Scotland’s most famous win... and last hurrah of flawed genius Baxter
IT was 50 years ago today that Scotland enjoyed their most famous victory as they vanquished world champions England at Wembley. The memory of that 3-2 triumph still endures, as do the images of the mercurial Jim Baxter nonchalantly doing keepy-uppies as the game wore on. However, for the great Scot, it was to be perhaps the last time he would be seen at his swashbuckling best. Here, in an extract from his book, Flawed Genius: Scottish Football’s Self Destructive Mavericks, Sportmail’s Chief Football Writer Stephen McGowan reflects on that final day in the sun...
IT remains an iconic image; a grainy snapshot of a gloriously black and white past. On Saturday, April 15, 1967, Scotland’s national team overcame the world champions, England, under the shadow of Wembley’s old Twin Towers.
They did so playing beautiful, inventive football. And, in the gleeful words of the late James Curran Baxter, midfielder extraordinaire, by ‘extracting the urine’.
As Baxter observed before his death at the age of 61 in April 2001, victory in itself was never enough. ‘I wanted to show the English how easily we could beat them,’ he said. ‘The manner of winning meant a lot to me.’
Recorded in his many obituaries was the suggestion that the hero of the hour sat reading the
Sporting Post in the dressing room until 10 minutes before kick-off.
Invited by management to do some warm-up exercises, the wayward star stretched out his right leg and then his left, all the while his eyes remaining fixed on the newspaper. ‘That’s me warmed up,’ he announced.
Here was a man with the capacity to make a day become one hell of a long night. Every moment, be it with a ball at his feet, a drink in hand, tearing up a betting slip or holding court in the St Enoch Hotel, was for the living.
And the less effort required to live it, the more rewarding the moment. On the pitch, he brimmed with industrial quantities of vision and imagination, if not defensive graft.
The instant Baxter juggled the ball in the air, socks around the ankles and shirt half hanging out in trademark fashion that fateful 1967 day, he created a memory which has acquired a legend of its own in the Scots psyche. What few realise, however, is that Wembley was akin to a last stand, the football death throes of a fading emperor.
The drinking and socialising had spiralled out of control, exacting a heavy price in physical terms.
The outline of greatness was diminishing amid a lifestyle of hedonistic chaos. In the home of Scotland’s Auld Enemy, fortified by a pre-match nip of whisky, his feet danced their last great waltz. The demise had already begun. ‘Jim was between Sunderland and Nottingham Forest when he played at Wembley and his reputation went before him,’ recalls Rodger Baillie, the ghost-writer of Baxter’s lucrative 1960s Sunday Mirror column and best man at his wedding.
‘Wembley was his last great hoorah.’
For some, Wembley 1967 remains the national team’s finest hourand-a-half. England had been 4/7 odds on favourites, Scotland no shorter than 4/1.
But not everyone shared in the joie de vivre of Scotland’s No 6.
‘Jim wanted to play to the crowd at 3–1 when we might have scored five or six,’ Denis Law recalls.
‘When I screamed, “Let’s give them a doing!” Jim would smile that infuriating smile of his and reply, “Naw, let’s take the p*** out of them”. But he was magnificent that day, and you could never stay angry with him for long.’
Sir Alf Ramsay’s England team had captured the Jules Rimet trophy in sterile fashion in the summer of 1966.
The team’s lack of wingers and the dearth of any great flourish stood in stark contrast to Baxter’s fast and loose concept of how football should be played.
Like Law, the Manchester United striker who had suffered 11 months of triumphalist coverage in the media, this was some form of payback; a victory for style over
Just over two years after Baxter’s sublime chutzpah tormented England, the game was up
pragmatism. The epitome of the 1960s in a Scottish context, Baxter was the forerunner of George Best.
The only Caledonian celebrity with the profile and status to match Twiggy or the Kray Twins, pork-pie hats and snazzy ties were his calling card as the staid 1950s came to an end. He celebrated the Wembley victory by swaggering into Piccadilly’s Café Royale in the company of Law.
‘[That] was almost as much fun as playing England off the park,’ he would later recall. ‘There was this big, round table in the middle with 12 hairy-legged Highlanders sitting round it in kilts. Instead of a tablecloth, the table was covered in this huge swatch of lush Wembley turf. They had the kitty in the middle and their drinks all lined up on top.’
Yet, just weeks after his Indian summer at Wembley, Baxter’s Sunderland demise was triggered by an arrest in another ignominious episode. In an ill-fated and mildly bizarre venture, the FIFA-backed United States Soccer Association imported 12 overseas clubs to lend some short-term glamour by temporarily adopting the mantle of a state-side franchise. Sunderland became the Vancouver Royal Canadians for the summer, with Scottish clubs Hibernian (Toronto City), Dundee United (Dallas Tornado) and Aberdeen (Washington Whips) also paid $250,000 to grab a slice of the action.
In tow with his team-mate and cousin Bobby Kinnell, Baxter embarked upon a kamikaze regime of wild living during his stay in Canada. In Canada, where the touring footballers were expected to spread the word and serve as football missionaries, Baxter was charged with fighting, alongside Northern Irish team-mate John Parke. For Sunderland, it was the final straw.
Rampant indiscipline reached its apex at Nottingham Forest, where his stay might diplomatically be described as ill-starred. Manager Johnny Carey, it was said, never wanted Baxter but was overruled by his chairman Tony Wood. The experiment was short-lived. And so a decade of ever-declining performances and uncontainable laddishness, Baxter ended up back at Ibrox where, on his first day back, the midfielder offered manager Davie White, Scot Symon’s former assistant, a promise to grasp the chance afforded to him with both hands, despite reservations within the Rangers boardroom.
The phone duly rang in the manager’s office and a senior police officer reported an incident in Fife. ‘He was arrested hours after returning for drink driving,’ recalls Baillie. ‘And that set the tone for what was to follow.’
As friend and clubmate Willie Henderson recalls. ‘It wasn’t the Jimmy Baxter we all knew and loved. He was maybe playing out time by then. It’s hard to explain that, other than by saying that it’s always difficult to go back to a former club,’ he said.
‘You are inevitably going to be compared to the way you were the first time, but Jimmy was a bit older by the time he came back. And when you get older you’re not quite the same, so you can’t always turn back the clock.’
Baxter made just 22 appearances in his second spell. His final release from Ibrox would be delayed another four months, but a bitingly cold December day in the north-east in 1969, when Aberdeen were narrowly beaten, was the final swansong for Baxter.
Two years and seven months after his sublime chutzpah tormented the world champions at Wembley, the game was effectively up.