The first ever international football match took place in Hamilton Crescent, Partick in 1872, a goalless draw that featured a Queen’s Park side donned in Scotland colours, and a group of players from Wanderers, Royal Engineers and Old Etonians that were sent north of the border on the orders of the English FA.
Though there had been five friendlies between these nations prior, this was the first encounter to be officially recognized, and so began a rivalry that has persisted for a century and a half, consisting of 115 games, each and every one of them fiercely contested.
It is fitting therefore that this Tuesday evening it is Scotland’s ‘Auld Enemy’ who travel to Hampden Park to help commemorate 150 years of Scottish football and no doubt the famous stadium will be rammed and rowdy and full of patriotic fervour as it should be.
It is a fervour born from history and hostility and indeed, not for nothing did the BBC once deem that England versus Scotland represents ‘all that is good and all that is bad about football’ as centuries of cultural differences and long-held grudges play out in a sporting context, between two nations separated only by the crumbling remains of a Roman wall.
Yet perhaps in recent times, this is a fixture that has lost a little of its edge, an inevitable consequence of international football’s appeal waning and club tribalism instead dominating our attention.
It is highly unlikely, for example, that a poor performance from Angus Gunn this week will see the rest of his life defined by it, or for that matter, should the hosts triumph against expectation, we will witness hordes of tartan-clad supporters swarm onto the pitch, bringing down the goals in the process.
The first of these alluded-to instances took place in 1961, when a superb England side took their neighbours to the cleaners at Wembley Stadium in a Home Championship clash.
Three up at half-time nobody could have possibly predicted what was to come, despite England being the big favourites in the betting, and that was an avalanche of goals in the second period, mostly to the home side.
After enduring a torrid afternoon, poor Celtic goalkeeper Frank Haffey retrieved the ball from his net on nine occasions, leading to widespread derision and the spawning of a long-lasting fallacy that Scotland’s keepers were a bit rubbish.
Never picked for his country again, Haffey later emigrated to Australia, to forever distance himself from ninety humiliating minutes.
As for the pitch invasion, that took place in 1977, with Scotland having overturned the football odds in beating their ancient foe.
With the World Cup less than twelve months away, belief was growing that a side featuring Kenny Dalglish and Archie Gemmill could do something special in Argentina, and buoyed by this optimism - plus, it has to be said, an inordinate amount of alcohol - the final whistle heralded a thousand-strong army storming the Wembley turf, tearing down the goalposts and scooping up the pitch with their bare hands to take home as a souvenir.
In an era of hooliganism, this was something very different. It was entirely celebratory, an outpouring of jubilation.
It was an illustration of what it meant to get one over on the ‘Auld Enemy’ back when the game was the best and worst of football.
*Credit for all of the photos in this article belongs to AP Photo*
