Argentina 78: a reappraisal

[Mark Connolly]

Joe Jordan wouldn't be anywhere near Scotland's Top 100 players of all time.

[nate]

16 hours ago, craigkillie said:

Games in 1974 are irrelevant (except when it's how teams performed at the 1974 World Cup) but the 1975 Copa America is hugely relevant.

Yes, but for reasons of player availability, not chronology. Only 3 of our 74 squad were regular starters at WC 78. Many significant players from 74 (our best ever team IMO) didn’t make it. Bremner, Hay, Lorimer, Holton, McGrain, Morgan and umpteen others…they were all absent for one reason or another. Given the upheaval in personnel, I think it’s reasonable to claim the 74 campaign is irrelevant as a reliable indicator of how we were likely to fare in Argentina. There were far more reliable indicators out there.

Conversely, Peru benefitted from continuity of selection. Half their 75 Copa America winning squad were still intact come 78. Crucially (for them, not us) this included 3 of the most iconic players in Peruvian football folklore: captain Chumpitaz, talisman Cubillas and the hare like Oblitas. The importance of those first two guys in particular cannot be overstated. They are generally regarded to have been two of the best ever players to emerge from that continent ( Brazil & Argentina aside).

I think it was Asa Hartford who subsequently claimed to have been surprised, if not astonished, by the pace and movement of the Peruvians. They were faster and fitter than us. Their passing was more precise. They were less wasteful in front of goal. In other words, they were better than us. At a pinch you could argue the margin of victory flattered them a bit, given our penalty miss, but they unquestionably deserved the points on the day.

But hang on a minute! Didn’t the Scottish narrative insist they were a ragbag of old blokes past their best? They were nothing of the sort. The average age of Peru’s squad (around 26) was LESS than the average age of our squad. That’s another myth debunked. 1978 is full of them.

The irony about 78 is that for all the off-field malarkey it remains one of our most statistically impressive showings at a major tournament. Only Germany 74 betters it.

[Ken Deans]

Danny McGrain and big Gordon being out didn't help us at all and we ended up with Stuart Kennedy at full back. Peru were eminently beatable although it would have been more likely had Ally picked his best team from the off. Iran game a complete disaster.  Not knowing that Peru's Cubillas was good at free kicks was just ludicrous. Also the SFA organisation for that tournament was laughable.

 

What hurt the most was that we battered Holland and that team would have done alright latter stages

[Thane of Cawdor]

15 hours ago, Insert Amusing Pseudonym said:

Right, so our 9th best goalkeeper should be in the top 100 in the interests of fairness?

Come on

No, I didn't mean that, I just expressed it badly. It's in the nature of football fans to admire attacking midfield players and forwards. You'd take a huge bite out of the top hundred before anyone started thinking about full backs, for example.  Obviously would not be the case today where we have two possible world-class candidates at left back. 

[Marlow]

6 hours ago, Ken Deans said:

Danny McGrain and big Gordon being out didn't help us at all and we ended up with Stuart Kennedy at full back. Peru were eminently beatable although it would have been more likely had Ally picked his best team from the off. Iran game a complete disaster.  Not knowing that Peru's Cubillas was good at free kicks was just ludicrous. Also the SFA organisation for that tournament was laughable.

 

What hurt the most was that we battered Holland and that team would have done alright latter stages

I think one of Ally McLeod's MANY problems was that he couldn't actually pick what would have struck him as his best team for the first match: the numbers indicate he had planned to kick off with:

1 Rough

2 Jardine RB (injured) replaced by Stuart Kennedy

3 Donnachie LB (suspended) replaced by Martin Buchan playing his only game ever at left back

4 Buchan CB (played out of position) replaced by Kenny Burns

5 McQueen CB  (injured) replaced by Tam Forsyth

6 Rioch (pretty certain he was not fully fit for the first game)

7 Masson

8 Dalglish

9 Jordan

10 Hartford

11 Johnston

 

Best team available for the Peru game and considering fitness might have been:

 

Blyth

Kennedy

Buchan

Forsyth

Burns

Souness

Gemmill

Dalglish

Jordan

Hartford

Robertson (though he was poor against Iran)

 

 

 

 

[BFTD]

6 hours ago, Ken Deans said:

Also the SFA organisation for that tournament was laughable.

Sorry to harp on this, but check out the nick of the blazers who sent us to the 1954 tournament. Competence doesn't seem to have been a consideration!

Anyway, having read the latest posts on this topic, all I can think about is who's be our ninth-best keeper of all time  

[Monkey Tennis]

It's a good thread this.

Some interesting perspectives.

