Category: Sport

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Who chairs wins

 

 

On Friday, August 16th, two friends and I ventured into the Foochow Building on Singapore’s Tyrwhitt Road to experience Hardcore Island 2: A Fine City, the latest extravaganza staged by the Singapore Pro-Wrestling (SPW) association.  We’d been laggardly in getting there, having supped a beer too many in a nearby pub, and arrived near the end of the evening’s first bout: one between local wrestlers CK Vin and Emman.  As we entered the hall where the action was taking place, we were greeted by the sight of CK Vin throttling Emman with a folded chair.  He’d put the back chair-frame over Emman’s head and had the rear edge of the seat deep in his throat.  Unsurprisingly, soon afterwards, Emman submitted.

 

This, it transpired, was a ‘chairs match’ – which, Wikipedia informs me, is a contest where “only chairs can be used as legal weapons, but the only way to win is by pinfall or submission in the ring.”  I liked the publicity blurb with which the SPW presaged CK Vin and Emman’s fight: “You’ll want to get to your seats now before the wrestlers take them all for weapons.”

 

© Singapore Pro-Wrestling

 

Before I moved to Singapore, it’d been a long time since I watched a professional wrestling match.  In fact, I hadn’t been a fan of the sport since my boyhood in Northern Ireland.  This was when World of Sport, Independent Television’s Saturday-afternoon sports show, would always have a four o’clock slot devoted to what people in those days simply called ‘the Wrestling’.  Watching the Wrestling on TV, I quickly became obsessed with such larger-than-life figures as Les Kellett, Mark ‘Rollerball’ Rocco, Tally Ho Kaye, Jim Breaks, Mick McManus (catchphrase: “Not the ears! Not the ears!”), Big Daddy (catchphrase: “Easy! Easy! Easy!”), the gargantuan (six-foot-eleven, 685 pounds) Giant Haystacks and the mysterious, masked Kendo Nagasaki who claimed to be channelling “the spirit of a samurai warrior who, 300 years ago, lived in the place that is now called Nagasaki.”  (He himself lived in Wolverhampton.)  But I never got into the brasher, showier and slightly more glamorous pro-wrestling spectacles served up in subsequent decades by America’s World Wrestling Federation (WWF), later World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).  And though for most of the 1990s I lived in Japan, I didn’t get into the super-popular New Japan Pro-Wrestling and All Japan Pro-Wrestling promotions either.

 

But I’d always enjoyed wrestling movies, such as Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008) or Stephen Merchant’s Fighting with my Family (2019).  Okay, Mr. Nanny (1993) with Hulk Hogan not so much.  And it often occurred to me that I’d like to see some live bouts.  So, last year, when a mate told me of the existence of the SPW and invited me to one of their events, I thought, why not?

 

Anyway, back to tonight’s proceedings.  The second bout on the bill involved two more local wrestlers, Destroyer Dharma and Kentona – the former defeating the latter with a pinfall, which in wrestling jargon is when you hold your opponent’s shoulders against the ring-floor long enough for the referee to count to three.  Not for the last time that evening, the fighting spilled out of the confines of the ring and into the surrounding hall – much to the glee of the spectators, always happy to get a close-up view of the carnage.  I should say that the crowd was a pleasing mix of young and old, male and female, and Singaporeans and foreigners.  It was a far cry from the audiences I remember watching the 1970s British wrestling, which seemed to consist mainly of demented old grannies who’d hobble forward and club Mick McManus with their handbags whenever he was against the ropes.

