‘I’d love to lose tag as the last Scot to score winning goal against England’ says Gough

Richard Gough would love to see his status as the last man to score a Hampden winner for Scotland against England erased this Saturday, writes Stephen Halliday.

But while hope springs eternal in the mind of the man who sent that famous header beyond Peter Shilton into the roof of the net all of 32 years ago, he fears nostalgia is likely to remain the only source of comfort for the Tartan Army.

Gough doesn’t particularly relish harking back to the “good old days” but the former Scotland captain has come to realise that, in the case of his generation, that’s exactly what they were. He recalled: “I was at Archie Knox’s 70th birthday party the other week and people like Sir Alex Ferguson, Walter Smith, Gordon Strachan and Willie Miller were there.

“Willie said to me that night that we always say Scottish football was better in our day, but that’s because it was. The facts show it. When we were playing around that time of beating England in 1985, the older guys in the game said it was better in the days of Jim Baxter and what have you.

“But those guys never qualified for a World Cup or European Championship when they played for Scotland. We qualified for three World Cups in a row when I played, so who was the better team?

“Willie and I were talking about that 1985 game against England at Hampden and how the game has changed since then. I remember we used to ask Graeme Souness to come back from midfield at times to give us a bit of protection. He would just turn around and say, ‘I’m a midfield player, you two do the defending’. This was a player who had won the European Cup three times. I’ve a great photo at home of that team, with guys like Steve Archibald, who was at Barcelona at the time. We had some really good players. In those days, there was no inferiority complex when we played England. We were used to playing against them at club level,