[Lurkst]

2 hours ago, Marlow said:

I think one of Ally McLeod's MANY problems was that he couldn't actually pick what would have struck him as his best team for the first match: the numbers indicate he had planned to kick off with:

1 Rough

2 Jardine RB (injured) replaced by Stuart Kennedy

3 Donnachie LB (suspended) replaced by Martin Buchan playing his only game ever at left back

4 Buchan CB (played out of position) replaced by Kenny Burns

5 McQueen CB  (injured) replaced by Tam Forsyth

6 Rioch (pretty certain he was not fully fit for the first game)

7 Masson

8 Dalglish

9 Jordan

10 Hartford

11 Johnston

 

Best team available for the Peru game and considering fitness might have been:

 

Blyth

Kennedy

Buchan

Forsyth

Burns

Souness

Gemmill

Dalglish

Jordan

Hartford

Robertson (though he was poor against Iran)

Given how stretched we were at the back, if only Craig Brown could have advised him from the future and gone 5-3-2, leaving out Robertson and playing Derek Johnstone as a third centre half.

 

[Monkey Tennis]

1 hour ago, Lurkst said:

Given how stretched we were at the back, if only Craig Brown could have advised him from the future and gone 5-3-2, leaving out Robertson and playing Derek Johnstone as a third centre half.

 

Derek Johnstone himself has a theory that he dented his chances of getting fielded up front by telling McLeod he could fill in at centre half if needed.  Apparently, the offer wasn't that well received and he thinks it helped keep him out altogether by planting some doubt in the manager's mind.

Obviously though, you need to factor in that the person saying it is Derek Johnstone.

[Thane of Cawdor]

3 hours ago, BFTD said:

Sorry to harp on this, but check out the nick of the blazers who sent us to the 1954 tournament. Competence doesn't seem to have been a consideration!

Anyway, having read the latest posts on this topic, all I can think about is who's be our ninth-best keeper of all time  

Probably Frank Haffey.

[Insert Amusing Pseudonym]

8 hours ago, Thane of Cawdor said:

No, I didn't mean that, I just expressed it badly. It's in the nature of football fans to admire attacking midfield players and forwards. You'd take a huge bite out of the top hundred before anyone started thinking about full backs, for example.  Obviously would not be the case today where we have two possible world-class candidates at left back. 

That would potentially be true if the top 50 hadn't been full of defenders and goalies.  If anything attacking players were the ones underrepresented.

There was some recency bias, but I'm not having that whatever criteria you choose wouldn't have a lot of the 78 squad in a top 100

[nate]

On 29/11/2021 at 21:13, Thane of Cawdor said:

 

This was the Scottish squad in 1978. It would take some degree of hubris to believe that these guys could win a World Cup. All decent players at club level, but Souness and Dalglish the only two approaching world class. Those two would be the only candidates from that squad to be anywhere near the 100 best Scotland internationals of all time.

The mad hype at the time was as much the gallus swagger of 'here's tae us, wha's like us' as any genuine belief that we would win the World Cup.

Scotland's World Cup squad 1978

 

                                  D.O.B.        CLUB                       WC
      1 GK Alan Rough             25 Nov 1951   Partick Thistle
      2 DF Sandy Jardine          31 Dec 1948   Glasgow Rangers            1974
      3 DF William Donachie       05 Oct 1951   Manchester City (ENG)      1974
      4 DF Martin Buchan          06 Mar 1949   Manchester United (ENG)    1974
      5 DF Gordon McQueen         26 Jun 1952   Manchester United (ENG)    1974
      6 MD Bruce Rioch            06 Sep 1947   Derby County (ENG)
      7 MD Don Masson             26 Aug 1949   Notts County (ENG)
      8 FW Kenny Dalglish         04 Mar 1951   Liverpool (ENG)            1974
      9 FW Joe Jordan             15 Dec 1951   Manchester United (ENG)    1974
     10 MD Asa Hartford           24 Oct 1950   Manchester City (ENG)
     11 MD Willie Johnston        19 Dec 1946   West Bromwich Albion (ENG)
     12 GK Jim Blyth              02 Feb 1955   Coventry City (ENG)
     13 DF Stuart Kennedy         31 May 1953   Aberdeen
     14 DF Thomas Forsyth         23 Jan 1949   Glasgow Rangers
     15 MD Archie Gemmill         24 Mar 1947   Nottingham Forest (ENG)
     16 FW Lou Macari             07 Jun 1949   Manchester United (ENG)
     17 FW Derek Johnstone        04 Nov 1953   Glasgow Rangers
     18 MD Graeme Souness         06 May 1953   Liverpool (ENG)
     19 FW John Robertson         20 Jan 1953   Nottingham Forest (ENG)
     20 GK Bobby Clark            26 Sep 1945   Aberdeen
     21 FW Joe Harper             11 Jan 1948   Aberdeen
     22 DF Kenny Burns            23 Sep 1953   Nottingham Forest (ENG)

