The Great What-If
I do remember seeing the tackle that would effectively end the late Eric Caldow's career, a tackle that would break his leg in three places. That I think was news-reel. The date was 6th April 1963. He was twenty-eight and also in his prime, the best left-back in the country, a wide, Scottish left-back, Scotland's captain. And although the leg mended in time he was never the same. In the 1963-64 he managed just four games, in 1964-5 an encouraging thirty-four but in 1965-6 just three and that was it.
It should not be forgotten that on the day of Caldow's injury despite Scotland being down to ten men for all but 4 minutes and twenty-one seconds the final score was 2-1 and at Wembley, 2-0 at half-time. True, the tackle also injured Smith badly enough for him to be a passenger but the Scot team that day had been something to excite, to give hope. In goal was Bill Brown, Alex Hamilton was a right-back, Caldow on the left for the 40th time. The half-backs were Ian Ure in the centre, Dave Mackay on the right and Jim Baxter on the left. The wingers were Willy Henderson and Davie Wilson. Chunky, compact Ian St. John was centre-forward, a Scottish centre-forward, with John White to his right and Denis Law his left. Baxter, who had a game that was if anything better than his more famous one in 1967. was another Alex James, even starting his career like James at Raith, White
R.C. Hamilton, Law was Law. And this against an England team that included Banks, Moore, Armfield, Greaves and Charlton.
Scotland would beat England the following year too, Jim Kennedy taking Caldow's place at Hampden and winning a second cap in succession but not before the Daveys, Holt and Provan, had first been tried. White won his 21st cap that day but Dave Mackay, who had become captain was not there. The arm-band seemed cursed. In a European tie for Spurs at Old Trafford in December 1963 his leg too had been broken and would break the following year again as he tried to return. He was also twenty-eight, in his prime and again the leg would finally mend but once more never be quite the same. He would play on at Spurs until 1968 but get the Scotland call only once more, only in October 1965 almost two years after the break.
And the curse, at least the curse as I saw it, the captain's curse as it would come to seem, continued. The late Billy McNeill was promoted to lead the team in Mackay's place. He lasted two games until a injury at the beginning of the 1964-5 season that would take time to heal would see him out for for some time. Denis Law took over for two more games and then, as Law was switched to inside-right, White's old position, where Davie Gibson and Willy Wallace had been tried and presumably found wanting, the armband was passed to Jim Baxter, who stepped up from half-back to fill Law's spot on the left. He lasted but one game. A month later in December in a club match in Vienna against Rapid in the European Cup with the tie all sewn up Baxter's leg had been snapped by a frustrated opponent as Gentleman Jim showboated.
Baxter would be out for the rest of the season. McColl had no choice but to reorganise. before the next game in April against England at Wembley. John Greig, who had taken Mackay's place and played five times at right-half was switched to left to fill Baxter's previous position. Law was switched back to inside-left. Thirty-four year old Bobby Collins was recalled to try plug the hole left by White's death, the position where White had replaced him six years earlier. Eddie McCreadie was tried for the first time in Caldow's position and Pat Crerand returned to fill the gap left by Greig's move across. But under other circumstances there might have been an alternative. Nobby Stiles was making his debut at right-half, effectively as Dave Mackay's equivalent in the England team. He had replaced Alan Mullery, who had replaced Michael Bailey, who had replaced, after fourteen caps over two seasons, Liverpool's Gordon Milne. Now its was not that Milne was ageing. He had been twenty-eight when he played for England for the last time the previous October, that is October 1964. Indeed he would continue at Liverpool for another three seasons and at Blackpool and Wigan for five years more, retiring finally at the age of thirty five. It simply seems that Alf Ramsey didn't fancy him in spite of Liverpool, promoted from the 2nd Division in 1961 with him in the squad and the league in 1964, would take the Cup in 1965 and the league again in 1966 with him still there, almost ever present. He was playing well but there remains the possibility of another factor, which might be called the
Baker question.
