• Scottish referendum

Scotland's independent streak fuels sporting contradictions

Andy Murray's Wimbledon triumph encapsulated the complicated sporting relationship of Scotland, England and Britain © AP

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I got caught in a people jam. For 20 minutes I was unable to move forward or back. Scotland had just beaten Switzerland in the European Football Championship of 1996 and the crowd outside Villa Park in Birmingham were not going to let the moment go. So they sang the only song that could encompass the situation.

"If you all hate the English clap your hands … If you all hate the English" etc etc. I eventually got away, suffering - English though I am - no more serious injury than sore palms. A vignette of sporting nationalism: so it is, so it was, so it shall be forever.

But today Scotland votes. Do we go independent from the England hated by the footballing hand-clappers, or do we stay as we are? The situation is getting complicated - but then it always was. For I was also there on Centre Court when Andy Murray - as Scottish as a glass of Lagavulin - won the men's singles at Wimbledon last year, the first Brit to have done so for 77 years.

Beforehand there were plenty of jokes - or were they jokes? Will he be a British hero? Or a Scottish failure? There is no more English arena in sport than the Centre Court at Wimbledon but Murray's victory sent an unambiguous detonation of joy through the old place: victory to one of our own at last.

And still the situation gains complications. Murray had once jested - as all Scots jest - that in an upcoming football tournament he would support "anyone but England". This bit of primeval banter caused palpitations in old England: what? Have we clutched a viper to our bosom?

So come with me to Melbourne and visit the Gents at the Australian Open in 2010. Murray had just been vivisected by Roger Federer. Two Gents in neighbouring stalls, clearly and audibly Scottish, were discussing the horrific fact that an Englishwoman sitting close to them had been cheering for the Fed. "She was everything I've been brought up to hate …"

I had the good fortune not to have been brought up to hate anyone, as an individual or as a nation, and so I pondered on the phenomenon of negative patriotism: a sentiment that comes not so much love of country as the shared joy of hating a neighbour. With negative patriotism there are times when banter slips into something more serious.

Negative patriotism is a bit like a marriage in which one partner blames the other for all the ills of the world: everything wrong with your own life, everything wrong with the nation, with the planet, with the cosmos, is down to the partner. As a way of facing the world, it's effective in a limited way - but it gets found out with divorce.

It's important to point out here that the Yes campaign has gone to great lengths to claim that Scottish independence is not a trivial anti-English issue. Murray, whose partner is an English girl, has revealed himself as a Yes man: a mature decision, it seems. It's also true that the sort of atavistic hatred so often expressed in sport will influence more than one voter today.

But how odd that all this should happen in a year in which Scotland celebrates sport as something beyond nationalism. I visited the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Here Scotland and England field separate teams, but local rivalries were eclipsed by the joy that comes at a great multi-national sporting occasion.

Scotland's victory over England in the 1990 Grand Slam decider was inspired by local patriotism © Getty Images

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It was Scotland en fete: Scotland welcoming the world: even the sun blessed the occasion. And next week, the Ryder Cup will be held at Gleneagles: not an event that pitches Scotland against England, for it's about a united Europe - of which Scotland, regardless of the result in the referendum, is a part.

As a matter of fact, the Ryder Cup is a clear example of negative patriotism: cheering for Europe doesn't come naturally to anyone - but it's really quite straightforward to cheer anyone but the United States. Still, the point here is that the Ryder Cup is a sporting festival of inclusivity: something bigger than local patriotism.

There's no disputing that local patriotism has its inspiring side. I was at Murrayfield in 1990 when England played Scotland for the grand-slam decider in the Five Nations rugby tournament, and watched England fall apart under the urgency of Scottish ambition. The collapse began when the Scotland team, instead of running onto the pitch like scalded cats as tradition dictates, strolled out with swaggering nonchalance. It continued with a roof-busting rendition of Flower of Scotland, which is now Scotland's unofficial anthem. It reached a decisive point when English decision-making broke down for all to see.

But while such insularity is great fun in sport, it's not to be taken with deathly seriousness. After all, you don't want to end up like the man in the Gents: hatred is always more damaging to the hater than it is to the hated.

Sport sometimes appears to showcase all the worst aspects of hatred and negative patriotism, as the soreness of my palms in Birmingham might indicate. But sport is only a narrow thing to narrow people. You could see the Olympic Games of 2012 as an orgy of local patriotism if you were of a mind too … but it was a great deal more than that, bringing in great performers and great performances from across the world to a vast and cosmopolitan audience that greeted and mingled and talked and shared and swapped in the Olympic Park and on the train.

Sport can be part of something greater than patriotism, as it was during the Commonwealth Games. As the event unfolded, it became clear that sport belongs to the world, and Scotland was overjoyed to be the world's stage - and the world came and revelled in it. Then after play was over for the day I went for dinner with a dear Scottish friend and we had as fine a curry as you can get anywhere in Scotland or Britain or the world.

Moral: sport is bigger than people tend to think. And so is Scotland. Like all other nations.

Simon Barnes was Chief Sports Writer at The Times and UK Sports Columnist of the Year in 2001 and 2007. He writes about a wide variety for ESPN.co.uk, as well as ESPNFC.com and ESPNcricinfo. He has written more than 20 books including The Meaning of Sport and three novels. On Twitter he is @simonbarneswild

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