Fifty years ago this Friday afternoon, June 14, 1974, Scotland played its first match in a major international tournament on German soil and won.
That’s more important than it seems. Rewind the calendar to their first World Cup finals defeat to Austria and the national team has consistently faltered from its lines on opening night.
They have played in eight World Cups and reached the European Championship three times previously. There are 11 tournaments in total and they have only won their first game twice. The first was against the powerful Zaire, the second against New Zealand.
This is important because the opening skirmish of the soccer tournament sets the tone. Win and get the monkey off your back. Lose and the second game is like walking a tightrope blindfolded. One more slip and it could be curtains.
Scotland has never been very good at getting down to business. It’s never terribly good, period, to be honest. You don’t have to be one of Steve Clarke’s negative Normans to recognize the historical reality of the team’s record in major tournaments.
In total, the men’s team has played 32 games in World Cups and European Championships and only won six of them. A win rate of 18.75 percent is woeful and too often the die is cast on opening night.
Coach Steve Clarke has been conveying his message to his Scottish players.
The Scottish players take their final steps before the first game on Friday night.
The Scots have been well received in Germany, but they need to convert games into points.
Many will tell you that the game against Germany doesn’t matter much. Clarke wants four points from three games and that is a perfectly achievable goal against Switzerland and Hungary, even if his team loses the first game.
That attitude is fine if Scotland is happy to be the nation that puts games before points. If they are just happy to be there and pose for selfies on the pitch, what happens in Munich is irrelevant.
If there is a real ambition to reach the second phase of a major international tournament for the first time, they should be clear about the importance of picking up a point, at least, at the Allianz Arena. Grading becomes much easier if they do.
Argentina 1978 was the height of failures on opening night. Joe Jordan scored the first goal against a Peruvian team that coach Ally MacLeod hadn’t bothered to see in person.
Don Masson missed a penalty to make it 2-0 and the brilliant Teófilo Cubillas took the game by the neck as Peru won 3-1. A team with a chance to win the World Cup returned to a hotel with no water in the pool and, if the Tartan Army had caught them that night, they would have been thrown out anyway.
Mexico ’86 brought an opening night with a loss to Denmark. And when Scots of a certain age wake up sweating in the middle of the night, it has nothing to do with the onset of middle age. They are having nightmares about that loss against Costa Rica in the first game of Italia ’90.
Tom Boyd’s own goal against Brazil in France ’98 summed up what happens the moment the curtain goes up and the spotlight goes down. Scots everywhere are programmed to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
The last time Scotland played the opening match of a finals, a Tom Boyd own goal gave finalists Brazil a 2-1 victory at France 98.
It’s illogical to judge the current team by that standard. If failure were an inherited condition, Clarke’s team would never have won that penalty shootout in Serbia in 2020. They would not have won their first five games in qualifying. They would never have gone to Cyprus and scored three goals in the first half. First of all, they would have found a way to ruin his hopes of reaching Germany.
Scotland’s mental scars have nothing to do with these players, it’s all down to fans of a certain generation.
Some of us grew up accepting that bricks had a mishap. Even when they won the first match, another calamity was around the corner.
When Kenny Dalglish, Joe Jordan and Denis Law played against Zaire in 1974, Willie Ormond couldn’t have mustered more firepower if he had brought Mons Meg onto the Dortmund pitch. All they had to show for it in the end were two goals from Peter Lorimer and Jordan.
The urban myth says that the Scots took their foot off the accelerator against a team that had no hope. They emerged from the World Cup undefeated after Yugoslavia scored nine goals against the same opponents. There was more than that.
When money disappeared from Zaire’s players’ fund, a strike was averted when FIFA intervened. The African champions were placed under house arrest by their own security forces, smoked and drank more than they should, and lost 3-0 to Yugoslavia at home. 20 minutes earlier, the coach replaced his starting goalie with a guy who was 5-foot-4. He shipped another six goals and Scotland went down on goal difference.
Even the best dark blue team in memory did not fare better. By the time Spain 82 arrived, Alan Hansen, Graeme Souness, Dalglish and John Robertson had already amassed a brilliant array of European Cup winners’ medals between them. They were the Abba teams from Scotland.
Despite having beaten New Zealand by five goals in the first match, calamity occurred in the last match against the Soviet Union and they lost on goal difference. Again.
If there is a fatalistic fatalism among older fans, then it is based on cold, hard experience. Television, telephone and penicillin aside, Scotland are more inventive when it comes to finding new ways to ruin qualification for the knockout stages of an international tournament.
It’s not really fair to accuse Andy Robertson and Co. While the last Euros were disappointing, the events of Argentina 1978 or France 1998 are as relevant to Billy Gilmour or Scott McTominay as the Cuban missile crisis or the assassination of JFK. . All that anguish belongs to generations like mine, who grew up fearing the worst and, more often than not, proved to be astute judges.
The Scots will race on Friday night at the impressive Allianz Arena, home of Bayern Munich
Despite past PTSD, nothing beats the hope and excitement of Scotland in another finals tournament. A country polarized by club football, politics and religion is getting a little closer for at least a fortnight.
The only thing worse than being mocked is being ignored. For too long the national football team was mediocre and on nights like this the Scots throw off the cloak of invisibility and feel relevant again.
Even if it is only for one night, this match against Germany places the national team front, left and center of Planet Football for the first time in years and, for the tens of thousands of fans gathering in Munich, it is a nice place to be.
A new generation of players has the opportunity to confound negative Normans everywhere by writing a new positive chapter in the history of the national team.
If the 50th anniversary of the last significant victory on German soil is not an omen, then God knows what is.