But there is far more shocking news emerging from Scotland today, surrounding smooth-voiced Charles “Chick” Young (right), often rightly called the Barry White of Scottish sports reporting for his mellow broadcast reflection on matters both on and off the pitch and who, for a man of such fame, is well-known for the remarkable modesty with which he holds his many views.

Our hero had to be stretchered off the park during a Journalists vs MSPs football match on Sunday, following a red-blooded tackle from Labour’s John Park, which led to the MSP’s sending off before the game was entirely abandoned.

News of this shocking assault has only emerged today.

Red-faced MSP Ken Macintosh, who also played in the game, can be heard in the audio clip accompanying this story on BBC Radio Scotland about the match, expressing his regret and apologising to the Chick.

But it’s a measure of Chick’s legendary perspective that, even though the programme was clearly trying to play the whole episode in an ill-judged attempt at “laughs”, he found the courage to not accept that apology, and also brand the tackle as “evil, in my opinion”.

Talking to the Scottish Daily Record, Chick added: “John Park did me.  I’ve got six stud marks down my leg. I’m still limping.”

Chick told the Glasgow Evening Times: “They played like thugs. The treatment of us and the ref was scandalous.”

Chick added, to the Times: “One guy playing at the back for them was a nutcase of the first order and their language to the ref was scandalous. They totally lost the plot.”

And Chick pointed, in an interview with the Scotsman, to the clear political ramifications of the rammie, reminding his public: “What worries me most of all: these are the people who are in charge of running the country.”

The journalists had been losing 6-2 to the people in charge of running the country before scuffles broke out and the game was abandoned.

Adds that Times report: “One of Mr Park’s team-mates said that the journalists had over-reacted. ‘I don’t think there will be a return match.”

• My regular reader will recall Chick’s last appearance on this blog, when we brought you this classic YouTube footage of an ill-fated interview with Rangers manager Walter Smith. Warning – strong language on the other side of that link.

The text story tells the story of a lucky escape, yes, but essentially it can only be a variation on: “Plane damaged. Everyone’s OK, lukily.” And you could say there’s nothing dramatic about the footage at all. Yes, the oxygen masks are all down. But the engines sound normal, there’s a little more chatter than normal but no screaming, and some people even still have their lunch in front of them. A stewardess, showing how really well trained and professional she is, appears to be smiling to a passenger.

But then you remember they’ve had the explosive decompression already, and the controlled plunge of 20,000 feet (this is a standard thing, as those earnest guys in the forums at the Professional Pilot’s Rumour Network will tell you). They’re not really sure what’s wrong with their plane, and most must have strong suspicions these are their last moments in this world. Maybe real, true horror isn’t like the movies at all – it can be quiet and orderly and just as horrific.

You only really see the tension as they come in to land – ground hurtling past through the window, some passengers have heads bowed and arms out-stretched to the seats in front, waiting for an impact that never comes. The plane just lands as normal, and after a while the cheery Aussie voice of the captain comes on to tell everyone all’s well, but they might have to wait a while while the fire crews take a look at the plane and decide if it’s fit to taxi to the terminal.

All so normal, and yet such a complete and utter nightmare. Little wonder some of them threw up after they got off the plane, while the captain who did such a good job was pictured looking quizzically at a four meter by two hole in the side of his aircraft.

It’s an amazing piece of footage, and it’s a marvel – ironically, as much of flying and engineering as anything – that the thing landed safely. I only hope they find out what went wrong, and quickly.

It’s rare you step out a football ground to be afforded a fine view of tonight’s dirty dishes in someone’s kitchen sink, but that’s what away fans at Kenilworth Road, Luton, get as they embark down a steep (and rather slippy) staircase.

This is the view out the back of the away end, behind one goal (pitch view here). The tiny, ramshackle ground must be one of the tightest fits in the Football League.