 

 

The third battle tonight was a hotly anticipated one between Singapore’s Jack ‘N’ Cheese and the Gym Bros, who hail from Pattaya in Thailand.  Jack ‘N’ Cheese are BGJ, aka Jack Chong, described on his Instagram page as the ‘Beast of Benevolence’; and the Cheeseburger Kid, whose yellow cowl-mask makes him resemble a jaundiced Deadpool.  The latter has become a popular fixture of Singapore’s pro-wrestling world and tonight it looked like he had a mini-fan-club in tow – a small but voluble group in yellow T-shirts at the front of the crowd who cheered on his every move.  It has to be said of their opponents, the Gym Bros, that they were at least a wee bit camp.  One had a headful of Debbie-Harry-style blonde hair and wore white spats up to his knees. The other sported a weedy moustache and was clad in tight pink shorts whose contours left little to the proverbial imagination.

 

To the delight of everyone – bar the Gym Bros – Jack ‘N’ Cheese won the bout through another pinfall.  And nobody was more delighted than the Cheeseburger Kid, who reacted to victory by leaping up into BGJ’s arms and posing there for the cameras.

 

 

Next came a tussle between two more wrestlers from the SPW roster: Bryson Blade, wearing bad-boy black-leather pants, and Referee Ryan, who, appropriately for a person sometimes working as a referee, was attired in a more sober costume of black and white.  This was billed as a ‘Loser Gets Caned Match’.  The blurb for it declared, “…the loser will be forced to take a lashing with a Singapore cane post-match!  Gather round, people!  You’re about to be taken back, school assembly style.”  That references the fact that Singapore not only allows caning as a judicial punishment – a maximum of 24 strokes for a range of criminal offences – but also as a corporal punishment in schools, for male pupils who commit serious offences.  (Actually, it took me back, since corporal punishment was still legal in Northern Irish schools in the 1970s and I got caned a few times, though not with a Singaporean rattan cane but a beechwood one.)

 

 

Eventually, Referee Ryan lost through a pinfall and ended up receiving ‘five of the best’.   I wasn’t sitting near enough to the ring to be sure, but I suspect the cane-strokes may not have landed with the fullest possible force.

 

 

Following a 15-minute interval, bout number five saw another pair of Singaporean wrestlers in action, Zhang Wen and Riz. The former won, again by a pinfall.  Then came a trio of female wrestlers slugging it out in a three-way battle.  Representing Singapore in this scrap was the formidable Alexis Lee, who also goes under the moniker ‘Lion City Hit Girl’ and is the city-state’s very first lady pro-wrestler.  The Straits Times newspaper recently described her as “…a rampaging figure of death, who will stomp and slam her opponents swiftly and ruthlessly.”  I assume the Straits Times writer got the ‘figure of death’ idea from the white skull-make-up that covers half her face and her costume of tank-top, shorts and leggings patterned with bones and ribs.  Her foes tonight were two Japanese wrestlers, Miyu ‘Pink Striker’ Yamashita and Koya Toribami.  I know tori is the Japanese word for ‘bird’, which may explain why the latter fighter turned up in an elaborate, beaked bird-costume.

 

After a hard-fought contest – at one point the three of them were engaged in a sort of treble bearhug, with the bird-themed Koya Toribami caught in the middle like a piece of chicken in a chicken sandwich – Alexis Lee won with a pinfall.  Afterwards, outside the ring, she posed defiantly with a glass of beer, which she’d definitely earned.

 

 

The seventh and final bout was an all-Singaporean affair pitching two teams of three wrestlers against each other – the Horrors, consisting of Aiden Rex, Dr Gore and Da Butcherman, and the Midnight Bastards (billed in some quarters as ‘State of Bastards’), consisting of RJ, Mason and Andruew Tang, aka the Statement.  Despite being the co-founder of and head coach at SPW, Tang / the Statement has a villainous ring persona: “Embrace the Statement or I will make a statement out of you!”  This was billed as an ‘Xtreme Rules’ match, which meant there were no rules.  Not only chairs could be utilized as weapons, but also tables, a big wooden board that someone dragged out from under the ring, and even a stepladder.  Yes, I’d noticed how that stepladder had been parked all evening at the far end of the hall and wondered when it was going to come in handy.  It did when the spiky-mohawked Da Butcherman clambered up one side of it, and Andruew Tang, in gold-streaked trousers, clambered up its other side, and they faced off at the top.

