Roy Beers: Pubs strike gold as heroic Scots crash out of the race - official report

That, with a few key words changed, is actually a direct quote of Ollie Reed's from the film Gladiator, and what with the Italian dimension - and 50,000 also being capacity crowd at the Colosseum - it will do nicely for a Scotland v Italy clash whichwas every bit the epic we were promised.

Filthy Scottish winter weather and tens of thousands of screaming lunatics with blue faces in the terraces… so far, so good.

Unfortunately the crafty Azzurri and the Spanish ref, about whom many unkind things have been said, conspired to rob our valiant team of the victory that was rightly their's - or at least that was the message a couple of the tabloids were purveying to a bleary-eyed but no doubt receptive audience the next day.

Glasgow on the Saturday night was all freezing cold rain and dark streets, yet the pubs - and not just the larger hybrids and superpubs - were bursting at the seams.

In the JD Wetherspoon bar The Counting House in Glasgow's George Square, awash with tartan-clad supporters, a visiting Italian TV host had come dressed as Bonnie Prince Charlie (who was partly of Italian extraction) for a spot of televisual banter with the locals.

He was loudly cheered and back-slapped before being presented with, somewhat to his bemusement, an inflatable sheep.

Outside presumably responsibly-drinking Tartan Army fans capered and danced a bizarre Highland fling with a posse of diehard Azzurri fans from Sorrento.

By early evening it was all over. Listening to the post mortem commentary the next day, interspliced with reading one or two newspaper reports, somewhat gave the idea that Scotland's goal was offside while the winning Italian goal came from a free kick which shouldn't have been given: but I'll leave all that guff to the professionals.

Here's a typical verdict, from the Edinburgh Evening News: "The visitors silenced Hampden when Christian Panucci headed an injury-time winner from which there was no way back.

"Yet the Roma full-back should never have had the opportunity to become his country's hero - the free-kick that set up his last-gasp goal was a travesty."

That's what I like - proper hard-headed objective journalism.

Unless my corner of Glasgow was wildly different from the rest of the country the post-match mood in the bars (and I saw a fair few) was glum but philosophical.

In Tennent's Bar, Byres Road, a suddenly necessary visit to the gents disclosed a group of well-dressed blokes in their 20's and 30's - estate agents on a spree? - discussing the evening's events like allied generals analysing the debacle at Arnhem.

I'm presuming this was because they didn't want to air defeatist talk in the bar in front of their girlfriends.

They co-opted me briefly into their discussion but rejected my argument that Italy is one of the world's best sides, while we are a lucky (more usually unlucky) dip, as ridiculous.

In The Three Judges, Partick Cross, which had been a football-free zone, a deluge of strangers who had been watching the game elsewhere suddenly descended en masse.

These included a lady wearing a bright red jacket and a tam o'shanter bonnet sporting

huge peacock feathers. Her miserable expression sadly didn't match the jollity of her garb.

Then a completely sober, well-dressed gent in his 60's, who legend has it is some sort of retired chorister, took it upon himself to stand in the middle of the bar and, with a beatific smile and great professionalism, sing Dougie McLean's poignant opus "Caledonia", all umpteen versus, to a suddenly deathly silent, crowded pub. Cue rapturous applause and the odd manly tear.

Come Monday morning, freezing cold and pelting rain, the Scottish tabloids are full of colour photographs of weeping fans at the match - one newspaper curiously invites readers to buy copies as a memento - but against all the sound and fury about the actual game we are at least treated to the jolly counterpoint of a rip-roaring bonanza for the trade.

A few days before the game The Daily Record had jubilantly proclaimed: "Scots Will Drink 5 Million Pints". If anything their estimates were conservative, because literally every pub I saw with a screen was operating at maximum capacity, while not a few also had a crowd on the pavement outside trying to see the game through the window.

Most papers carried detailed regional coverage of the amount of booze individual pubs had shipped in to deal with the match.

Some bars didn't bother with a football frenzy, rightly concluding they would get plenty of trade anyway, and in Edinburgh one pub advertised itself as a football-free zone - claiming, incredibly, that some people can't be bothered with the game at all.

Oddly, and admittedly it may only have been in my part of Glasgow, there was little conspicuous drunkenness to be seen - if anything less than you usually see at this time on a Saturday night.

There were 12 arrests at Hampden Stadium for minor offences, which from a 50,000 crowd seems scarcely credible, and almost no trouble in the normal busy city centre later that night, apart from the usual smattering of vicious crimes not related to football: you'd almost think the two sides had been playing rugby.

Some gormless police spokesman helpfully said there had been no nasty incidents in Italian restaurants, a case of imagining problems where there doesn't need to be any.

("What have the Italians ever done for us?" - sunshine holidays, fish and chips, the Renaissance, and in that order.)

In fact the Azzurri's Scottish-based licensed catering wing had probably the best time of all - plenty of trade and a technical win for their compatriots. I haven't checked, but I hope Piero Pieraccini of Hamishes Hoose bar in Paisley wore his Azzurri shirt for the occasion, as is his custom.

But perhaps the bars were winners in another sense, too. Tens of thousands of Scots mobbed the pubs to watch a game which they later all knew their team really could have won, and effectively caused absolutely no problems at all.

The cities' police overtime bill must have been monstrous but for a major "national occasion" in which sport was firmly linked (in the pubs) to drink, Saturday was an unfeasibly brilliant success.

I've no way of knowing if Bonnie Prince Charlie kept his inflatable sheep as a souvenir - but I'd like to think that he did.