by Gary Imlach
An impostor would have got a very limited set of privileges for his trouble. On the back of the card in Swedish and English is written: Free Admission to the Stadium – Standing Enclosure. I’m sure I’ve never read that before, I would have remembered. I feel retrospectively insulted on his behalf, and at the same time reassured. At least it wasn’t just the UK: footballers were second-class citizens all over the world. God forbid they should stray into the seated sections and start leering at the officials’ wives. Better to keep them among their own kind where they’d feel more comfortable.
In 1958 Scotland had yet to be weighed down by a long and painful World Cup history; that is to say the painful World Cup history they had was still short. Their first appearance had been four years earlier in Switzerland, where they’d lost both their games – one of them 7–0 to Uruguay, the defending champions – and hadn’t managed to score.
This time, though, they’d qualified impressively enough, getting through ahead of Spain, whom they had beaten 4–2 at Hampden Park. Optimism rose further with the news that the Scottish FA was to join most of the rest of the footballing world in appointing its first national team manager. It wasn’t a full-time post, but the fact that they’d persuaded Manchester United’s Matt Busby to take it on looked like a huge step forward. Player selection would still be in the hands of a committee, as it had always been, but here was a man with the authority to make a team in his own image despite the men in the blazers. Incidentally, it gave United the managership of two national teams – Busby’s assistant Jimmy Murphy was in charge of Wales.
The appointment was reported on 16 January 1958. Three weeks later, and two days before the date of the World Cup draw in Stockholm, came the Munich air disaster. Matt Busby was gravely ill; Jimmy Murphy had missed the trip, staying behind for Wales’s play-off game against Israel in Cardiff, which would clinch their place in Sweden.
It was one of those innocent chains of events that form themselves into cruel or miraculous shapes only after tragedies, when they are revealed as having saved a life, or cost one. There should have been no good reason for Jimmy Murphy to be on international duty in February 1958. Qualifying had finished the previous year and Wales had failed, coming second in their group behind Czechoslovakia. Israel, meanwhile, had qualified without playing a game. Four nations in their section – Egypt, Indonesia, Sudan and Turkey – had refused to play them, leaving them to top the Asia and Africa group by default. FIFA called an emergency meeting at which it was decided that Israel would face a play-off against one of the second-placed European teams. Wales were drawn out of the hat. So Jimmy Murphy owed his life indirectly to the burgeoning tensions in the Middle East, and Wales went to Sweden as the representatives of Asia and Africa.
It was the first and only time that all four home nations qualified for the World Cup finals. And Scotland again found itself as the only one of the four without a manager. The hospital reports from Munich made it clear that Matt Busby wouldn’t recover from his injuries in time to lead the team. The Scottish FA reacted by announcing a review of World Cup travel arrangements; the possibility of getting to Sweden by sea and rail instead of flying was to be investigated. There was no mention of finding a replacement manager. Instead, Scotland were led into the 1958 World Cup by a sponge-man.
‘Dawson Walker was the trainer at Clyde, he was more for injuries, y’know. He’d never played the game, certainly not as a professional. We were possibly the only nation there without a manager or a coach, the only country that didn’t have a figurehead like that.’
Eddie Turnbull has preserved his scorn intact for the best part of half a century. My father was twenty-six when he went to Sweden, young enough to have watched the great Hibs inside-forward in a wartime exhibition game in 1943 as a schoolboy. By 1958 Turnbull was a 35-year-old wing-half and knew he would only ever play in one World Cup. He’s eighty-one now, but the baritone that intimidated generations of footballers in his time as player and then manager at Hibernian and Aberdeen retains its force. And his memory is clear and bitter. ‘We had to do it ourselves. I was the oldest in the group, I think, and we had to do training sessions. It was ludicrous really, the preparation we had.’
