Not A Moment Too Soon
Nobody Told Us, 'Cause Nobody Showed Us
Saturday, July 31 1976
Like a sudden downpour in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave, football is back, back, back!
Well, sort of. After a full month of no football news of any significance in the papers, with all the football journalists on holiday and us poor readers reduced to making up stories in the absence of any information, you can almost hear the sigh of relief which must have echoed around the Sunday Post sports desk as they laid out a full two pages of match reports from Saturday, together with the triumphant return of Bill McFarlane’s round-up of breaking news on the back page.1
All of which was reported under the banner headline:
That does seem a little desperate, doesn’t it? Even in today’s feverish atmosphere of never-ending football, I don’t think anyone calls it a ‘season’.
Anyway, there was football to report on, and pre-season pointers to, er, point out. For instance, Celtic went to Inverness and put six past the then Inverness Thistle, while Rangers went to Germany and lost two tough-looking ties, so maybe the Scottish title race will end up closer than last year?
St. Johnstone cemented themselves as firm favourites to come straight back up on the strength of beating Dundee United 2-1. I say firm favourites; the actual match report includes the word ‘perhaps’. The Green Final were in no doubt of the significance of it, though:
How much of a shock it actually was is unclear from the report. Elsewhere, one Sunday Post sub-editor kind of shot his bolt a little early:
That headline refers to Berwick Rangers briefly holding a lead over English First Division Sunderland, before losing 2-1. How the headline writers are going to cope with actual league games remains to be seen.
Of the remaining Premier Division teams in action on the first day of the ‘friendly season’, Ayr beat Swindon 5-2, Motherwell beat Fraserburgh 4-0 and Dundee United sent out a second team to beat Brechin 2-0, which partially balanced out their first team’s defeat.
Everyone else is cramming their pre-season friendlies into the next six days, before the actual football starts next Saturday with a round of Anglo-Scottish Cup games.
A quick refresher - the Anglo-Scottish Cup invited eight Scottish and sixteen English teams2 to participate. None of the invitees had qualified for Europe, or had any other encumbrances, but while there was an actual trophy up for grabs, not everyone took it all that seriously and it mostly served - at least in this preliminary phase - as an extension of pre-season.
Anyway, thanks to what used to be known as the Texaco Cup, the actual football season starts next Saturday, with the following games:
The invitees were the six Premier teams not in Europe, and - for some reason - the two who came up from Division 2 at the end of last season. I can understand not inviting Dundee or St.Johnstone, but to ignore the likes of St. Mirren or Montrose seems odd.
Well, at least as odd as many of the other things going on at the time, I suppose.
All of this nonsense means that the ‘Friendly Season’ will last exactly one week before hostilities are resumed.
This, I suspect, passed me by at the time - 13-year-old me was (as far as I can calculate) on holiday in Bournemouth. Yes, we drove all the way from Aberdeen to Bournemouth in dad’s Vauxhall Viva to spend a week being burned by the relentless sun and swarmed by ladybirds, before undertaking the mammoth trek home over the following weekend.
What of Bill McFarlane’s column, which doesn’t mention the word ‘gossip’ anywhere3?
He leads with the startling news that Dundee United have signed Archie Knox, who played last season for… Dundee United. Not a misprint; he was released from his contract at the end of the season, but has been asked back to provide cover on a short-term deal. One wonders how his salary compares to last year.
Other news is pretty mundane until you get to the startling revelation that:
All in all, it’s good to have football back. Heaven knows I’ve been scraping the ground beneath the bottom of the barrel for at least a month now; I’m raring to go with a new season.
Which leads me to contemplate how this is going to work in Season 2 of the revolution:
Weekly posts on a Saturday. These will continue, much as they did last year, with a round-up of results and news from the equivalent Saturday in 1976-77.
More coverage of Divisions 1 and 2. I shamefully ignored them until most of the way through the season last time out, yet there was much going on. This year, a full 39-game schedule will have to work itself out; I’ll keep you updated on how it’s going.
A new feature. Try to contain your excitement, but I’m intending to shoehorn in a reference to a song from that week’s charts each week. See if you can spot this week’s trial run.
Midweek posts. Not every week, at least, that’s not my intention. If there are internationals, European ties or big cup games in midweek, I’ll be there, but if the midweek report is going to be ‘nothing much happened’, I’ll focus instead to my other column, which almost never involves Scottish football.
