I Wish It Could Be...
Looking forward to Christmas? Already?
Saturday July 3 1976
As has become something of a tradition, nothing happened this week:
Looking at the summer of 1976 from a vantage point where football news continues regardless of games being played (I’m thinking more of last summer than of this, to be fair), the void where the football news used to be on the sports pages is striking. Still, at least I know why!
Tucked away on one of the inner back pages in Friday’s Daily Record is this snippet:
In news which helps make a lot of things make more sense to the traveller from the future, the SFA “quickly stepped in to crush a new Highland revolution” after Highland League clubs had arranged pre-season friendlies against League opposition.
You see, there’s a rule. And you have to follow the rules, or there would be chaos. This particular rule states that “no matches [a]re allowed to be played in public in Scotland before Saturday, July 31”.1
Exactly whose rule this is isn’t clear. The SFA simply calls it an “old, old rule” and claims that the clubs were perfectly aware of it before making all these arrangements.
Well, maybe. It’s possible that they knew of the rule and decided, en masse, to ignore it, or - just possibly - none of them actually knew this rule existed in the first place. To be clear, this isn’t one or two clubs arranging a tour of the Highlands; these games would have included four different Highland League teams taking on four separate league outfits. According to the SFA, all eight clubs got together and decided to flout the rules.
The clubs appealed, the SFA scoffed:
Yes, it turns out this rule is in place to protect “[o]ther sports”, although those sports are not identified. From the coverage in the papers, tennis, golf and even cricket seem to be doing fine, and pretty much every other sport is also shut down for the summer, so I’m not entirely clear what’s going on here.
Other than SFA bureaucrats flexing their muscles, of course.
Anyway, Hugh Taylor in the Record isn’t too worried. Playing the Old Firm Exceptionalism card, he states:
I’m sure that the managers and coaches of the other teams involved will just shrug and say that playing games in the run-up to a new season is over-rated anyway.
That does, however, clarify for me why the last few weeks have been so quiet - prevented by the rules from doing their jobs, managers and players alike have been on holiday.
However, Friday also saw the first real inkling of excitement for the new season, as the League fixtures were published.
The first thing I noticed was that the neat symmetry of the previous season has been disrupted by the fact that the calendar doesn’t work as nicely as it did the year before.
You might remember that the first week of the new Premier Division was marked by playing all the derby games at the same time. Thanks to the way the weekends fell last year, this meant that the repeat of those fixtures landed on New Year’s Day, the traditional time for those games to be played.
No such luck this year; the repeat of the opening weekend falls on January 3, and won’t be a derby game anyway, as - for example - Aberdeen will be playing Hearts first game up.
However, this piece of calendrical adjustment pales beside the news that games have been scheduled for both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day as well as Monday the 3rd of January.
Now, I remember 1976, and I have absolutely zero memory of Christmas Day games; I’d have said that they died out in Scotland some time in the sixties, so I’m keen to see what actually happens.
Meanwhile, the opening day does feature an Old Firm game2, so why Aberdeen are playing Hearts and Dundee United facing Hibs is unknown - one of the things which I was confident of from last year was the success of the regular ‘derby days’ and with Kilmarnock arriving to pair up with Ayr, I can’t help but feel that an opportunity has been missed here.
Of course, 1976 predates the ‘New Firm’ rivalry between Aberdeen and Dundee United, but United are now the only Tayside side in the top flight, so an opening weekend meeting, allowing for an Edinburgh derby the same day feels like a no-brainer to me.
But what do I know? Perhaps Motherwell v Partick Thistle was the deal-breaker, being not enough of a derby to make the marketing team excited3.
Whatever the reality, the fixtures are available - the Green Final offering a cut-out-and-keep4 guide not just for Aberdeen’s games, but Montrose, Forfar, Brechin, Arbroath and both Dundee clubs, fans of most of whom will have been able to cut out the same list from their Dundee Evening Telegraph, but you can never have too many lists of fixtures, as I recall.