 

 

At another point, the wrestlers hurriedly assembled, IKEA-style, a table in the ring.  Then someone poured dozens of small, multicoloured, plasticky things across the tabletop.  And soon after, an opponent got slammed down on the covered table, on his back.  Ouch!  One of my friends thought the plasticky things might be drawing pins.  I had a horrible suspicion, though, that they were pieces of Lego.  I remember how much my foot hurt after I stepped on a Lego-piece as a kid, so having your back thumped down against a whole table’s worth of those must be hellishly sore.

 

Anyway, thanks to yet another pinfall, the Horrors emerged victorious.  And that was it for the night.  Just to make the experience a little bit sweeter, on our way out, we encountered the Cheeseburger Kid standing at the Foochow Building’s entrance.  We told him how much we’d enjoyed his fight and he seemed to genuinely appreciate our warm words.

 

Certain sports purists might quibble about the tongue-in-cheek, even corny nature of some of what was on show tonight.  But the SPW’s get-togethers never fail to provide fun and excitement.  The city / island state of Singapore has a reputation for being a calm, ordered and well-run place, but it’s nice to think that there’s a little part of it where, thanks to the SPW, for an occasional few hours, good-natured anarchy takes over.  Where it becomes an anything-goes ‘lion city’ or a riotous ‘hardcore island’.  Where – to borrow a quote from Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) – “Chaos reigns!”

 

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Nostalgic wallows 1: Bill McLaren

 

© BBC

 

We’re nearing the end of the 2024 Six Nations rugby championship and my mental health feels more kicked around than the ball in the matches.  Up until the Saturday just past, the two teams I support, Ireland and Scotland, had been doing well and I was entertaining hopes that the championship would conclude with them at the top of the table.  But what a difference a Saturday afternoon makes.  Ireland got beaten by England, the team nobody wants to get beaten by.  Against all expectations, Scotland lost to Italy, the team regarded as the one in the championship ‘making up the numbers’ and who usually finish bottom.

 

Anyhow, aside from the anguish…  The championship reminds me yet again of how much I miss being able to watch an international rugby match and at the same time listen to the knowledgeable and dulcet tones of Bill McLaren.

 

Although McLaren, who died in 2010 at the age of 86, worked as late as 2002, it was in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s that he was indisputably the voice of British rugby union.  This was an era when sport, if you weren’t at the live event itself, was viewable only on a handful of terrestrial TV channels.  It was common for one channel to have a monopoly on broadcasting one sport and, by extension, for one commentator to have a monopoly on talking about that sport.  Hence, in my youth, it was almost impossible to see horse racing without hearing the posh but eerily robotic tones of Peter O’Sullivan, or boxing without hearing the excitable Harry Carpenter, or Formula One without hearing the gaffe-prone Murray Walker, or rugby league without hearing the indescribable-sounding Eddie Waring.  McLaren fulfilled this role in the world of rugby union and for me was the best sports commentator of the lot, though I’m undoubtedly biased.  Rugby has always been my favourite team sport.  Plus McLaren came from Hawick in the Scottish Borders, the region where I spent many of my formative years.

 

There were three reasons for McLaren’s greatness.  Firstly, he knew his stuff.  I remember watching a McLaren-commentated game on a pub TV in Aberdeen sometime in the 1980s.  I was in the company of my good friend, the late Finlay McLean, and at one point, Finlay turned around to me and marvelled, “He’s just steeped in the game, isn’t he?”

 

When a try was scored, McLaren didn’t just tell you the name of the player who’d crossed the line.  No, he’d also observe how the player was the great-great-nephew of the man who’d kicked the winning points in the legendary Hawick-Galashiels derby of 1937, or a direct descendent of the tight-head prop with the great Western Province team that’d dominated South Africa’s Currie Cup in the 1890s.  It wouldn’t have surprised you if he’d identified the player’s granny as the stylist responsible for grooming the mutton-chop sideburns of J.P.R. Williams, which were rugby’s main contribution to fashion in the 1970s.  McLaren seemed to know everything about rugby.