 

 

 

 

That’s a 5.5 out of 10 squad. 6 if we’re being generous. In the context of top level international football it’s crammed with honest-to-goodness triers, augmented by a handful of players that were better than the prevailing average. Those claiming the squad had every right to believe they’d be among the medals should ask themselves this: how many of them would have gotten a game for either of the two teams that actually WERE among the medals?
Souness? In 78 he was an emerging talent, regarded as nothing more than a competent and combative midfielder, but hardly of major significance. That’s why he’d only won about half a dozen caps - a good chunk of them in try-out Friendlies- in the years before 78. Souness won the vast majority of his caps in 80s. He’d spent most of the pre- Argentina period beavering away at mediocre Middlesbrough. I recall Ally McLeod being unimpressed by Souness’ relocation to Australian league football about a year before Argentina (haven’t checked it but I suspect this relocation was one of those short-term job-cum-holiday junkets). Souness had only arrived at Liverpool about 6 months prior to the WC. Yes, he collected a European Cup medal that same year which emphatically means he was a good player. But he wasn’t yet a great one.

Dalglish? Magnificent club player. Obviously. But his Scotland form was notoriously erratic. That’s not because he was unpatriotic or had more important things on his mind. He was simply confronted with better opponents at International level than he was confronted with domestically. Veteran TA used to joke that if Dalglish could wear his Liverpool top playing for Scotland we’d be world beaters. It’s an exaggeration, but you get the point.

Some continue to claim that our victory v Holland is proof that we could indeed have been among the medals, given a bit more luck or preparation or feet-on-the-ground realism. It’s cockeyed logic. Any World Cup entrant can beat any other World Cup entrant on a given day. World Cup lore is full of one-hit wonders (Senegal,North Korea,Algeria,you name em). But you’ll notice none of them ever go the distance and actually do end up “among the medals”. Raising your game for a one-off is a very different business from raising your game 6 or 7 times in a month. The Holland win brought momentary cheer to the nation and we’re very grateful for it happening. Any other interpretation of it is wishful thinking.

*** Although no world beater himself, I always found Asa Hartford easy on the eye and a bit underrated. Great passer of the ball and industrious too. Check out his contribution to the Wembley “goal-posts” win in 77. I think the full match is still up on YouTube.
 

[Ewan8472]

On 29/11/2021 at 09:36, nate said:

You’re being silly now. Luck is an imponderable. It comes, it goes. You don’t win international tournaments without a bit of it, because of the number of games required in doing so. And seldom do middle-ranking nations like Scotland qualify for major tournaments without a bit of it too, whether by dint of dodgy refereeing, unforeseen late winners or whatever.

What is “terribly revealing” is your inability to accept that Peru were a better team than us, despite the historical facts staring you in the face. That’s why they were seeded above us and that’s why they won the Group. Simple. Facts trump opinions. I suggest you remove your head from the sand and stop deluding yourself with the notion that our 78 squad was better than it actually was (and ultimately proved to be). They were a bunch of decent international players but no more than that, propelled into an extremely tough WC Group. I think they did rather well down there, given the squad’s limitations.

You are forgetting about the drugs scandal !

[Marlow]

Some really great posts here. 

I really, really recommend Graham McColl's book "78: How a Nation Lost the World Cup" as the best set of insights into that campaign ever assembled, although the quality of some of the analysis on this thread is just as good.

I still think 1982 was, in a very different way, a disappointment: I think Stein had a better squad than any other Scotland manager in a World Cup (though Ormond came closest to a best defined team of 11) but they did not do as well as they could have due to selection decisions and questionable man management, legend though he was. I'd actually like to read a book dedicated to that World Cup campaign (there's one good one about 74 and two about 78). Archie MacPherson has a very good chapter on it in his "Adventures in the Golden Age" but I'd love to know more.

 

 

 

[nate]

On 01/12/2021 at 21:15, Ewan8472 said:

You are forgetting about the drugs scandal !

Ah, the “drugs scandal”. How can we forget? But it needs a bit of perspective. Although without doubt a stain on our good name, how much did it actually affect our performances? It occurred after the Peru match so we can say with absolute certainty it had no bearing on that particular outcome. If it caused some kind of deep collective psychological wound among the squad then it healed suspiciously quickly; 4 days after Iran we were beating the second best team in the tournament.