I’m sure that this year, all fixtures will be duly played on the scheduled date.
A quick dividing line to allow me to look at these ‘other sports’ - I feel this might become a fixture in coming weeks as the Olympics unfurl. More on those next week…
All sporting eyes were, of course, on Wimbledon, as the second week produced champions. A fact which I did clearly remember was that no tennis was played on Sundays, so the Ladies’ singles final was in its traditional place on the Friday, and the Gentlemen’s final on the Saturday, as nature intended.5
Britain had two women in the quarter-finals, but “pretty blonde6” Sue Barker found the Czechoslovakian defector Martina Navratilova too much to handle. The newly-minted American was not yet the Queen of Wimbledon, and lost to her compatriot and great rival Chris Evert in the semi-final.
In the other half of the draw, Britain’s Virginia Wade was said to be at her peak; if she was ever going to win Wimbledon, this was her chance. Sadly, she came up against an inspired Evonne Cawley in her semi-final, in which Wade confessed that she never got going.
Miss Evert beat Mrs Cawley in the final to win the title for the second time.
Oh, OK, a word on the whole “Mrs. Cawley” thing. You might know her better as Evonne Goolagong, champion in 1970, but as she was now married, she was competing under her husband’s name.
No, seriously - she was in the draw as “Mrs. R Cawley”, and the newspapers all reported on the women as adjuncts to their husbands. It’s quite striking to read whole articles where the unmarried women are referred to by only their surnames, while their married opponents are always “Mrs”.
I feel like 1976 is part of the modern era, but it still had a way to go…
In the men’s game, an open field was greatly enlivened by the antics of the Romanian Ilie Nastase, known to all newspapers as “Mr. Nasty” thanks to his habit of not responding to every point won by his opponent with a polite round of applause and a quiet “oh, I say - well played!”
Nastase spent the later stages of the tournament in a running battle with photographers, who appeared to irk him mightily by having the temerity to take photographs. His opponent in the final, Sweden’s Björn Borg ignored all the noise around Nastase and won his first Wimbledon title in comfort, having not dropped a set throughout the two weeks.
Borg was an unthinkably young 20, but the suspicion remains that his game is not entirely suited to grass. We shall see.
On the front pages, alongside the usual carnage on the roads,7 everyone seems to have noticed that it’s been sunny and warm for several days in a row. The early part of the week had been marked with “well, this is a nice surprise” - with the exception of the Aberdeen papers, who noted rather huffily that the famous Aberdeen haar8 was blunting the effect of the hot weather everyone else seemed to be having.
By Saturday, however, things were starting to look a little worrying:
Two weeks of no rainfall had started to dry up the nation’s reservoirs, Britain being a notoriously damp island which generally doesn’t have to worry about such things. This has led to all sorts of warnings and advisories going out, urging us all to use less water.
Fortunately, the government is on hand to take swift and decisive action:
Yes, immediate action is to be taken. The week after next, by which time it might well have rained for ten days straight.
Mr. Silkin assured us all, however, that while the drought:
The chairman of the National Water Council (whatever that is) backed up this confident statement:
So, no watering of golf courses, and don’t even think about washing your car. If only we could play football in July; that generally brings waterlogged pitches and postponements galore.
I’m guessing that doesn’t include all the games already played between January and June, or we’ll be in a right mess.
Which will technically be the second one of the season, as they intend to play the much delayed 75-76 Glasgow Cup final in August.
Yeah, I doubt such an entity existed.
Before the internet, we had to make out own fun, kids.
It feels strange now, doesn’t it? But it was just the way the world worked in 1976 - no sport on Sundays; indeed. little activity of any kind went on, although I’m certain we kicked a ball around on a Sunday afternoon without sanction.
See last week for details
I’ve mentioned it before, but barely a day went by without someone somewhere being the victim of the Scottish road network. Looking back, we did all travel around in flimsy tin boxes with no real idea of how to make them safer.
It’s just sea mist, but we have our own special name for it.