ONE OF THE less-documented chapters in the long and tumultuous footballing life of Thomas Henderson Docherty occurred in the summer of 1958. The Doc had played a key role in Scotland qualifying for the World Cup Finals, to be played in Sweden that year.
He had done a superb man-marking job on the great Alfredo de Stefano as Scotland beat Spain at Hampden in their opening qualifier. He then steadied the ship after the SFA Selectors viciously sacked Captain and effective Player-Manager George Young before the return game in Madrid, which Spain won at a canter.
This meant that Scotland had to beat Switzerland in their final qualifier to reach Sweden and in the match, at Hampden, Docherty gave a true Captain's performance to drag us over the line to Sweden.
However, after a 0-4 thrashing from England, back at Hampden in April, 1958, Doc was dropped; he remained in the 22-man squad which travelled to Sweden, but he was by then very-much in the “only to be used if everyone else is injured” category.
So, while the selected team prepared to open the tournament against Yugoslavia, in Västerås, Doc and Clyde's Archie Robertson were despatched to Norrköping to spy on next opponents Paraguay, who were playing France.
They reported back that the Paraguayans were very enthusiastic, but liked to “put it about a bit” and Scotland should prepare themselves for a bit of a battle. Doc went to his grave convinced that the SFA High Heid Yins totally ignored his report. Any way, a couple of rare goalkeeping errors from Captain Tommy Younger, which ended his Scotland career after 24 straight games, gifted the South Americans two goals in a 2-3 defeat.
In his match report for the next day's Glasgow Herald, Cyril Horne, the great Herald reporter, legendary for putting a Glesca Kiss on a gloating Uruguayan football writer four years previously, wrote: “This Paraguayan team is one of the poorest I have seen in international football. Their greatest assets were their tremendous enthusiasm and the variety of unfair tricks they employed.”
Mr Horne was typically incisive in his view on the match referee, Italian official Vincenzo Orlandini, of whom he wrote: “Signor Orlandini, for whom in the past I have had great respect, was a very poor referee indeed. The Paraguayan outside left kicked a Scot at least a dozen times after he had been outwitted, but the only punishment he suffered was a talking-to.”
What, one wonders, would today's SFA High Heid Yins make of Horne's brutal summing-up: “The tactics of Paraguay apart, Scotland lost this match because of goalkeeping errors, weak play at right back and poor shooting – the last the very fault that has been so apparent in recent months in every Scottish team.”
Fast forward 68 years and plus ca change. Scotland goes out of a World Cup because of our errors at the back and our inability to score, while Paraguay are roundly condemned when a weak referee allows them to reduce a game to a kicking match.
Mind you, today's Scotland stars might prefer, following a defeat, if the Scdottish press restricts themselves, as the Herald did the next day. To a report on the progress of the five Scotland players injured in the game. No hysterical four-page post-mortem on the loss.
Having watched that Paraguay v France match on Saturday night, I have only two thoughts:
Why didn't Didier Deschamps pull Mbappé and Dembele, to save them from possible injury at the hands of Paraguayan defenders who were in full head-hunting mode?
How bad must Scottish referees be, that we don't have a single official at this World Cup? When you reflect on how such a terrible referee as Ilgiz Tantashev of Uzbekistan can, after his rank rotten performance in our group game against Morocco, be given a knock-out game, in which, if anything he was even worse, our referees must be even worse than we think they are.
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