 

His knowledge was encyclopaedic, but this was backed by a conscientious and professional attitude to research.  I read somewhere that when preparing for a game, he’d cover a full sheet of foolscap with notes about each player.  This meant that in the commentator’s box he was constantly shuffling around some 30 sheets of paper.

 

Secondly, although he was a Scotsman and often commentated on games involving the Scottish rugby team, he was never biased.  On the contrary, he always applauded good rugby, no matter who was playing it and even if Scotland was on the receiving end of it.  McLaren’s neutrality was especially admirable when you compared him with the international football commentators on the BBC at the time (and indeed still now), who seemed incapable of narrating an England World Cup match without speculating every second minute about whether ‘we’ could win the World Cup just like ‘we’ won it back in 1966.

 

Thirdly, and most importantly for me, his commentaries were laden with poetry.  McLaren had an amusing, fanciful, frequently wonderful talent with language.  Admittedly, he could be a tad unflattering in the turn of phrase he used to describe the over-sized players on the field.  English prop Colin Smart – famous for getting stomach-pumped after drinking a bottle of aftershave as a post-match lark – consisted of ‘considerable acreage’; English captain and lock Bill Beaumont looked ‘like someone who enjoys his food’; Welsh forwards Scott and Craig Quinnell were ‘two well-nourished individuals’; Scottish flanker Finlay Calder had ‘hands like dinner plates’; and Calder’s gangly fellow-Scot Doddie Weir was ‘the lamppost of the line-out.’  As for the legendary and frankly massive New Zealand flanker Jonah Lomu, running into him was like ‘trying to tackle a snooker table’.

 

© BBC

 

He had a fondness to likening players to animals.  They might behave like ‘a demented ferret’ or a ‘bag of weasels’ of a ‘raging bull with a bad head’ or ‘a whirling tsetse fly’ or ‘a runaway giraffe’ or ‘a slippery salmon’.  The Scottish scrum-half Roy Laidlaw (whose nephew Greig captained Scotland for seven years up until 2019) was as elusive as ‘a baggy up a Borders burn’ – a baggy being, to quote the Dictionary of the Scottish Language, ‘a species of large minnow.’  Unsurprisingly for a Borders man, Scotticisms were common in his delivery.  Rugby balls were likened to ‘three pounds of haggis’, the famously square-shouldered Scottish skipper Peter Brown was like ‘a coo kicking over a milk pail’ and an injured player sitting dejectedly at the side of the field whilst sucking on a mint was at least ‘enjoying his sweetie.’

 

When it came to describing the turbulent passions and physical violence often unleashed on the pitch, McLaren was amusingly euphemistic.  Cheating was frequently described as ‘jiggery-pokery’ and punch-ups were dismissed as ‘a bit of argy-bargy’.  I remember when fists started flying in the middle of one scrum, he commented: “It’s getting a bit unceremonious in that front row.”  And when Scottish centre Jim Renwick – whom McLaren had coached as a schoolboy – missed a kick and was caught by the camera mouthing the F-word, McLaren diplomatically remarked that he was ‘muttering a few naughty Hawick words.’

 

Some of his sayings became catchphrases.  When a player prepared to kick a conversion and half the stadium made disparaging noises in the hope of distracting him and making him fluff it, McLaren would invariably remark: “There’s some ill-mannered whistling.”  And when a conversion-kick made it between the posts despite being taken from a torturous angle, he’d declare: “It’s high enough, it’s long enough and it’s straight enough!”