Willie Johnston was poorly advised by a bungling SFA, but no way were these hay fever pills the “performance enhancing” stimulants they were made out to be. If anything they were performance de-hancing anti-stimulants: Peru was - by common consensus and by the player’s own admission - his worst ever in a Scotland shirt. Some stimulant, eh?

 

[Ewan8472]

On 30/11/2021 at 17:11, Marlow said:

I think one of Ally McLeod's MANY problems was that he couldn't actually pick what would have struck him as his best team for the first match: the numbers indicate he had planned to kick off with:

1 Rough

2 Jardine RB (injured) replaced by Stuart Kennedy

3 Donnachie LB (suspended) replaced by Martin Buchan playing his only game ever at left back

4 Buchan CB (played out of position) replaced by Kenny Burns

5 McQueen CB  (injured) replaced by Tam Forsyth

6 Rioch (pretty certain he was not fully fit for the first game)

7 Masson

8 Dalglish

9 Jordan

10 Hartford

11 Johnston

 

Best team available for the Peru game and considering fitness might have been:

 

Blyth

Kennedy

Buchan

Forsyth

Burns

Souness

Gemmill

Dalglish

Jordan

Hartford

Robertson (though he was poor against Iran)

 

 

 

 

Still no natural left full back. It is worse than I remembered !

[Ewan8472]

2 hours ago, nate said:

Ah, the “drugs scandal”. How can we forget? But it needs a bit of perspective. Although without doubt a stain on our good name, how much did it actually affect our performances? It occurred after the Peru match so we can say with absolute certainty it had no bearing on that particular outcome. If it caused some kind of deep collective psychological wound among the squad then it healed suspiciously quickly; 4 days after Iran we were beating the second best team in the tournament.

Willie Johnston was poorly advised by a bungling SFA, but no way were these hay fever pills the “performance enhancing” stimulants they were made out to be. If anything they were performance de-hancing anti-stimulants: Peru was - by common consensus and by the player’s own admission - his worst ever in a Scotland shirt. Some stimulant, eh?

 

I was thinking about the harassment by the media , and Macari ( ? ) saying he had also taken the pills

[Ewan8472]

2 hours ago, nate said:

Ah, the “drugs scandal”. How can we forget? But it needs a bit of perspective. Although without doubt a stain on our good name, how much did it actually affect our performances? It occurred after the Peru match so we can say with absolute certainty it had no bearing on that particular outcome. If it caused some kind of deep collective psychological wound among the squad then it healed suspiciously quickly; 4 days after Iran we were beating the second best team in the tournament.

Willie Johnston was poorly advised by a bungling SFA, but no way were these hay fever pills the “performance enhancing” stimulants they were made out to be. If anything they were performance de-hancing anti-stimulants: Peru was - by common consensus and by the player’s own admission - his worst ever in a Scotland shirt. Some stimulant, eh?

 

No pressure v. the Dutch.

Here we go !

 

[Ewan8472]

21 hours ago, Marlow said:

Some really great posts here. 

I really, really recommend Graham McColl's book "78: How a Nation Lost the World Cup" as the best set of insights into that campaign ever assembled, although the quality of some of the analysis on this thread is just as good.

I still think 1982 was, in a very different way, a disappointment: I think Stein had a better squad than any other Scotland manager in a World Cup (though Ormond came closest to a best defined team of 11) but they did not do as well as they could have due to selection decisions and questionable man management, legend though he was. I'd actually like to read a book dedicated to that World Cup campaign (there's one good one about 74 and two about 78). Archie MacPherson has a very good chapter on it in his "Adventures in the Golden Age" but I'd love to know more.

 

 

 

1982 - Could you elaborate on the questionable man management please ?

Anything to do with H*ns*n ?

I remember Davie Proven in his column saying , iirc , Jock Stein was " intimidated " by S**n*ss

I remember the defence was poor against N.Z. and continued from there.

 

Going back to 1978 ( no , no ! ) Stuart Kennedy has some things to say about squad " unity "

Burns told him , Stuart , directly he did not think he was any good.

Rioch and senior players expected the " junior " players to get them their drinks

Archie was not popular !!!

 

 

[Hampden Diehard]

It was a great time to be a Scotland fan. And then the football started.....

I reckon we peaked in 77 and we had shaded off.

The drugs thing made it so much more of a disaster and the press, slabbering all over the team and Ally beforehand, were unrestrained in their criticism. The dirt-digging features writers went Tonto and couldn't believe their luck.

I don't think we'll ever really get over it.