It is said that Alf Ramsey, just prior to the World Cup, did not trust Arsenal forward Joe Baker because, although he was born in England and therefore could only play for that country, he was raised a Scot. I personally think there was nothing in it but remained puzzled because with today's eligibility rules, indeed those of a just decade later, Milne might have been Scots too. Although born in Preston he was the son of two Dundonians; Jimmy Milne, who at twenty-one and from Dundee Utd joined Preston North End, played two hundred and thirty times for the club over seven season and even managed it from 1961 to 1968, and Jesse Malcolm, the two marrying again in Dundee in 1934.
The 1965 England result would be a 2-2 draw, Scotland pulling back from two down. A picked and fit again Billy McNeill came through. Bobby Collins would be there for the next two games, seven games later Baxter would return but something else in the meantime was changed. Scotland manager, Ian McColl, ex-Rangers, its captain immediately before Caldow, right-half in the national team, when Caldow had made his international debut, had resigned. Jock Stein had on a part-time basis stepped into his shoes. He would remain in place for seven games, fail to qualify for the 1966 World Cup and be replaced by John Prentice, whose first game was a 3-4 home loss to England with a completely revamped team. Which begs three questions, four if we add yet another blow the national team was to suffer, a third leg-break.
In 1962 Ian McColl had just missed out on qualification for the World Cup in Sweden. The group had gone to a play-off, in which Scotland was twice up against Czechoslovakia but conceded a late equaliser and two more in extra time. Yet the manager must have been happy with what he had because he merely tweaked the team making no wholesale changes, allowing it to gain experience. By the Spring of 1963 he had an eleven with only three players with fewer than ten caps, a reliable goalkeeper, established combinations at full-back and half-back and four forwards in settled positions. Yet just a year later he had first lost his captain, his left-back, his rock, Caldow, White, his X-factor, had been killed in a freak accident, Mackay, his central steel was on crutches and to crown it all his play-maker, Baxter, his unpredictable genius, the man he had brought into the national team in his first game in charge and at centre-half, an attacking Scottish centre-half, had in December also suffered a broken leg that had kept him out of football for the first three months of 1965. Moreover, he had two, perhaps three ready replacements in Joe Baker, Gordon Milne and Gerry Baker he would a decade later at least in theory have been able to access, but which he could not in his era, two of whom had been tried by England and discarded for whatever reason. Joe Baker was no John White but he might have allowed an alternative style. Milne and Gerry Baker in December 1963 and Dave Mackay's leg fracture would have been an obvious candidates to replace him with repercussions throughout the national team and possibly for McColl himself. There is even with the considerable passage of time a palpable air of feeling as if we had been in touching distance of something special and the disappointment being almost too much to bear. As a wean I remember felt it at the time and Ian McColl cannot have been immune. It seems unlikely to be coincidence that, when he stepped down to manage at club level at Sunderland, promptly signing Baxter, and it did not work out, he in 1968 simply gave up on football altogether. He was a qualified engineer. There was certainty in that.
And so to the denouement of what-if. To qualify for the 1966 World Cup Scotland's last two games were home and away to Italy but they ought not to have been crucial. As should have been expected the home game was won, the away one lost. Finland would be beaten home and away. Poland was drawn with away. The fixture that mattered was Poland at Hampden Park. The date was 13th October 1965. Billy McNeill was there. He was back for a sixth game after a wee gap. He scored the first goal in thirteen minutes and all looked well until five minutes from full-time. That was when the Polish inside-left scored. His marker would have been the Scottish right-half, Mackay's position, Milne's position. And worse was to come. With three minutes to go the inside-right for the Poles scored the winner. He was faced by the left-half with the left-back behind, who might have been respectively Baxter and Caldow, with Caldow gone and Baxter that day absent. And as for The Ghost, after Collins the space he had left needed Law to step across and a struggle then to fill his inside-right shoes that was not resolved until Baxter was the one to step up. And it would be precisely in those positions, where both Law and Baxter would shine on that wonderful Wembley day in 1967, a last hurrah for the latter, before the drink took him, and perhaps also for McColl, or at least his hopes, the might-have-beens, of four years earlier.