by Gary Imlach
They can toss a handful of mashed carrots between their wide-open lips with an accuracy of action that is almost mathematical in its precision. There are many signs that they are ignorant of life outside their own country. But with them ignorance is bliss.
No sooner had he tucked his first dispatch into its cleft stick, than he was sending another.
The latest I’ve heard – and it seems to be true – is that they give way to bad temper. Some of the continental officials it would seem have espionages set up all over the world. They have been telling me that the Paraguayan players flare up so easily that even in practice matches among themselves they mix fisticuffs with their footwork on the ball!
The nation relaxed. So did the Scotland squad. While they had drawn their opener against the strongly fancied Yugoslavia, Paraguay had been beaten 7–3 by France.
My father watched the game from the stands along with the Hearts inside-right, Jimmy Murray. Murray had been the hero of the opening game, scoring Scotland’s first ever World Cup goal with a header, but he had also been injured. That hadn’t stopped the selectors from picking him for the next match. Whatever the committee men were doing in Sweden it wasn’t being done in proximity to the training ground, and their shaky grasp of team affairs was exposed when they named the side to play Paraguay the day before the game. The limping Murray was one of the eleven on the team sheet; so was another hobbled player, the right-back John Hewie.
On the morning of the game the selectors were forced to announce a new line-up, hurriedly bringing in Archie Robertson for Murray and Alex Parker for Hewie. Celtic’s Willie Fernie had already been named in place of my father. When the team coach stopped en route to the stadium for a meal, the selectors went into a huddle and changed the formation from the one agreed in the morning.
Still, up in the stand my father and Jimmy Murray were confident that the team could win without them. ‘I remember one guy, the inside-left I think it was, and he was putting his hairnet on just before the kick-off. You can imagine our reaction. But they could make the ball speak. I was sitting there thinking, my God, perhaps it’s just as well we didn’t play, y’know.’
Aberdeen’s Graham Leggat, who was on the field at outside-right, remembers the game differently: ‘We thought, oh they’re hopeless, we might get one across here, but they turned out to be the toughest team I’ve ever seen. They just kicked anything that moved. They were all about 5'8'' square and they just crushed us, kicked everything. It was painful.’
Whether they were outplayed or outmuscled by the South Americans, Scotland went down 3–2 and suddenly faced a crunch game with France to stay in the competition. The Paraguay match had been in Norrköping, a three-hour coach journey from Scotland’s training camp at Eskilstuna, and it was the early hours of the morning before the squad got back to the hotel. The following day the committee had arranged for them to watch a game, Sweden versus Hungary in Stockholm – another six-hour round trip. The players didn’t want to go. They were tired and demoralised after their unexpected defeat and they wanted to rest and regroup. First Tommy Younger, then a whole deputation of players asked that the trip be cancelled, but the committee wouldn’t relent.
At home, the officials of the Scottish Junior FA were being slightly more flexible. They had lifted their objections to the Sweden–Hungary match being televised, ensuring that Scotland’s fans would be able to see the game its players were trying to wriggle out of attending. However, they were still dead set against the BBC showing England v Brazil because it fell on a Wednesday, a big night for local football. In Eskilstuna, Scotland’s weary squad assembled after lunch to board the coach for Stockholm. To make morale worse, the selectors announced they were dropping the captain, Tommy Younger.
The Liverpool goalkeeper hadn’t played particularly well against Paraguay, although if he’d wanted an excuse he could have pointed to the telegram he’d received a few hours before kick-off. His wife Dorothy was being taken into hospital with heart trouble. He asked the SFA for permission to fly home to see her and to make arrangements for their two children, but the request was turned down. Dundee’s Bill Brown replaced him in goal and he never played for Scotland again.
Willie Fernie had been anonymous on the left wing against Paraguay and the pressure was on for my father to return to the line-up. I can picture him, torn between the two ways he might let his country down: by not playing in the deciding group game, and by playing when he wasn’t fully fit. In the end, the selectors named him in the side to face France, and this time there were no last-minute changes to the line-up.