The decision to travel to Sweden without a manager was attacked from all sides. Peter Black, writing in Scotland’s Weekly News, denounced the SFA hierarchy: ‘I can’t see a soul on the selection committee with either the time or the qualifications to take our World Cup hopes and fashion them into a well-disciplined outfit with a proper plan of campaign. I warn you that unless we can induce a change of mind in the selectors, Sweden 1958 will be Switzerland 1954 all over again. And what a horrible thought that is.’ The SFA responded by withdrawing the paper’s credentials for the upcoming competition.
The members of the selection committee were themselves chosen from the ranks of Scottish club chairmen and directors. ‘Potato merchants and what have you,’ Eddie Turnbull calls them, ‘men who’d never played the game at any level whatsoever.’
It had taken my father longer than some people expected to come to their attention. As early as 1953 he’d been touted as a likely name to be in the Scotland squad for a home international against Wales, but the call hadn’t come. In the end it was Matt Busby who recommended to the selectors that they take a closer look. A contingent from the Scottish FA travelled down to watch him in a match against Leicester City at Filbert Street in October 1957. It was the week after that legendary–ordinary game between Forest and United, so perhaps it did lead to something after all. He played well in a Forest win, and after that the selectors kept an intermittent eye on him through the winter.
In the first week of February 1958, he was named in a Scotland eleven to play a World Cup trial game at Easter Road in Edinburgh against a Scottish League team. At Lossiemouth secondary, the headmaster made the mistake of confiding the news to some of the senior pupils and had to abandon the school day shortly afterwards, once the news had spread from classroom to classroom.
Six years into his professional career my father was making his first senior competitive appearance in Scotland. He played superbly, crossing for Mudie and Currie to head Scotland’s first two goals and scoring the winner himself in a 3–2 victory over the League. The next morning’s Scottish press was ecstatic: ‘IMLACH IS SCOTLAND’S WING DISCOVERY,’ ‘IMLACH – A FIND’. Found? Discovered? By whom? The man they were talking about as some walk-on wonder was an English First Division player.
The truth was that the majority of his countrymen had never heard of him. Most of the other ‘Anglos’ in the squad, men like Preston’s wing-half Tommy Docherty and the Liverpool goalkeeper Tommy Younger, had made a name for themselves in Scotland first. Without television to spread the news, my father’s rise from the Second Division with one of England’s less glamorous clubs would have had an audience not much wider than the readership of the Northern Scot. And so his first senior game in Scotland was as an alien, an exotic import. Lossiemouth, in any case, was a place even Scots might struggle to place on the map. The People’s Journal ran a series of features on him: ‘THE WORLD CUP STAR FROM FOOTBALL’S BACKWOODS’.
He was named in the World Cup squad of twenty-two and in the team to play Hungary at Hampden Park in May 1958. It was the first in a pair of warm-up games that would see them head to Sweden via Warsaw to play Poland. Before the match two telegrams were delivered to the dressing room – one from my mother: ‘All the luck in the world, Darling’, the other from Lossiemouth Town Council, sending him the entire community’s good wishes. As one councillor pointed out, there was a precedent for this sort of municipal extravagance – they’d done the same with a Lossie émigré to South Africa on his hundredth birthday, and later paid for his ashes to be brought home and scattered on the Moray Firth.
The Hungarians weren’t the same side who’d rewritten the rules of the international game five years earlier with their dismantling of England at Wembley, but they were still considered top-class opposition. My father played w
ell in a 1–1 draw and the squad headed off for a training camp at Turnberry. Any misgivings the players might have had about being managerless were more than likely outweighed by the honour of representing their country in a World Cup. More to the point, there was little they could do about it – the administrators ran the game; they just reported at the specified times and dates, and played.
At Turnberry, though, there was discontent when they learned that they would receive no out-of-pocket expenses while they were in Sweden. The established rate for foreign games was £2 a day, but the Scottish FA, perhaps worried about how well the team might do and how long the trip might last, announced that it wouldn’t be paid. Instead, if any player wanted Swedish kronor to spend during the competition he’d have to ask for an advance which would be deducted from his match fees on return to the UK.
