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World Cup Memories – Jim remembers Scotland’s 1974 campaign

Ahead of the Men’s Football World Cup starting later this week, we asked some of our team to share their memories of the globe’s biggest football competition.

In the first of our series, and ahead of Scotland’s return to the World Cup, Jim Purvis, one of our Community Club Co-Ordinators in Scotland, reflects on the Tartan Army being the Home Nation to make the 1974 World Cup after having to watch England succeed 1966 and make the quarter-finals in 1970 in Mexico.

Excited for 1974

The 1974 World Cup was the tournament to finally get excited about in Scotland. All the things that I knew about the World Cups were about England, as we hadn’t qualified in either 1966 or 1970.

I don’t want to be xenophobic about it, but we’d all lived with England winning and they reached the knockouts in Mexico too, so to be the only ‘home nation’ to qualify for the finals in West Germany was something to cherish.

I still have my Esso coin collection from the 1970 tournament up in the loft. You’d get a coin with a player’s face on it every time you bought a couple of gallons of petrol, but my father didn’t have a car! So, he and I cadged all these coins from different people that we knew who drove. And I’ve got the full collection upstairs.

Qualifying for 1974 and no England!

1974 was the second World Cup I truly remember and that it was something that I was excited about. I was 12 at the time and I remember being at the game when Scotland qualified for the finals.

Joe Jordan scored a diving header to beat Czechoslovakia 2-1 at Hampden. I was there with my father - 26th of September 1973 - a date that will always live with me.

A few weeks later, on the 17th of October 1973, England only had to beat Poland at Wembley to qualify for the 1974 World Cup.

Poland’s goalkeeper was a guy called Jan Tomaszewski, who Brian Clough had described a couple of weeks earlier as a circus clown in gloves. Now, Clough was right about most things about football, but he was completely wrong about this because Tomaszewski performed miracles at Wembley. England could only manage a draw and it wasn’t enough to qualify.

The excitement and delirium caused by Scotland qualifying at the end of September was heightened further by England’s failure to qualify in October!

Taking on Zaire and Brazil

There was a lot of build up over the intervening six or nine months to the tournament - a lot of excitement.

We were just quietly confident. Hindsight has told us that the 1974 team were probably a better group than the 1978 squad, where Ally McLeod famously told us all that we were possibly going to win the World Cup.

So, Scotland play Zaire in the first game. I remember the day of the first game. I had been playing golf with my school at Troon on an absolutely beautiful day, and got home just in time to see the start of this game. I believe Zaire, who are now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo, were the first ever Sub-Saharan African team to qualify for the World Cup.

Again, and in hindsight, we all believed that they were completely naïve, that they knew nothing about football and we would beat them quite easily. When I’ve looked at it afterwards, I find that they won the African Cup of Nations in 1974 and qualified for the World Cup. So, they were no mugs at all.

They were being portrayed afterwards as being naive and innocents abroad, basically. Scotland beat them 2-0, with both goals scored in the first half and then we were accused later of sort of sitting back and being quite happy with the 2-0. And as you’ll hear later, that was said to be their downfall.

I was happy enough with the start before we played Brazil next, who were the World Cup holders. In fairness, they weren’t the World Cup winning-team as four years previously, but they still had Rivellino and umpteen others in their team.

Arguably Scotland probably outplayed them in a nil-nil draw, where famously Billy Bremner apparently missed a sitter from five yards. But if you look at the footage of it afterwards you find that it kind of bounced off his leg and it wasn’t really his fault.

That’s probably the best result Scotland has ever had against Brazil. I think we’ve drawn with them one other time - but who wouldn’t be happy to draw 0-0 with the world champions!

The final group game…but the damage was done

The final game was against Yugoslavia and in the meantime, they had beaten Zaire 9-0.

Scotland drew with Yugoslavia in the last game, while Brazil ended up beating Zaire 3-0 which meant Scotland failed to qualify out of the group to the next round. Back then, from the group stage, the top two of the group of four would qualify and Scotland failed to qualify by one goal difference.

It was a glorious defeat - Scotland undefeated but out. Even the team that won it, which was West Germany, had been beaten by East Germany in the group stages. And of course, the Netherlands who were the beaten finalists had their only defeat in the final.

But Scotland played three, only conceding one goal and were undefeated but came home after the group stage to a tumultuous reception at Glasgow Airport when they flew in because they were heroes.

A lot of people that I’ve spoken to over the years believe that the Scotland squad for 1974 was actually a better team than the 1978 team, who it was suggested were slightly over the hill by the time they got to that World Cup.

The Zarie team and that game against Yugoslavia

As I said before, in the media Zaire were probably portrayed as being minnows and no-hopers. Again, looking at it afterwards, it transpires that Zaire weren’t the innocents, if you like, they weren’t the poor down-trodden African team that everybody had them as.

But I remember there was an incident in the Brazil game where a free kick had been given, the referee blows his whistle and a Zairian ran out over the wall and kicked the ball up the park. This was portrayed at the time as being evidence of their naivety. However, the guy who did that subsequently said he knew exactly what he was doing.

Zaire were also coached by a Yugoslav during the tournament, so there was immediately a suggestion that they would lie down to Yugoslavia and the 9-0 result was actually the crucial game.

It’s true that we didn’t score enough goals against Zaire, but there was hell of a lot more going on behind the scenes, particularly in that Yugoslavian 9-0 victory.

The Zairian players wouldn’t be paid and the goalkeeper was substituted at some point in that 9-0 defeat - for a goalkeeper who was about 5 foot 4 tall!  There were all sorts of things going on in that game that I wasn’t even frankly aware of until recently – so that may have been Scotland’s undoing as well as they’re own efforts against Zaire!