Terraced houses butt up against three of the four sides, as you can see in this Google overhead. The away stand is the one at the top of the ground in that view – if it looks impossible to even enter, it’s because you actually come through a living room-sized tunnel in the ground floor of that terrace of houses, under someone’s first floor.

Last night completed a personal double-header of tiny grounds – last week was Barnet‘s Underhill.

And yes, Swindon Town won 1-0, thanks, the first away win I’ve seen in three years. No penalties this week, which was a relief.

Any notions that Croatia, already qualified, wouldn’t be up for this final match were quickly set aside when we turned on the TV on Monday. Even without speaking a word of Croatian, I could still understand the universal language of footballing hype in the trailers for last night’s live coverage; fast-cut clips of Croatian players, wearing their familiar checkerboard red and white strip, scoring some of the goals – and making some of the tackles – which had propelled them to the top of their table.

There were, inevitably, shots of the infamous Robinson bobble from the last meeting of Croatia and England – which the Croats won 2-0. Then helicopter images of the imposing Wembley stadium, and a deep voiceover to tell this small nation it was going into the lion’s den, with an outside chance of putting a footballing superpower out the competition.

And then they did.

Mrs Tosh and I, watching in the hotel lounge with some of its staff, were quietly hoping England would go through. It was hard not to feel deep sympathy for England goalie Scott Carson as he conceded a first goal so poor most park teams would be holding an inquest. Being a sucker for a big Hollywood ending, I hoped Becks would score the winner as he did a few years back against Greece (to win qualification, in extra time, to the same tournament). 

But it was also difficult not to be beguiled by a Croatian side which, against the odds (it has a population of 4.5m, smaller than Scotland), was playing some pacy, attractive and tactically smart counter-attacking football. Midway through the first half they’d attacked twice, and scored twice.

Later, as the third and winning goal flew in a thousand miles away in London, it was impossible not to smile as our hapless waitress squealed, and a manager sank to his knees with delight. It was clear right then their team – a side credited with putting Croatia on the map after the Balkans war of the 1990s – was going to delight them again. 

Having played England out, the team returned to Zagreb, and a heroes’ welcome, in the early morning. The newspapers’ front pages are celebratory today.

By comparison, watching England’s unhappy post mortem of the qualification fiasco from afar, it all seems a little out of perspective. Nobody’s dead. We’re holidaying in a city where, despite some careful restoration, there are still the physical scars of bitter (real) conflict only a few years ago, making the Sky News talk of “disaster” sound as absurd as it is.

But there are problems. Poor old Steve McClaren, nervously glugging bottle after bottle of water in the London rain (little wonder he locked himself in the toilet during the Israel game), was clearly out his depth, and England might have to look overseas to find someone capable of moulding a decent squad of players into a team. It also seems inevitable the Premiership will have to consider whether its huge global TV success might be harmed by a quota on foreign players (clue: yes) thus forcing it to decide what matters most.

It’s no coincidence, after all, that teams with strong domestic representation in their home leagues – France, Italy, Portugal, the Netherlands - seem to have deeper quality in their squads (not necessarily betterfirst XIs) than the two with lots of imports – England and Spain – which means they cope better with gruelling international competition.

Finally, I suspect there’s a problem, UK-wide, just with the simplistic way we talk about the game. But that’s another post.

All this will take years to fix. In the meantime, I’m sorry England won’t be there next summer. Even moreso that Scotland won’t make it either. And I’m not sure I can be bothered with diddy home internationals as a distraction; not while the continent’s best sides get on with it elsewhere.

But after the double footballing disappointment of the last few days, it’s nice to be in a place celebrating some success this morning. I think I know, now, who I’ll be looking out for next summer in Austria and Switzerland. We just hope the hotel staff just take nights off when Croatia are playing, for the sake of their careers - and their guests’ safety. 