The players protested, and the sportswriters, probably with a guilty eye on their own expense accounts, were sympathetic. The SFA, however, claimed they’d be breaking ‘an international agreement’ if they relented. The international agreement, it turned out, was a pact they’d made with the football associations of England and Wales that none of them would pay per diems. England and Wales, though, changed their minds; the SFA didn’t.
For men on the fringe of selection, like Falkirk’s right-back Alex Parker, the trip suddenly became a fraught financial proposition. ‘I played against Paraguay, didn’t get a game against Yugoslavia, didn’t get a game against France. Now, you got £50 a match if you played, £30 if you were a reserve. When we got back and my expenses were deducted, I got a cheque off the SFA for £14.’ Tommy Docherty, who lost the captain’s job to Tommy Younger in the run-up to the competition, didn’t play at all. When he got home he owed the SFA money.
The squad made primitive attempts to compensate. They approached Swallow, makers of expensive raincoats, but Swallow weren’t interested in seeing their garments on the shoulders of footballers, even internationals. In the end they settled for a lambswool jumper each off another company, which they had to model for a squad photograph. With their SFA blazers and flannels and their free sweaters, the players flew to Warsaw. Morale was good. It improved when they beat Poland 2–1, and comfortably survived the food and the sightseeing trip laid on by the Ministry of Tourism – to Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto to see where thousands had perished during the Nazi siege.
By contrast the small steel city of Eskilstuna – often called Sweden’s Sheffield according to the 1958 World Cup press guide, although it doesn’t say by whom – rolled out the red carpet. Scotland’s two coaches were stopped at the city limits by a fleet of vehicles with the mayor’s at the head. The committee men stepped down onto the street to hear a speech of welcome, then the procession, with police outriders sounding their sirens, was escorted to a civic reception.
The choice of Sweden as host country hadn’t gone down well in South America. Since the ’54 World Cup had been held in Switzerland there were complaints of a European bias. FIFA, though, was less concerned with alternating between the continents than having a neutral venue that offended as few post-war sensibilities as possible. And in 1958 there was to be the consolation of live television.
Actually, ‘live’ had yet to establish itself as the adjective of choice for these instantaneous broadcasts. In both the Radio and TV Times, the listings boasted of World Cup games ‘direct’ from Sweden. The BBC showed the opening ceremony, a modest fly-past by the Swedish Airforce in front of the King, followed by the first match, Sweden versus Mexico. The game kicked off at 2 p.m. with commentary by Kenneth Wolstenholme. At 2.45 there was Gardening Club with Percy Thrower, then the second half of the match at 3.00. Without a studio to fall back on, the BBC had the Swedish television pictures to broadcast and nothing else; evening games during the week filled the half-time gap with fifteen-minute news bulletins. Still, this was a massive leap forward. There had been cameras in Switzerland, but the 1958 World Cup was going to be the first with what qualified by the standards of the time as a global audience. Except perhaps for Scotland.
Television had begun to recognise the power of football to bring in large audiences – a headline in the TV Times trumpeted: ‘ITV JOINS EUROVISION FOR THE WORLD CUP SERIES’. The football authorities had recognised it too and were determined to keep it under tight control. Up until then the only live games on domestic television had been the FA Cup Final and major internationals. The BBC and ITV were keen to expand their live portfolio beyond the big showpiece games into the League and the earlier rounds of the Cup. In the run-up to Sweden, the Football League and the FA had been meeting jointly with the broadcasters to discuss exactly that.
The talks had the tenor of a debate over the wisdom of allowing cameras into Parliament, or serious court cases. ‘TV can do a certain amount of good up to a certain point. But if it goes beyond that point it can do considerable harm,’ was League Secretary Alan Hardaker’s gnomic note of caution. The Scottish FA President, John Park, went further, warning his own association darkly that television was a positive danger to football.