 

Aware that in the Borders towns local players who’d made it onto the national team were seen as heroes, he’d often serenade the scorer of a Scottish try with the lines, “And they’ll be dancing on the streets of…” or “And they’ll be drinking his health in…” – Hawick, Galashiels, Kelso, Melrose, Selkirk, wherever – “…tonight!”  As an honorary Borderer, I’d say they were more likely to be drinking his health than dancing in the streets.

 

McLaren’s manner and delivery were immensely relaxed and comforting, but his early life had been no bed of roses.  As a young World War II serviceman, he had to endure the Battle of Monte Cassino, of which one eyewitness said, “The men were so tired that it was a living death.  They had come from such a depth of weariness that I wondered if they would quite be able to make the return to the lives and thoughts they had known.’  McLaren himself described Monte Cassino as a ‘vision of hell on earth.’

 

After the war, he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, which put a prompt end to any hopes he had of becoming a rugby internationalist.  TB was then considered incurable and he wasn’t expected to survive, but he and four fellow sufferers agreed to be guinea pigs for the trials of a new drug, streptomycin.  Thanks to this treatment he recovered, but three of the four other volunteers died.  It was while he was convalescing that he produced his first sports commentaries – describing table-tennis matches over the hospital radio.

 

McLaren was passionately attached to his hometown and famously said, “A day out of Hawick is a day wasted.”  Several years ago I visited Hawick for the first time since the 1980s, and saw to my dismay how much it’d deteriorated.  Its high street was run-down and riddled with derelict properties – thanks to a faltering economy caused by the closure of local woolen mills, and also thanks no doubt to the opening of branches of Morrison’s, Sainsbury’s and Lidl, which’d sucked the retailing life out of the place.  My first thought was: “What would Bill McLaren have said?”

 

© From rugbyrelics.com

 

McLaren’s commentaries were emblematic of an earlier, more innocent age, when rugby was still an amateur sport and because of that it was incredibly accessible.  This was especially true if you lived in a rugby-daft place like the Borders, where the guys you saw performing heroic deeds for Scotland on TV on Saturday afternoons existed during weekdays as mortals like everyone else.  As a kid living there, I was delighted when the man from the electricity board who came to our house to check on a power outage was none other than Jim Renwick.  Meanwhile, Scottish fullback Peter Dods was a joiner down the road in Galashiels and my old man, a farmer, was on nodding terms with Scottish flanker John Jeffrey, who farmed in Kelso – Jeffrey’s teammates had nicknamed him ‘the Great White Shark’ but to Bill McLaren he was just ‘the big Kelso farmer’.  And let’s not forget local electrician Roy Laidlaw, whom legend has it had to rewire the public toilets in Jedburgh the Monday morning after the Scotland team he was part of won the Grand Slam in Paris.

 

Yes, Bill McLaren’s voice evokes a simpler time in rugby, before professionalism, sponsorship, corporatism, razzmatazz and a profit-driven need to win at all costs took over.  But homespun though his persona was, I don’t believe there’s been a sports commentator in the years since who’s come close to matching him.

 

From artuk.org / © Beltane Studios

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Remember the Ally-mo

 

© BBC

 

It’s come to my attention that a football World Cup is in progress.  Time, then, to dust down and repost the following item, which surfaces on this blog every four years when the competition is underway to decide the global champions of the ‘beautiful game’.

 

One unsettling feature of growing older is that when an anniversary arrives and you think back to the original event, you feel shocked when you realise how much time separates now and then.  The other week, the 2022 World Cup competition began in Qatar, and it’s just occurred to me that the 1978 World Cup in Argentina took place 44 whole years and eleven whole World Cups ago.  It’s almost traumatic to realise how much time has elapsed.

 

However, if you’re old enough to remember the 1978 Argentinian World Cup and you were in Scotland at the time, you’ll testify that the event itself was traumatic.