Washington Dulles’ famous mobile lounges. [Image shared under Creative Commons license by Kaptain Krispy Kreme]

Washington Dulles airport is, as it turns out, not dull at all. Opened by Kennedy in 1962, it’s a fine old cathedral to the golden age of air travel, built with an optimism that suggests its designers had greater aspirations than merely providing limitless shopping opportunities for thousands of sweating travellers stuck in interminable queues.

Of course, faced with modern security needs and passenger levels, it has all those queues, but at least it’s not got the mall strapped to the side. Instead, it’s got some elan, drawn from a time when air travel was glamorous and unusual. With its sweeping concrete terminal and retro-style signage, it feels like the only airport in the world where you could shoot the video for Yoshinori Sunahara’s Theme from Take Off (on iTunes – take a listen and you’ll know what I mean).

I have two favourite things about this airport. First, it wasn’t designed just to be an airport… it was also intended to be… a spaceport. Or, at least, as far as Wikipedia tells us – the giveaways are extra-long runways and terminal buildings in the middle of the airfield, it seems. That’s the kind of buccaneering mood they were in back in those days, you see; let’s build an airfield capable of dealing with a mode of transport not invented yet!

They were doing quite a lot of improvising, mind you. Because there weren’t even many airports intended for jet planes back then, they had to experiment with ideas for getting people from terminal to aircraft, and that meant they came up with my second favourite thing – mobile lounges, pictured above. A fleet of these huge trucks support lounges which travellers enter at concourse level in the terminal, after security. You sit down, and after a few minutes the whole shebang sets off across the tarmac.

These days they only go to another bit of the airport, not the air or space craft itself, and so infuriate anyone in a rush. But as you pass through it’s hard not to think it faintly remarkable they’ve lasted this long, complete with little decorative airplane-style fins on the roof. And you wonder if, given the surely inevitable energy crunch of the next few decades, future generations won’t look back on all airports as being of another age.

Unfortunately, it seems they aren’t learning. Cecilia Weckstrom has another BA horror story – worse than mine, which saw her get to London more than 24 hours late… from the south of France. The aviation industry has its troubles, for sure; it seems bad crisis management is one of them.

But I do like the Cotswolds, just up the road from where we used to live, and was entertained to see fellow Scot Harry Ritchie defend them in today’s Guardian. He describes first seeing that landscape from the window of a childhood car…

“I had never seen anything like it. Not that Scotland doesn’t have scenery – of course it does, and lots of it. But Scotland doesn’t have much in the way of the lush, bucolic idyll that was passing gloriously by, beyond the car window which my nose was pressed against. Also, in the swathe of Scotland where most Scots live, the view tends to be disrupted – by open-cast mines, power stations, Glasgow …

So the Cotswolds came as a shock.”

This is, I’ll add, a little unfair on Glasgow, but a very accurate description of the Cotswolds’ appeal. It fits, also, for the lovely Forest of Dean, a little to the west.

Its greatest feature, for me, was the open-sided engine room at the heart of the ship, where you could see, hear and smell the remarkable triple expansion steam engine; three pistons, huge weights at the end, spinning the paddle wheels in a distinctive eight beats to the bar rhythm. I found two (1 & 2) wonderful pictures of the engine room – the second one, in particular, shows a wee boy peering over the railing as the pistons pound around just feet away. He’s standing on a raised piece of deck under which the axle passes out to the paddles, thus making it ideal for short people to see what’s happening. I used to stand there too… the image brought back happy memories.

I was saddened to see pictures of the Waverley on the Thames from October, while I was revising for an MBA exam;I’ve missed her annual visit down here, again, and the break from that finance revision would have been nice (if detramental to the work at hand). I really must get aboard next year.

(Oh – and a note on the headline: "I’m off to see the engines" was the traditional cry of the menfolk during a trip aboard the Clyde steamers. They may, certainly, have passed by the engines, but only en route to the bar, which nestled behind the engines, below the waterline. Last time I was aboard, I was too young to have a drink. I’m looking forward to completing the Waverley experience next time).