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In your briefing today:

• Joy unconfined as Scotland qualify for the World Cup after a remarkable night of football in Glasgow

• Ultraprocessed food causes damage to every major human organ, a large study has found

• Britain is not ready to defend itself from invasion, MPs have warned

📣 Football is, I know, divisive, and more than a few Early Line subscribers tell me that even the modest focus the newsletter offers it each day is too much.

Forgive today’s edition, then: it covers lots of other important things happening in Scotland, the UK and around the world, but the joy of Scotland’s national team making the World Cup is too much to ignore.

Normal service will eventually resume… and I’ll figure out how we all navigate the World Cup finals next summer without falling out. 😉

Neil Mc

📣 Scotland qualified for the World Cup with a 4-2 win over Denmark, on a night of extraordinary drama and even more extraordinary goals at Hampden.

• Nick McPheat: “The last kick of a win that takes Scotland to their first men's World Cup in almost three decades is a Kenny McLean goal from the halfway line. This is not a dream.” (BBC)

• Scott McDermott: “On a remarkable night of drama, Hampden witnessed one of its greatest games.” (Daily Record)

• Ewan Murray: “You yearn for almost three decades to return to the men’s World Cup and do so with an overhead kick, a 22-yard stunner and a goal from the halfway line.” (Guardian)

• Matthew Lindsay: “Log on to Skyscanner and book cheap flights, check your passport is not about to expire, stock up on the factor 50 sun tan lotion, dig that old We’re On The March With Ally’s Army t-shirt out of the loft – Scotland are going to the World Cup.” (Herald)

• Donald - where’s your boozers? (The Sun)

• More reaction, and the goals, later in today’s newsletter ⬇️

📣 Hundreds of jobs are at risk after energy company ExxonMobil said it would close its plant at Mossmorran in Fife. 179 employees, plus 250 contractors, are at risk, with the possibility of 50 staff transferring to another plant in Hampshire. (Sky News) (Mail)

• The UK government has said it will not offer financial support to help keep the plant open. (BBC)

• How workers and campaigners reacted to Fife bombshell (Courier)

📣 Britain is not ready to defend itself from invasion, a report by the Commons defence committee has concluded. MPs said Britain was failing to meet its Nato commitments, despite an increased threat from Russia and China, and said the country had “next to nothing” in its integrated air and missile defence inventory.

“The UK must urgently strengthen its conventional and nuclear capabilities, improve interoperability with Allies, strengthen its defence industrial base and ensure it can defend the UK homeland and overseas territories,” the report says.

“The war in Ukraine is a war to defend Europe and protect civil society against Russian aggression. The Government needs to be clear-eyed about this fact, and rapidly accelerate the state of the UK’s defence readiness. (🎁 Telegraph - gift link) (Read the full report)

• Poland scrambles jets and closes two airports as Putin bombards western Ukraine (Independent)

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AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 Parents’ satisfaction with schools has dropped to its lowest levels in a decade amid concerns about rising school violence and falling educational standards. (Scotsman)

📣 Legislation to drive a switch to heat pumps in homes and businesses has been dropped by the Scottish government for the second time in a year, after Housing Secretary Mairi McAllan saying she wanted to see more detail in UK proposals before taking a bill through Holyrood. (BBC)

• Heat pumps put less strain on the energy grid than expected (Guardian)

📣 An NHS supervisor who repeatedly hit a colleague with a “pair of marigolds” during a three-year campaign of sexual abuse has been given community service and placed on the sex offenders’ register. (Daily Record)

AROUND THE UK & WORLD

📣 UK inflation has fallen to 3.6% in October, the lowest level in four months. (BBC)

📣 Ultraprocessed food is linked to harm in every major human organ, according to a review of 104 long-term studies. UPF now makes up more than half the average diet in the UK and US: for the young, poor and disadvantaged, it can be as much as 80%. (Guardian)

📣 China is targeting MPs with “large financial incentives”, MI5 has warned. (Guardian)

📣 The US Congress has approved plans to force the release of the Epstain files, after Republicans - including President Donald Trump - dropped opposition to the release, which is now expected to take place within 30 days. (AP)

📣 A global outage at digital infrastructure company Cloudflare left major internet sites unavailable. (Independent)

📣 The Three Mile Island nuclear plant is to be restarted, thanks to a $1 billion loan from the Trump administration. (WSJ)

📣 A huge fire in Japan - its worst in 50 years - ripped through 170 buildings and killed one person. (Reuters)

IDEAS
Delirium and tears as Scotland books a World Cup spot

🗣️ There are Scots well into their adult life who’ve never known Scotland play at one of the greatest sporting spectacles on earth, the World Cup finals. You could be 30 years old and - unless you have extraordinary recall of your earliest years - think it’s the sort of thing we try for, but fail at, every single time.

And then, last night, it finally went all right. “Twenty-seven years of hurt and pain. Wiped out by one swing of Kenny McLean’s left boot,” writes Scott McDermott. “Incredibly, inexplicably even, Scotland are going to the World Cup.

“On a remarkable night of drama, Hampden witnessed one of its greatest games. And three of the best goals this old stadium has EVER seen.”

The goals were, indeed, remarkable. 🎥 Scott McTominay opened proceedings with an overhead kick early on: an feat of athleticism that saw his boot connect perfectly with the ball high above the heads of the players around him, and while he was upside down. If I can lip-read at all, it appears he raced off to find his mum.

🎥 Kenny McLean closed proceedings with an audatious shot from the halfway line at the death, to put Scotland into an unassailable 4-2 lead and spark scenes of chaos around the old terraces of Hampden.

In between, a game of almost unbearable tension for both sets of fans, with Denmark dominant - even when they had a man sent off. They scored a penalty and had another goal chalked off for a foul. But Scotland moved into the lead with the third of that spectacular trio of goals - a 🎥wonderful long-range shot from Kieran Tierney. (🎥See fuller highlights and all of the BBC’s clips from the night).

Football reporters in Hampden’s main stand, in among the chaos, were left frantically re-writing the tops of their stories as the game twisted and turned through the second half.

“Even this great old place has never rocked and bounced like this,” writes Michael Grant in the Times (£). “Release, fulfilment, jubilation, it was breathtaking and incredible.

“Grown men cried. Mates tumbled all over each other. Some had waited a lifetime for this. Every business in Scotland had better get ready for some sickies being pulled.”

“Oh, this was epic,” exhales Alan Pattullo in The Scotsman. He’s been there for most of that litany of failure over the years. “Oh Scotland, why do you do this to you fans?

“Step forward Kieran Tierney. The Celtic full back is no longer an automatic starter for Scotland but he enhanced his status here with an injury time goal to put the Scots 3-2 up that will be treasured like those such as Joe Jordan’s header against Czechoslavakia in 1973. And yet it wasn’t even the best goal of the night. It might not even have been the second best.”

As for that first goal… “Youngsters all over Scotland and beyond will be doing themselves a mischief trying to execute a ‘McTominay’.”

And, amid all the happiness, a poignant moment too: in the aftermath of the match, as giddy fans sang around the stadium, Scotland captain and Liverpool defender fought back tears as he paid tribute to his friend Diogo Jota, the teammate who died in a car crash this summer.

“Today I have been in bits,” he told the BBC. “'I know that the age I'm at now, this might be my last chance at a World Cup. I couldn't get my mate Diogo Jota out of my head today.

“We spoke so much together about the World Cup. He missed out in Qatar through injury, I missed out because Scotland never went. We always discussed what it would be like going to this World Cup, and I know he will be somewhere smiling over me.”

👍 That’s your Early Line for the day

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