 

For those of you who’re unacquainted with the topic…  What happened in 1978 was that of the four national football teams in the UK, Scotland was the only one to qualify for Argentina.  And the country had a team that, on paper, looked like it might achieve something.  It boasted players from some of the mightiest football clubs in Britain: for example, from Manchester United (Martin Buchan, Gordon McQueen, Lou Macari, Joe Jordan), Liverpool (Graham Souness, the legendary Kenny Dalgleish), Glasgow Rangers (Derek Johnstone, Tom Forsyth, Sandy Jardine), Nottingham Forest (Kenny Burns, John Robertson, Archie Gemmill) and, er, Partick Thistle (Alan Rough).  And in charge of these remarkable players was a manager called Ally MacLeod, who was remarkable in his own way.  Though not necessarily in the right way.

 

From the Independent / © Getty Images

 

Ally had been emboldened by wins in 1977 over the European champions Czechoslovakia and over the Auld Enemy, England.  The game against England concluded with the Scottish fans swarming onto the pitch at Wembley and digging up clods of the turf and breaking the goalposts into wee pieces to bring home as souvenirs, much to the horror of the English commentators and much to the hilarity of everyone in Scotland.  He then began to talk up his team’s chances in Argentina.  When early in 1978 Scotland failed to win the Home International championship involving England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ally shrugged it off with the tantalising comment that the championship’s title “could be dwarfed by the World Cup.”  Such statements, and Ally’s general air of swagger and optimism – “My name is Ally MacLeod,” he announced when he became Scotland manager, “and I am a born winner!” – acted like catnip to both football fans and the hacks working on the sports pages of Scotland’s newspapers.

 

As the World Cup approached, a heady sense of expectation began to infect the Scottish population.  Folk started to believe that the Argentinian World Cup would be a jamboree of Scottish footballing genius, culminating in Ally and the gang lifting the trophy.  No wonder a carpet company cannily signed Ally to do a commercial where he sat on one of their rugs whilst dressed as a gaucho, which was 1970s Britain’s idea of what everybody in Argentina looked like.  This led to a priceless incident where, just before he departed for Argentina, Ally was accosted by an exuberant fan who announced, “Ally, see the day after your commercial?  My ma bought one o they carpets!”

 

Ally was indeed a great salesman.  He could truly market the brand.  Unfortunately, that was not quite the same as delivering the goods.

 

Even one of my favourite rock bands, the Australian (but mostly Scottish-born) AC/DC, got in on the act and played a gig in 1978 at Glasgow Apollo Theatre wearing Scotland football strips.  Also getting in on the act was the Scottish comedian Andy Cameron, who recorded a song called Ally’s Tartan Army that soon rode high in the charts.  It contained such catchy, if posthumously cringeworthy, lines as: “And we’re fairly shake them up / When we win the World Cup / Cos Scotland’s got the greatest football team!”

 

From pinterest.co.uk

 

Being in Scotland in the spring of 1978 and watching this happen was disconcerting for me.  The year before, my family had moved from Northern Ireland and taken up residency in a farm near the Scottish town of Peebles.  I’d assumed that the Scots were a stoical, down-to-earth lot, not given to flights of fancy.  But then, all-of-a-sudden, they’d succumbed to this madness about Ally MacLeod, winning the World Cup and having the greatest football team in the universe.  What was going on?  I found it particularly noticeable the day before Scotland played Northern Ireland in the Home Internationals.  When I walked into a meeting of the local Scouts that evening, all the other (Scottish) scouts had an insane glint in their eyes and were gleefully predicting how Scotland was going to slaughter, dismember and stomp on the grave of poor, lowly Northern Ireland the next day.  As it turned out, all Scotland could manage with Northern Ireland was a 1-1 draw, much to my satisfaction.

 

Still, over time, the madness seemed to seep into even my non-ethnically Scottish soul.  Hey, I thought, it would be cool to live in the country that’d won the World Cup, wouldn’t it?

