Prologue from '78: How Scotland Lost the World Cup

There did not appear to be a lot in common between Ally MacLeod and Prince Charles during the late 1970s. MacLeod, the Scotland manager, was a refined rabble-rouser whose infectious enthusiasm led thousands of people to follow in his wake; Charles, the heir to the British throne, had an uncertain, hesitant presence in public. Here was a privileged being desperate to find the common touch in the egalitarian, barrier-breaking seventies, but a young man seemingly without a clue how or where to start.

As part of Charles’s doomed attempt to seem more at ease with the masses, he had perfected the mannerism when meeting commoners of placing one hand half in and half out of a blazer pocket. It was a gesture towards informality employed by the prince when dropped into a throng of strangers during public engagements, but this attempt to appear casual only served to make the young Charles – smartly tailored and buffed to a pristine shine – look even more stuffy and stiff, and like just one more eccentric aristocrat in the age of the common man. It was not the type of gesture to be expected of Ally MacLeod, Scotland manager in 1978, a man of the people, loquacious, and the focus of roused Scots everywhere. Yet here was Ally, crown prince of populist pronouncements, just days away from what he had stated would be his finest hour, the Argentina World Cup, with not just one but both hands stuffed awkwardly in his blazer pockets and looking as uncomfortable as Prince Charles when confronted by a throng of northern factory workers.

The occasion was the staged send-off of the Scotland squad to the finals of that 1978 World Cup. The venue was Hampden Park. Thirty thousand people had assembled on the stadium’s ashen slopes that sun-blessed May evening to send off, in style, Ally and his team. It seemed as though it should have been all that Ally desired: the climax to months and months in which he had rallied the people of Scotland to get behind his cause. Yet those hands thrust in pockets betrayed a certain nervousness on the part of MacLeod as he ambled uncertainly along the red carpet laid out between serried ranks of pipers and majorettes. His smile appeared half fixed, half forced as he strolled bashfully forward from touchline to halfway line. He looked like a schoolboy summoned to the headmaster’s office; as if fighting a losing battle with bravado, yet apprehensive.

Perhaps Ally was beginning to think he had gone too far in promising the nation that his team would capture the World Cup. Perhaps he was looking one month into the future, attempting to envisage himself and his players parading the trophy back there at Hampden – with West Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Holland, France, Italy and Spain lying vanquished in their challenges for the prize – and finding that his imagination was failing him. Perhaps he was beginning to realise, in the face of this emotional show of support, how so many had truly taken his lightly-spun words to heart and the void that would result if he was unable to fulfil his pronouncements by scooping the ultimate prize in football.

That send-off was unprecedented; never before had thousands turned up at Hampden Park, without a ball in sight, simply to cheer footballers as they paraded in their suits. It had not been, contrary to popular belief, Ally MacLeod’s idea but the public embraced this ritual, which was a brainchild of the Scottish Football Association. MacLeod himself found it an emotional but embarrassing evening. ‘Ally didn’t want it,’ says John Hagart, the manager’s assistant, ‘because he thought it was too over the top, too much like show biz.’

The players had spent the afternoon relaxing at the North British hotel on George Square in Glasgow and the event at Hampden was to be the final staging post for the squad prior to their departure for Prestwick airport and embarkation on the flight to Argentina. Feelings were mixed among the footballers as to whether the send-off was a good idea. One or two thought it a magnificent prospect; others were neutral, a number were embarrassed by it and a few were contemplating whether to opt out of it altogether. On the night, they all participated but some of the waving to the crowd was forced.

At half past six that evening of 25 May, proceedings had begun with ten massed pipe bands taking to the field and the skirl of their pipes was accompanied by a swirl of majorettes. The dancing girls were followed, twenty minutes later, by Andy Cameron, the Glasgow comedian who had enjoyed a 1978 UK top ten hit with Ally’s Tartan Army; then at seven o’clock each of the twenty-two players, plus members of the backroom staff and management, were presented individually to the supporters before stepping on to an open-topped bus to lap the track twice, with the players engulfed in a twenty-feet-long flag of Argentina. All of this was broadcast live on Scottish Television. The fans, whose vocal muscle had done so much to guarantee the trip to Argentina, would see no football but that did not deter the SFA from charging them fifty pence for entry to the stand and thirty pence for the ground; this during an era when Scottish Premier Division football could be watched for eighty pence. The willingness of 30,000 Scots to pay these sums and roll up en masse at a time when no Scottish club side could regularly generate attendances of that size, was a sign that the natural order of things had been turned on its head.

It did not end there. The route from Hampden down through Ayrshire to Prestwick, just a quick run up the coast from MacLeod’s adopted home town of Ayr, was lined with thousands of well-wishers. One man was seen running from his bath, dripping wet, to watch the Scottish team bus as it passed. Fenwick Moor, normally deserted and desolate, was suddenly populated by cheering, waving individuals. Women swept to their back doors to wave tea towels. Every bridge had flags draped over it and was lined with people. Every field of every farm contained well-wishers speeding the squad on its way. The populaces of towns and villages a mile away from the dual carriageway that careers down through Ayrshire could be seen hanging out of their house windows, some even dangling babies in the air. ‘It was like D-Day,’ says Andy Roxburgh, then director of coaching at the SFA. There were an estimated 30,000 out on the streets in the environs of the small towns of Troon and Prestwick alone. Gordon McQueen, the Scotland centre-back, describes the scenes at Prestwick airport as reminiscent of Beatlemania.

Even as their plane took off the runway and into the air, there was no escaping the fervour. The beach at Prestwick was crammed with people waving to the aircraft as it began its ascent over the Firth of Clyde and into the atmosphere high above the Atlantic. Finally, the rugged Scottish coastline receded into the distance, those well-wishers became black dots on the beach, then faded out of sight and Argentina loomed ahead. Few of those on board that long night-flight to South America would return without deep scarring on their souls.