Robert Snodgrass is adamant that the Scotland v England rivalry is as intense as ever.
And the Hull City midfielder is happy to buy into some old school motivation, including a pre-match viewing of Braveheart.
“They’ve always been the arch enemies and the rivals,” said Snodgrass, who has recovered from an ankle injury quicker than expected to be available for the trip to Wembley.
“They’ve always probably been that step ahead especially in the last 10 or 20 years, when we’ve been trying just to get to major tournaments and they are saying they should be winning them.
“I’ve played down there the last 10 years so it’s always been that heated, Scotland-England type of thing.
“I’ve been brought up with a family that is patriotic and loved the Scotland-England games so to see it first hand when we played down there at Wembley and lost 3-2, it was hard to take.
“I think we watched about three motivational videos on the bus. Braveheart was one of them. So we’re going in there thinking to ourselves ‘we mean business here’ and that was only a friendly. You’re desperate to be a part of it.”
So, in an age when a football camp is overflowing with sports scientists, psychologists and analysts, can something as basic as watching a Mel Gibson movie on a team bus actually make a difference? Snodgrass thinks it can.
“Once you get to international level the lads are experienced,” he said. “And you think we have all been here before.
“But sometimes wee things like that maybe get you up for the game. That was a friendly, but we didn’t take it as a friendly, it was big for us.
“We wanted the bragging rights for beating England and it’s no different on Friday.”
A decade of working and living down south hasn’t changed Snodgrass’s gut instinct to want England to lose when they are playing a game of football.
“I think the full country does, to be honest,” he admitted. “That’s just the way we were brought up.
“You want every team to beat England, it’s simple.
“I speak to English people and I don’t think they want England to do well because it’s the same old story all the time. That’s sad, actually, when you think about it, when everyone up here is rooting for you being Scottish and wanting the country to do well. It’s a different mentality. We want to get to tournaments, and for England it’s ‘we want to win it’.”
