The sad decline of Scottish football
Scottish football now gets little media attention outside Scotland, and no wonder. The national side hasn’t qualified for either the World Cup or the European one for donkey’s years. Celtic and Rangers, the Old Firm of Scottish football, may have rich histories and Celtic fans never tire of reminding us that it was the first British club to win the European Cup, but that was a long time ago. Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, the Vietnam war was raging and the Beatles were still together. Nobody had yet walked on the moon.
Back in the 1960s Scotland still produced great footballers. Few of the leading English clubs were without a handful of Scots. There were three or four in the famous Spurs team that won both the League and FA Cup. Matt Busby’s Manchester United had Denis Law and Paddy Crerand. Don Revie’s Leeds United was driven forward by Billy Bremner, and there were more Scots than Scouse accents in the Liverpool dressing-room in the days of Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley. Now you scarcely need all your fingers to count the number of Scots playing for the top clubs in the English Premiership, and the last great Scottish manager of an English club was Sir Alex Ferguson. Sic transit and all that is one’s feeling about Scottish football.
This week Heart of Midlothian, usually known just as Hearts, sacked its manager Craig Levine, once, briefly and unsuccessfully, manager of the Scotland team. Hearts’ owner, Anne Budge, popular for having rescued the club from financial disaster, did this reluctantly, having shown Mr Levine more loyalty than most managers receive. But Hearts have recorded only one win in eighteen games. So he had to go.
Hearts are a club with a great history. There’s a memorial outside Haymarket Station in Edinburgh which you may pass on your way to the Hearts ground, Tynecastle on the Gorgie Road. It honours the Hearts team who volunteered en masse on the outbreak of war in 1914. When I was a boy in the 1950s Hearts were a glamour team. In the days when teams fielded five forwards, their two inside men and centre forward were known for their brilliance and goal-scoring feats as “The Terrible Trio” – Alfie Conn, Willie Bauld and Jimmy Wardhaugh. I watched them with awe when they came north to play Aberdeen at Pittodrie. Bauld was one of the finest strikers I’ve ever seen, but he got only a handful of Scottish caps. The competition was then very stiff.
It came from the other side of the city, Easter Road on the way to Leith, home of great rivals, Hibernian (Hibs). They were even more glamourous. Their forwards – Gordon Smith, Bobby Johnstone, Lawrie Reilly, Eddie Turnbull and Willie Ormond – were known as “the 50,000 forward line” in the days when the record fee for an English club was around £14,000. The Scotland selectors usually preferred Reilly to Bauld, while Gordon Smith, the brightest star of the Five, a player comparable to England’s and Preston North End’s Tom Finney, was often kept out of the Scotland side by selectors who preferred the powerful Rangers outside right, Willie Waddell. Today’s Scotland manager would surely give his eye-teeth for any of these Hearts and Hibs players.
Where did it all go wrong? When and where are easier to answer than why. The bubble of Scottish footballing conceit might properly have been pricked as far back as 1954 when a hopelessly unprepared and ill-equipped Scotland team was beaten 8-0 by Uruguay in a World Cup match in Switzerland. But we shrugged that off easily. We were still producing great players and, as long as we could beat England at Wembley or Hampden Park, who really cared?
It was in the 1978 World Cup held in Argentina that the bubble of Scottish conceit was really burst. We set off with a good team and high hopes boosted by an effervescent and briefly inspiring manager, Ally McLeod. Asked what he would do if we won the World Cup, he replied “retain it”. A song by the comedian Andy Cameron in which he declared that “Scotland are the greatest football team” soared top of the (Scottish) pops. The tournament was a shambles and a disaster. My friend, William McIlvanney, the greatest Scottish novelist of my generation, followed it and remembered coming upon a wee Scotsman sitting in tears on the edge of a pavement. He looked up at Willie and said, “can we no’ iver dae onything right?” Good question, though characteristically having already failed to qualify for the knock-out stage of the cup, we won our last match against the Netherlands, who had already qualified, and did so with a brilliant individualist goal by Archie Gemmill.
Our pretentions have never – quite – been the same since. There have still been a few great players – there were one or two in that team in Argentina – but fewer in every decade. Social change has something to do with it doubtless, and looking at the composition of the England team today, one can say that both Scottish football and Scottish rugby have suffered from the low level of immigration to Scotland from Commonwealth countries. Some draw attention to a decline of football in the schools, dating back to a teachers’ strike in the early years of the Thatcher Government. Others see the dominance of the Old Firm clubs as a contributory cause, but this hardly explains why they produce so few players of real class themselves.
It was probably inevitable that other countries would first catch up and then surpass us. We were once leaders and innovators. The passing or, as it was known, “combination” game was first developed in Scotland by the famous amateur club Queen’s Park which supplied all the members of the Scotland team that played England in the first international match in 1872. It was then introduced to England by Scottish players, known as “Scotch professors” who took it south to English clubs. But there have been no such new ideas in Scottish football for a very long time now and precious little glamour either. Queen’s Park still exist and are still an amateur club, but they play in what is really the fourth tier of the league now. When I was a boy, they clung to their place in the top division, but every year lost a handful of their best players to the professional game. Even so they still occasionally produce and develop talented youngsters, most recently the Liverpool left back and current Scotland captain, Andy Robertson. But there aren’t many like him and very few Scots starring in the English Premiership. Or indeed anywhere.