Before the tournament began, Waverley – The Name that Means Football – had already passed judgment on the French without seeing them: ‘It is generally assumed that France are a poor team and that their only worthwhile player is Kopa. It is also said that France, apart from lack of skill, are soft.’ Having lost to the socially inept South Americans, Scotland knew they had to beat the effete Continentals to advance to the knockout rounds, where the national stereotypes would get tougher.
By the time they played Scotland, France had already scored nine goals, including five for Just Fontaine, who was on his way to setting a record of thirteen for a single World Cup. Still, the teams were separated by only a point. The night the Scots had lost 3–2 to Paraguay, France had gone down by the same score to Yugoslavia. A win for Scotland would guarantee joint second place in the group and a play-off, most likely a rematch with Paraguay. In the memories of most of the players, the game turned on a missed penalty by the Charlton full-back John Hewie.
Eddie Turnbull remembers it more vividly than any other incident in the competition, the details interrupting each other to tell the story: ‘We got a penalty – there was no score at the time – and John Hewie steps up to take it, he was the nominated penalty taker – and he hit the junction of the upright and the crossbar and the ball rebounded – he hit the ball with such force it rebounded away – y’know how everyone lines up on the eighteen-yard line – and the ball rebounded away to midway between the eighteen-yard box and the halfway line. But France had two players up there, Kopa and Just Fontaine and – boom-boom-boom between the two of them – instead of being one up we were one down. It was extraordinary. As a matter of fact, I had lunch last week up at the golf club with Jimmy Murray and we were talking about it. When we meet up we still talk about those games. We were really unfortunate.’
Jimmy Murray concurs with his old teammate: ‘John Hewie cracked it against the crossbar and it went right away over our heads for yards, you know, and they went up and bloody scored. And that would have made a big difference. At the same time France were a great side. They had Kopa and Fontaine, they were a very good side. But we were looking pretty good for half the match and the penalty sort of knackered us. It was a distinct blow.’
It was. But the way the blow landed and the way it has since lodged in the team’s collective memory are different. By the time John Hewie stepped up to the spot, Scotland were already a goal down. Just Fontaine had crossed for Raymond Kopa to score in the twenty-second minute. The penalty was awarded after half an hour, and the referee had to stop play immediately afterwards to break up a shoving match that broke out in the scramble for the rebound. France’s second, from Fontaine, was a minute before half-time. There was no sucker punch, no sudden reversal. Just a missed penalty in between two French goals.
In the second half Scotland pulled one back through Rangers’ Sammy Baird, but they couldn’t manage another and the game finished 2–1. The players walked off the field and out of the World Cup with John Hewie’s penalty miss branded onto their frontal lobes, ready to mutate into memory.
In the Daily Record, Willie Gallagher drew himself up to his full height, donning a new honorific like a black cap to pass judgment: ‘Waverley – The World’s Most Travelled, Best Informed Football Critic – points a finger at the men who made a debacle of Scotland’s appearance at the World Cup in Sweden.’
John Hewie’s name wasn’t
mentioned. Instead, the piece was a litany of Scottish FA incompetence: the failure to appoint a replacement for Matt Busby; the lack of any team tactics; the ignorance of which players were fit for selection; the fiasco of stripping the captaincy from Tommy Younger, then handing it Bobby Evans, a man who didn’t want it and had actually asked to be relieved of the responsibility at Celtic. The committee were ‘a bunch of amateurs’. On home ground, with a subject he knew first-hand, Gallagher’s words for once had the ring of authenticity.
Back at their hotel in Eskilstuna after another long coach journey, the players had a midnight cup of tea and went to bed. Waverley’s final sentence was passed on them: ‘I will say with few exceptions there will be no next time for the players who brought heartbreak to Scottish football.’