All the news that’s fit to print. The mid-1970s were a tumultuous time, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed rediscovering all those news stories. To reflect the reality of my teenage life, I’ll be reporting on a few more stories about music as we go along - 1976 represents the moment when album music reached roughly the same significance in my life as the doings of Aberdeen FC; I’ll try to represent that as we go along.
If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d be interested in, please click the ‘subscribe’ button. It’ll cost you nothing, and it’ll help me increase visibility, or something.
In other sports news, the second week of the Olympics contained all kinds of excitement, including the defection of a Soviet diver, which briefly threatened to turn into an international incident. The Soviet team threatened to pull out of the last two days, and - much more worryingly for the host nation of Canada - threatened to boycott the World Ice Hockey tournament in Montreal next September.
By Saturday night, ruffled feathers had been smoothed, and the Soviets remained part of the Games, but of the missing athlete - 17-year-old Sergei Nemtsanov - there was still no sign. No doubt there is a murky tale of espionage and diplomatic wrangling behind it all, but for now, we know nothing more.
How had the British team done in Montreal? Well:
It’s a little nebulous, since the only MP the Sunday Post has interviewed is the redoubtable Tam Dalyell, who explained that he “certainly won’t be raising the matter in the Commons”, but that he’s sure someone will.
The issue is that Britain has won a paltry 12 medals, and while there remains a lot of sniffiness surrounding the East Germans in particular, there’s also a general recognition that perhaps a bit more of a joined-up approach to sport might bring benefits. The Sunday Post weighed in:
Quite apart from the gendering of the entire country and the fact that the SP doesn’t consider what it (sorry - she) might want from its sportswomen; this is spectacularly unhelpful, and I’m not entirely sure why it’s even there. Still, I’m looking forward to the ‘complete new approach’.
On the front pages, a story which definitely passed me by at the time, as Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher attempted to murder three Labour MPs.
OK, you’re going to need a minute, I can tell:
Understanding this story requires knowledge of the parliamentary ‘pairing’ system, where the government asks the opposition to have some of its MPs sit out a vote in the event that some on the government side are unable to attend - by virtue of being in hospital, for example.
These votes are ‘paired’, effectively cancelling each other out, and removing the need for anyone to get out of their sickbed to come and vote. The system has worked seamlessly for many years, but Mrs. Thatcher smelled blood, and declined to take part this time.
The vote was on a renationalisation bill for aircraft manufacturers and shipbuilders, but it might have been any vote where the Conservative leader felt she had a chance to defeat the government, and then force a confidence vote and potentially a General Election.
At the time of the vote, four Labour MPs were indeed in hospital for various reasons, with their various conditions all being reported as ‘seriously ill’. Three of the four were rousted out of their beds and transferred to Westminster by ambulance. The bill passed by three votes, meaning that two of them could have stayed put, but this was small comfort to Labour MPs, who made the absolute most of the situation, claiming - among other things - that “there are three men who might die in this House tonight”.
In the event, no-one died, but the whole incident left a sour taste in the mouth, and seemed to indicate that the relatively new Opposition leader was not to be messed with.
The other huge story for Scottish newspapers this week was the relaxation of licensing laws, which meant that for the first time, Scottish pubs would be able to open on Sundays. There was a lack of clarity around which MPs actually voted for this, as a plea for this to be restricted to just Scottish members was ignored, and the vote itself took place around 3 in the morning, leading to some not particularly clear-headed reporting, but the result was clear - Scottish drinkers will no longer be restricted to hotel bars on Sundays, and will be allowed to stay up until the new closing time of 11pm on all days of the week.
The Daily Record hopes this will lead to a more sensible approach to drinking, but I can tell you that not all publicans were thrilled at the prospect of having to work seven days a week. Still, any excuse for a banner headline:
I’m absolutely certain this will eventually lead to an end to binge drinking…
Anyway, see you next week for the return of competitive football, if not yet the end of competitive drinking.
You may have missed it, but it was against the rules - which rule, no-one is entirely clear on - for Scottish teams to play games in public before the magical date of July 31st.
This may seem unbalanced (although England does have more teams than Scotland), but England does not have the League Cup sections going on, so their teams played off in four groups of four.
This may just be me, but being a gossip was a negative trait last time I looked; I have no idea why ‘speculation and guesswork from the papers’ is now just called ‘gossip’.