My wife and I have a made-up word to describe when things go catastrophically wrong and, being personally somewhat absent-minded and accident-prone, she gets to use it a lot around me. That word is "Hailcrang!" and watching this wonderful BBC Scotland documentary on the Scottish national football team's disastrous showing at the 1978 football World Cup, I can think of no more suitable word to sum up the whole experience.
I'm actually writing while this year's tournament is raging on and of course my team isn't amongst their number. In fact they haven't qualified for the Finals since 1998 while our biggest national rivals England of course are there with a favourite's chance to win, which would leave me inconsolable if they did.
But back in 1978, England nor any other of the home nations qualified for Argentina, all bar Scotland who really did look as if they had a fine team full of great players, names like Dalglish, Souness, Jordan and many more. We also had an ebullient manager, the irrepressible Ally McLeod who innocently and naively stoked the flames of expectation by talking up our chances of actually winning the thing. A Glasgow comedian, Andy Cameron even scored a U. K. top 10 hit with his novelty rallying-call "Ally's Tartan Army" (tag-line - "And we'll really shake them up, when we lift the World Cup!") and the team was given an open-bus send off at the national stadium, before they even left the country! Of course, right after them flocked hordes of Scotland fans, some of whose trips took weeks to get there and back, while elsewhere there's a great story of a bunch of outlying islanders themselves digging new television cables under the ground just to be able to watch the Scotland games on the box.
Well, that's when it all went hailcrang for the team. The team's living accommodation and training facilities were dreadful and MacLeod hadn't even bothered to watch any of his opponents in advance of the games.
What could go right?
And sure enough, a humbling defeat by Peru and then a shambolic display against minnows Iran left them with a mountain to climb, i.e. To qualify we had to beat the fancied Netherlands by three clear goals. Plus, of course in the background, there was the drug-taking scandal of winger Willie Johnston, sent home in a blaze of bad publicity for taking a banned substance for hay fever.
Well, do the boys not come out in Cordoba against the Dutch and play a stormer, at one point, thanks to wee Archie Gemmill's wonder-goal going 3-1 up and raising a nation's hopes until just a few minutes later Dutch forward Johnny Rep smashed in a screamer from 30 yards to bring us all back to earth. Legend has it he was so far out that MacLeod was heard to chide aloud, "Go on, hit it!" Maybe Rep heard him!
With a mass of contemporary news coverage on the manager, his team and the fans (oh, the fashions and the hairstyles - and that's just the men!), it was fantastic and at the same time traumatic to relive the events of that cruellest of summers. My favourite bit was the inspired mock-up of Scotland actually going on to win the trophy and there was also a nice story of a Scottish fan reuniting years later in Scotland with an Argentinian girl he first met there and their marrying soon afterwards.
It definitely helps if you're Scottish to give you that enormous sense of dashed anticipation and misplaced hubris on show here, but in truth the story I'm sure has universal relevance to any football fan who dares to dream that their wee team has even the slightest chance of success.
It can't be coincidence that the popular Lloyd-Webber and Rice musical "Evita" was out at the time with its mournful hit song "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" everywhere you listened. I wonder if its writers had a premonition of what was awaiting Scotland that mad summer in South America when they wrote it?