In fact, there were no exceptions. By the time Scotland qualified for their next World Cup, sixteen years later, the entire 1958 squad was retired and watching on television. More immediately, though, Waverley was right in my father’s case. The defeat against France was his last appearance in the national team. When the next Scotland line-up was announced in October 1958, there were only five survivors from the World Cup – including Bill Brown, who’d taken over from Tommy Younger in Sweden – and all but two of the forward line had been replaced. Over the following twelve months Scotland tried five different players at outside-left and none of them was my father. He didn’t even make it into another squad. A sensational trial debut, two impressive friendlies, two ineffective, injury-hampered World Cup games – that was his international lot.
What happened? From the records, he seems to have been fit and in the Forest team around the time of Scotland’s fixtures over the next couple of years. In fact, the 1958–59 season was perhaps the best of his whole career. It’s another question on the long unasked list.
Even if I’d got round to asking him, though, I doubt he’d have had the answer. The trouble with trying to fathom the reason he wasn’t picked is that it first requires an understanding of why he was picked, and the workings of the selectors were a mystery. Behind the closed doors of the committee room they could have been playing cards, holding séances, rolling up their trouser legs and trading favours to come up with a list of names.
The one man I thought might have an explanation was Ian Wheeler, whose career as a football journalist had run parallel with my father’s from the very beginning. As the young sports editor of the Northern Scot, he’d covered St James’ and Lossie juniors games. Later, based in Manchester for the Weekly News, he’d argued with Matt Busby over the best youth teams they’d ever seen. Per head of population, Ian Wheeler insisted, Lossiemouth’s golden generation just edged out Busby’s Babes.
‘Why wasn’t your father picked again for Scotland? Well, look at the men making the decisions. They were all on the boards of Scottish clubs. It was a time of terrible anti-English bias. I mean, take Bob McKinlay for example, who played with your dad at Nottingham Forest. He was possibly the best centre-half never to get a cap for Scotland and he played his football down south. They would play an English-based player, but he wouldn’t get that many caps – well, unless he was Denis Law or Dave Mackay.’
Unfortunately for my father, Scottish players of the quality of Law and Mackay were migrating to the English First Division in ever greater numbers. Twelve months after the World Cup there was a back-page outcry – SCOTLAND SNUB WALKER’S WONDERS! – over four of Nottingham Forest’s Cup Final team being overlooked for the annual home international with England. The reason seemed to be that there were already six Anglos in the team, which was reported as the selectors’ unofficial limit.
Not picking Dave Mackay simply because he’d left Hearts for Spurs would have been a national scandal. Players like my father, for whom there were home-grown alternatives – Willie Ormond, Bertie Auld, Davie Wilson – were less likely to get a chance, and almost certain not to get a second chance.
Who knows, if it hadn’t been for the terrible events that prevented Matt Busby from taking over as national manager, perhaps he would have become a mainstay of the Scotland side; one of the boss’s favourites, safe from the quotas and petty politics of the selection committee. Then again, if it hadn’t been for that transcendent Forest–United league game in October 1957, perhaps Busby wouldn’t have given him such a glowing recommendation in the first place, and he could easily have remained good company for his Forest roommate Bob McKinlay; the pair of them slipping through the cracks and down the years together into old men’s arguments about the best players never to have been capped by their country.
My father flew home, disappointed that he hadn’t been fit enough to do better, and travelled straight up to Lossiemouth with my mother and older brother for the consolation of the annual holiday at home. Waverley stayed behind in Stockholm as Scotland’s footballing ambassador.
‘WILL GERMANS TAKE ZOOM DRUG?’ he shouted before the semi-final between the holders and the hosts. The piece was full of innuendo – some of it since substantiated – about how the Germans had run Hungary off the park in the 1954 World Cup Final, then promptly been sick when they got into the dressing room.
It was whispered they had been given a drug just before the kick-off. There is nothing to prevent the Germans from doctoring their players. That is something – like a lot of the weird decisions of some continental referees – for which no provisions have been made in the laws of the game.