 

After a delirious send-off at Hampden Stadium where 30,000 Scotland fans whooped and screamed as if their team had just come back from Argentina clutching the World Cup trophy, Ally’s Tartan Army flew out and got ready for their first game of the competition’s first round, which was against Peru.  The evening that the game was on TV, I missed the beginning of it for my dad had sent me out to move some cows from one field to another.  I was in the middle of moving those cows when I heard a huge rumbling roar.  It was like how I’d imagine the approach of a tsunami to sound.  I needed a few seconds to realise I was hearing cheering coming from the town, a half-mile away beyond the last of my parents’ fields.  It was the sound of 5000-odd people in Peebles celebrating Joe Jordan knocking in a first goal for Scotland in the game’s 14th minute.  Gosh, I thought, it’s started.  Scotland really are going to win the World Cup!

 

I completed my task, hurried back to the house and hunkered down in front of the television next to my younger brother, who’d really caught the Scotland World Cup bug and was watching the match with avid excitement.  Scarcely had I arrived there when, just before half-time, Peru equalised.  Then in the second half Peru scored two more, so that by the game’s end Scotland had been beaten 3-1.  In a pathetic attempt to hide my disappointment, I pretended that, being Northern Irish, I hadn’t really been supporting Scotland and I thought their defeat was funny.  So I turned around and started laughing at my brother.  I stopped, though, when I realised he was in floods of tears.  However, my mother had already seen me laughing at him and she gave me a deserved bollocking for making him even more upset.

 

Next up for Scotland was Iran, an unstable country in the early throes of a revolution.  Scotland was surely going to win this one, right?  Wrong.  The team played so badly that they scraped a 1-1 draw and that was only because an Iranian player called Eskandarian scored an own-goal.  This game was famous for its images of a totally-deflated Ally Macleod sitting hunched over in the Scotland dugout, his hands clamped over the top of his skull in an attempt to shut out the world – “Ally trying to dismantle his head,” as one wag described it later.

 

© Daily Record

 

To heighten the misery, the Scottish striker Willie Johnston was sent home after failing a drugs test.  Other football players have suffered drugs scandals, most notably the cocaine-snorting Diego Maradona.  But the hapless Johnston wasn’t even caught taking a glamorous, hedonistic drug.  He tested positive for Reacitivan, a medication prescribed to him because he had hay fever.  Poor old Willie might as well have been busted for taking Benylin Chesty Cough Mixture.

 

By now the Scotland situation was looking grim.  Also grim was the atmosphere at Peebles High School.  One guy in my class told me there was a record shop in Glasgow that was now selling copies of Ally’s Tartan Army by Andy Cameron for a penny each, so that disgruntled punters could make a public display of smashing them into vinyl slivers on the pavement outside.  Meanwhile, a girl told me she couldn’t bear to drink Scotland’s national fizzy drink Irn Bru any more, because its name sounded it too much like ‘Iran Peru’.  Lessons with our English teacher, Iain Jenkins, strayed off the topic of Shakespeare and became lengthy post-mortem discussions about what was going horribly wrong in Argentina.

 

In fact, I remember us doing some creative writing one day and then Iain Jenkins reading out a poem that a mischievous pupil from south of the border – England – had just penned about Scotland’s faltering World Cup campaign.  It contained the memorable line, “Poor Ally will have to emigrate to the moon” and the even more memorable couplet, “Willie Johnston is over the hill / That’s why he’s on the pill.”

 

To get through to the World Cup’s next round, Scotland now had to beat the Netherlands… and beat them by three goals.  There seemed zero chance of that happening.  From the dire way the Scots were playing, it looked much more likely that the Dutch would murder them.  Yet it was against the Dutch – who’d eventually make it to the competition’s final – that Scotland managed a victory.  Indeed, they were 3-1 up at one point in the game and if they’d knocked in another goal they could have lived to fight another day.   Alas, it wasn’t to be.  The Dutch eventually pulled one back, making the final score 3-2.  Scotland had won, but not by enough to stop them going home early.