While the ruling bodies in England, Northern Ireland and Wales were acting together over World Cup television rights, Scotland had been given authority to make its own decisions. On 5 June, three days before the tournament began, the SFA announced a unilateral ban on the broadcast of midweek games from Sweden. Not just games involving Scotland, but any games. The decision had been taken at a meeting of Scottish officials at a FIFA conference in Stockholm. The junior level of the SFA – those representing the likes of Lossie juniors, clubs one step below the Highland League – said they were worried that attendances at their midweek games might suffer.
The SFA accepted their objection, and duly cabled the news to the BBC and Scottish Television. Scotland’s second game, against Paraguay, was midweek; so was England’s against Brazil. Given that only selected live games were being televised by the Swedes anyway, Scottish football fans faced the prospect of waiting until the semi-finals before they’d be able to see a World Cup match involving a home nation. If the television companies took any notice. It was one thing to deny their players living expenses; cabling terse instructions to broadcasters over the use they could make of their own Eurovision membership may have been beyond the SFA’s jurisdiction.
My father arrived in Sweden worried that he was going to be more of a spectator than a player himself. Although he’d performed well against Poland, he’d injured his knee and was having difficulty training. Three days before their first game, against Yugoslavia, Scotland took on the local amateur team in a combined practice match and PR gesture. Although he’s listed in the four-page programme, among the ads for Eskilstuna Vulkcentral tyre dealers and Old Eskil Primero ale, he wasn’t fit enough to play. Nowadays, risking internationals against Sunday league players on the Thursday before the start of the World Cup would lead to trial by tabloid for the officials concerned. But in Sweden most of the teams had arranged local friendlies, and the scores had been predictably one-sided: France rattled in 14 against a town side; Yugoslavia 11; Wales knocked 19 past their hosts in Saltsjöbaden. The Scots edged past Eskilstuna 2–0.
By the time of their opening match on Sunday 8 June, my father still wasn’t fit, but played anyway. Yugoslavia were a strongly fancied team, who only a month earlier had beaten England 5–0 in a World Cup warm-up game in Belgrade. A month before that England had beaten Scotland 4–0. The Scots came out of their first game with a 1–1 draw and a moral victory – it was Yugoslavia who had been hanging on at the end.
My father had been hanging on for most of the match. A challenge only a couple of minutes into the game had aggravated his knee injury. With no substitutes allowed, coming off – unless you had absolutely no choice – was looked on as letting the side down. The standard procedure for a hobbled player was to go and stand on the wing and be as much of a nuisance to the opposition as the pain would allow. Men regularly limped through matches, making up the numbers and making their injuries worse. My father at leas
t was on the wing already. But all he seems to have done on his World Cup debut is make sure that he wouldn’t be fit for the second group game against Paraguay.
The South Americans were an unknown quantity, as was most of the football world outside the British Isles. With Dawson Walker supervising the fitness work and senior players taking responsibility for tactics, that left the ten Scottish FA members in the party to look after scouting. They sent the deposed captain Tommy Docherty to watch Paraguay along with another squad player, Archie Robertson. The players returned ready to report what they’d seen to the selectors, but the invitation never came.
Fans at home were even more in the dark about Paraguay. They’d been largely unaware of my father’s existence until a few months earlier; all they knew about Scotland’s World Cup opponents was what they read in the sports pages. Into the Paraguay training camp on behalf of the Scottish public went the Daily Record’s Willie Gallagher, the doyen of the home press corps, whose pieces appeared under the byline ‘Waverley – The Name that Means Football’.
I expected some of their men to be coloured but they are all white, although bearing in mind what I saw in a reservation camp in British Columbia a few years back, I would say a few of our opponents are of Indian ancestry. They do not mind the heat the least bit: indeed they are thoroughly enjoying it. They are not big men but they look wonderfully strong, broad in shoulder and big in chest. They are fast movers – over 25 or 30 yards they make the stopwatch look silly.
Waverley followed them off the training pitch into the dining room.
Most of them have never been out of Paraguay and are unaccustomed to social life as we know it. They are beef eaters and scorn fish. They have never heard of such a person as a vegetarian . . . They use no knives or forks, employing their fingers, and their adroitness, I am told, has to be seen to be believed.
