The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
World Cup heroes to zeros
A new BBC documentary examines the legacy of Scotland’s infamous journey to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina. Michael Alexander looks back on the South America campaign.
The start of the Russia 2018 World Cup on June 14 will be a stark reminder to Scottish football fans that 20 years have now passed since their national team last qualified for the finals of an international football competition.
Yet 40 years ago, “Ally’s Army” was riding high, with Scotland the only home nation to have qualified for the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.
Leading a team packed with star players and renowned for his contagious optimism, manager Ally MacLeod wasn’t alone in believing this was the best squad Scotland had ever produced and that this could be the year.
However, over eight days, the squad stumbled from disappointment to calamity – from poor results against so-called weaker teams, to a failed drugs test and a fans’ rebellion.
History records the 1978 campaign as amongst the most infamous.
Now four decades on, a new documentary – Scotland ’78: A Love Story – which airs on BBC One Scotland from 9pm to 10pm on Wednesday, asks whether the summer of 1978 was really that bad.
The documentary uses previously unseen footage, player recollections, and fans’ diaries and photos to chart the journey of the team and its followers on a footballing odyssey.
Amongst those featured is Willie Johnston, the former Rangers and West Brom player who grew up in Cardenden, Fife, who was sent home in disgrace after he tested positive for a banned stimulant following Scotland’s shock opening defeat to Peru.
He took two banned Reactivan tablets for “hay fever” and now, aged 71, tells how he feared he would be killed by armed guards who helped smuggle him out of the country.
He was driven away from the team hotel hidden under a blanket in the back of a vehicle. But when the guards came on the bus with guns and said: “Up, up, Johnstone. Up, up”, he was thinking: “This is it, they’ll take me to the end of the runway and shoot me”.
Former Rangers and Chelsea player Derek Johnstone, who grew up in Dundee’s Fintry, is also amongst those who share memories of the campaign.
Despite his scoring form in 1978, which secured him a place in the Scotland squad, he did not start any of the three matches that the Scots played against Peru, Iran or Holland.
Yet he recalls how getting to the finals was an achievement in itself. He said: “I came from a family of six brothers. For someone in the family to go and do something was fantastic.”
Perth-raised broadcaster and football fan Stuart Cosgrove puts the intense pre-tournament optimism of the 1978 campaign into the context of a time when many parts of Scotland were scarred with post-industrial decay and dereliction.
He said: “Here was Scotland which was still by and large seen by many people as a region of England – it didn’t have its own parliament.
“It didn’t have a sense of nationhood... there was the feeling that somehow we weren’t the complete kind of nation. Then along comes this mercurial, magical figure – Ally MacLeod!”
Newport-based broadcaster and football fan Billy Kay added: “We were a stateless nation. The Scotland national team was one of the few focuses that we had for our national identity.”
With the campaign ultimately ending in “glorious failure”, however, the documentary suggests the relatively poor turnout for the 1979 Scottish Assembly referendum may have resulted from Scotland “losing its selfbelief” after the disappointment of the Argentina campaign.
It could be argued the trend has gone the other way since with the national football team now a shadow of what it once was and Scotland’s national political identity, post-devolution, now more defined than ever.