Grown men started found two Scotland bath wearing kilts
40-CHEER ANNIVERSARY
ride because he was one of us so we went out on to the pitch 90 minutes before kick-off. His first question was, ‘So Alan is this going to be another nightmare day for Scottish keepers?’
“I was gobsmacked but so was he by my reply. I said, ‘I hope not Bob but then again you must know all about that – you only got two caps.’ The interview never made the screen, funnily enough.”
Such smug, condescending talk pre-match was to be silenced when Gordon McQueen’s header put Scotland ahead two minutes before the break.
When Dalglish made it 2-0 on the hour mark it was no more than they deserved and in truth, Mike Channon’s late penalty did not reflect the dominance the Scots enjoyed in front of a 98,000 crowd – about three quarters of whom are reckoned to have been Scotland fans who by hook or by crook managed to populate huge pockets within the home support.
Come the final whistle though they weren’t content with just being deep behind enemy lines. Within seconds the pitch swarmed with jubilant punters.
McQueen said: “We were doing interviews down at the tunnel and we watched it on the monitors, the crossbar sagging and sagging and then breaking. There were no English left. They had all scarpered home. “There were a few of my pals from Kilbirnie about. Then my dad turned up. I was in the bath with a lager and a cigarette. He said, ‘Get that fag out!’ “That night I was staying in London and I was buzzing. I went back to the hotel for a quick sleep and woke up about 11. I had missed all the parties. “The invites were coming into a dookit downstairs – Sean Connery was having a party here and Rod Stewart was having a party there. I went for a walk and found a pub full of Scotland supporters.
“They saw me and went crazy. I had few beers and then went on my merry way.
“I got the train home the next morning. There were Scotland fans everywhere. They were asking me to sign bits of turf.
“I said, ‘I can’t sign turf, it’s impossible.’ They were going, ‘Just put your finger in it, big man, scratch it, do something.’ They all had these dollops of turf in their pockets. The boys hadn’t had much sleep.”
Four decades on who knows how many back gardens across Scotland still boast a surviving patch of enemy territory? But the tales and the memories certainly remain evergreen.