Alan Rough will never forget waking up one morning at 6am during the World Cup in Argentina and, as the sun blazed outside, deciding to grab some fresh air.
He was toddling around on his own and had turned round a corner at the team hotel at Alta Gracia when he suddenly caught sight of the Scotland manager, Ally MacLeod.
As Rough recalled: “He was curled up in the foetal position on a park bench, completely oblivious to everything else in the universe.
“I didn’t know how to respond, so I just asked him quietly ‘Are you OK, boss?’ But he didn’t say anything. He simply sat there in a ball, distraught, dishevelled, in despair.
“He was destroyed, a shell of the man he had been a month earlier.”
This was in the aftermath of the Scots’ elimination from the tournament, following an unexpected 3-1 defeat to Peru, an embarrassing 1-1 draw with Iran and a wonderful – and ultimately irrelevant – 3-2 victory over the might of Holland.
Rough, a genial character who is famous for his ready wit, chat-show punditry and the original “football perm” remains one of the most successful Scottish goalkeepers, a man who won 53 international caps and was selected in three World Cup squads between 1978 and 1986.
Yet, while he is one of life’s laidback individuals, he still looks back on that ill-fated sojourn to South America as one of the worst episodes in the history of Scottish football.
As he argued, nobody was blameless, not the players, the manager, the SFA blazerati, the press, or those fans who were caught up in the hype which suggested MacLeod’s personnel simply needed to pitch up on the pampas to rule the world.
Rough said: “Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Our hotel was a dump, and I don’t know what possessed the SFA to check into such down-at-heel accommodation, or whether they had even bothered taking a look at the facilities in advance. There was a swimming pool with only one problem – it had no water in it! Which just about summed up the place.
“There was even talk before the Peru match that we might go on strike unless the SFA raised their bonus payments.
“And, for a while, there was a definite possibility that the squad would refuse to play unless their grievances were addressed.
“After that, maybe it wasn’t surprising we got stuffed by Peru. We hadn’t bothered doing any homework on our opponents, and Ally had written them off as a bunch of old men.
“So we had no idea Teofilo Cubillas was a genuine superstar, until he stuck the ball past me a couple of times. Ally sat there in anguish, his face cupped in his hands. Within 90 minutes, he had been transformed from a merry guy into a wreck and, when the game finished, it felt as if it was the end of the world.”
Rough has never believed football is a matter of life and death. But his spirits sank further as the disintegration continued against Iran, which he personally considered one of the worst nights of his career.
He added: “I barely touched the ball, but still lost a bad goal – my fault – at my near post when Iraj Danaifar, a lad who wasn’t even a household name in his own living room, equalised.
“It was awful. The Tartan Army booed and you couldn’t criticise them. After all, they had travelled thousands of miles to support us and we couldn’t beat Iran, even after being gifted an own goal close to half-time. Our critics were baying for blood and we were heading for the exit door unless we beat the Dutch by three goals.”
The Scots, of course, were scintillating in that third tussle, dominating proceedings with Archie Gemmill orchestrating a magical piece of trickery to put his side 3-1 in front. Rough’s reaction at the other end of the stadium was: “Jeez, why couldn’t we have done this in our earlier games?”
But Johnny Rep soon shattered any flickering hopes and the Scots were out of the competition. At the climax, many big tough, Saltire-waving aficionados were in tears. But Rough wasn’t among them. He was sombre, dejected and angry.
He said: “Ally MacLeod made mistakes, no doubt about it. But regardless of that, our display against the Iranians was shambolic and you couldn’t lay that at Ally’s door. When he needed us to dig him out of a hole, several of the really big names – they know who they are – went AWOL in Cordoba. They should have been looking at themselves and not searching for scapegoats.
“It was nobody’s finest hour. But let’s not forget it was only a football tournament. We tried, we failed, we were disappointed, now it was time to get on with our lives.”