 

Still, the game produced a brilliant Scottish goal by the diminutive Nottingham Forest player Archie Gemmill.  It was the best goal of that World Cup and possibly the greatest World Cup goal ever.  Incidentally, it’s also the goal whose footage is intercut with the hectic sex sequence in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1995).  No wonder a dazed Ewan MacGregor murmurs at the end of it, “I haven’t felt that good since Archie Gemmill scored against Holland in 1978!”  Though I’m pretty sure that back in 1978 the Scottish football commentator Archie Macpherson didn’t really exclaim, as he does in Trainspotting, “A penetrating goal for Scotland!”

 

Thus, Scotland was out of the World Cup but with, technically, a wee bit of pride salvaged.  Sadly, such was the hype that’d accompanied them to Argentina that their campaign didn’t feel like anything other than an absolute disaster.  The day after the Holland game, I remember a classmate, the local postman’s son, coming into class.  He pulled out a tartan scarf, waved it around for five seconds and said flatly and unenthusiastically, “See that?  We beat Holland.  Magic.”  Then he put the scarf back in his bag and zipped it up again.  And nobody at school seemed to talk about Scotland, Argentina and the World Cup ever again.

 

Mind you, later that summer, I returned to Northern Ireland for a holiday.  People there seemed to view me as 100% Scottish now and they didn’t stop tearing the piss out of me about how crap Scotland had played in Argentina.

 

From twitter.com

 

But let’s be fair to Ally MacLeod, who died in 2004.  In popular Scottish mythology he’s often depicted as a vainglorious balloon, bragging that his team would win the World Cup, and then win the next World Cup, and probably the Ryder Cup, the Stanley Cup, the America’s Cup, the Ashes and the Tour de France as well.  But I’ve scoured the Internet and been unable to find most of the hyperbolic quotes that I’ve heard attributed to him.  It’s fairer to say that he made a few tactless comments and exuded a lot of optimism, which the overheated imaginations of fans and journalists turned into mass hysteria.  In the dispirited environment of post-World Cup Scotland, though, nobody wanted to admit their own culpability and poor Ally became the scapegoat.

 

Anyway, if you can ignore the hubris and focus only on the football, Ally’s 1978 squad didn’t do that badly.  Yes, they had two duff games but they only lost one of those, and then they achieved a win against the eventual finalists.  If the cards had fallen differently elsewhere in their first-round group, they might have got through to the competition’s next stage; and, having had their wake-up call, performed better.  Other teams in other World Cups have done so with the same first-round record of one win, one draw and one defeat – including England.

 

Much has been blamed on that ill-fated World Cup campaign.  People have found significance in how it came shortly before the 1979 referendum on creating a devolved Scottish parliament, which died a death because of apathy.  The Scottish public voted for the parliament, but not in sufficiently high numbers.  It’s tempting to join those two dots, but I’m inclined to blame this collapse in Scottish political willpower at the end of the decade on factors a lot more complex than Ally MacLeod bullshitting us a bit about football in 1978.

 

One thing that can be attributed to 1978 is the evolution of the Scotland football team’s travelling support, the Tartan Army.  Thanks to the bitter lessons learnt then, modern Scotland fans have dumped any belligerent, nationalistic sense of expectation and have gone about the (often thankless) task of supporting Scotland with humour, irony, self-deprecation and a determination to have a good time no matter how bad the results.  As a result, they’re now one of the most popular sets of fans in the world.

 

Actually, when Scotland played England several years ago at Wembley, I saw a picture of some Scottish fans posing in Trafalgar Square with a life-sized cut-out of Ally MacLeod they’d brought along.   That made me smile.  With his erratic management skills and over-exuberant PR skills, the daft bugger put us through the wringer in 1978.  But it’s nice to know his spirit still gets invited to the party.

 

From the Guardian / © Dan Kitwood, Getty Images

© Daily Record