Almost worse than the transgression itself, Waverley had divined the Germans’ dark motivation: ‘Like some other countries competing, they attach great value to the prestige that goes with winning the trophy.’
He turned his attention to the World Cup favourites, Brazil:
They have a psychiatrist with them. Maybe his presence is a necessity, for if there is one aspect of their make-up that could lead to their defeat, it is their hot-headedness . . . even at training today they gave ample evidence of how that can give way to excitement. There were occasions when all were shouting at the same time. Any Spanish-speaking onlooker would have been reduced to a state of utter confusion . . .
Brazil – cunningly speaking Spanish to confound the world’s most travelled and best informed football critics – went on to win the first World Cup competition televised live around at least a good portion of the planet. In the process Pelé became the Greatest Player in the World, not just because of his footballing genius, but because he was able to exhibit it simultaneously to a massive and growing global audience.
Who had been the Greatest Player in the World in the 1930s? It’s a trick question: the world hadn’t had one, because there was no way of assembling a panel to judge the international beauty contest. In fact, a little digging usually turns up the name of Giuseppe Meazza, revered in Milan as the key player in Italy’s consecutive World Cup wins of 1934 and 1938. But few of the rest of us have heard of Meazza because – in global terms – so few people ever saw him. And who knows what other, undeclared candidates there might have been, playing brilliantly in their own backwaters where the roofs of the houses had yet to see an aerial?
In 1958 television was starting to carry football across international borders without reference to parochial committee men. And fans at home could begin to test the opinions of travelling football writers against the evidence of their own eyes. I imagine my father watched the final on holiday in Scotland – that is to say I find it impossible to imagine that he didn’t watch – and marvelled at the one-touch, two-syllable Brazilians. Didi, Vavá, Pelé, Goal.
Chapter Seven
Giant-killing
JANUARY 2004. I’M FOLLOWING the 3rd Round of the FA Cup on television and thinking about the 3rd Round of 1959.
Looking at the latest scores brings home to me how far away from the game I’ve drifted. At least half of them I find impossible to put into context; I can’t tell the underdogs from the favourites. Ipswich 2 Derby 0, is that an upset or an entirely predictable home win in the making? Are they in the same division? Are Man City and Leice
ster? Gillingham 3 Charlton 1 appears on the rolling lower-screen caption. I know that’s an upset, but how big – which division are Gillingham in?
I used to know all this stuff. For a couple of years I had run the competition myself. From 3rd Round to Final, the whole drama was staged in an uninterrupted marathon on my bedroom carpet, with marbles and an upturned shoebox into which I would cut five or six rectangular mouse holes, each with a different goal value felt-tipped above it. Shoebox against one skirting board, me backed up against the other, the world’s greatest cup competition would begin.
I was scrupulously fair. I simply replayed key games until I got the right result, on the grounds that I’d let the marble go before I’d meant to, or inadvertently tried harder for one side than the other, and therefore not been fair to (inevitably) the side I was rooting for, secretly from myself. I never owned up to the bias – I’d installed a mental firewall in the interests of maintaining absolute probity. In the absence of authentic numbered balls, team names were written on pieces of paper, folded and put into a bag. I didn’t fix the draw, trusting in the integrity of the marbles to produce the right results. And I certainly didn’t need to consult the newspaper to come up with the list of teams. I knew all ninety-two, division by division. I hadn’t learned them, I just knew them, in the same way that I assumed every seven-year-old did.
These days, of course, you don’t necessarily need to know. Saturday afternoon television is a social service for the context-deficient; half a dozen health visitors dropping round to the house in suits and headphones. The afternoon passes in a bantery flow of information on goals, near-goals, narks, bookings, bad decisions and diabolical liberties, Jeff; all the incident not just reported but picked apart, given a good pub going-over, well before the final whistle goes and well after it. It’s addictive viewing, almost regardless of your degree of interest in the game.
