‘The summer of our lives’: The memories inspiring Scotland’s Euros dream

Somewhere in the attic at his home in Harrogate, Stuart McCall has Paul Gascoigne’s shirt from the famous Euro ’96 “Battle of Britain” at Wembley.

Earlier this year, an acquaintance made an offer for it: £30,000. So he had to tell them the story of what really happened at half-time on that sun-kissed afternoon 30 years ago when England took on Scotland.

“I used to get changed next to Gazza at Rangers when we were teammates, he’s a brilliant guy, absolute star,” McCall tells i, halfway through a wonderful hour of stories and sober assessments of Scotland’s chances in Germany.

“The night before the game I’d done an interview and I’d told the interviewer my daughter was born in England and she adored Gazza. So she wanted it to be 3-3 – me to score a hat-trick and Gazza to get one as well. That shows how little she was – me to get a hat-trick!

“Anyway, we play the first half and I think Scotland probably edged it, didn’t we? We certainly give as good as we get and Gazza is struggling in the game, playing as if he’s got the world on his shoulders. The ref blows for half-time and there’s a few boos aimed at him.

“Well I’m walking down the tunnel and I hear this commotion coming behind me. I thought there was a bit of trouble between the two teams but it was Gazza running straight at me. He whipped his shirt off, gave it to me and said: ‘That’s for your little girl’.

“I always say that’s the kind of guy he is. He had gone through a lot in the run-up to the tournament, there was a lot of pressure on him, he’d been booed, become a bit of a hate figure in some ways. But he still had that thought in his mind.

“I’d never asked for his shirt but he’d run across the pitch, he’d come looking for me. I quickly put it in my bag, no-one had seen it.”

Then came the second half: Jamie Redknapp’s entrance as substitute “bamboozled us for a bit”, in the words of McCall, and Alan Shearer scored the opener. Scotland roared back, won a penalty, missed it and were then downed by Gazza’s moment of magic.

“We were gutted on the bus afterwards but Ally McCoist, who is a really good mate of mine, broke the silence by saying something like ‘Well at least I got his shirt afterwards’,” McCall recalls.

“I said to him ‘That’s a f—ing disgrace, you’ve taken a shirt off the lad who has probably knocked us out of the tournament’. A couple of the lads jumped in, thinking it was going to go off between us.

“I said ‘I’d never take the shirt off the lad who scored against us – but then I took the other shirt out of the bag and said ‘On the other hand, I’ve got the one he didn’t score against us in’.”

When he was told how much the sweat-soaked jersey would be worth now, he admits to a pang of regret.

“30 grand for a shirt! I had to tell them: ‘Look, it’s not the one he scored in, it’s the one he wore in the first half’,” he says.

“They said ‘You’d still get £10,000 for it’ and I had to explain ‘Look, it’s got ‘To Carly, love Paul Gascoigne’ on it in black marker pen so unless you can find someone called Carly to pay for it I don’t think it’s worth that much!”

The story is told with the timing of a stand-up comedian, which is typical of McCall – one of football’s great characters and nicest people. There’s a reason he is so well-loved among fans of his former clubs, Bradford City in particular, and a Tartan Army idol.

His decision to snub England – pretending he couldn’t hear the call to come on when he was named among the substitutes for their under-21 side because he really wanted to represent Scotland – probably helps with the latter.

But his CV in blue – including playing every minute of Euro 1992, Euro 1996 and the 1990 World Cup – is a testament to just how good he was as a holding midfielder for Scotland sides who regularly qualified for major international tournaments.

‘A different world’

McCall likes to say he was a lucky footballer – his Sliding Doors moment for England, rising through the ranks at an up-and-coming Bradford side and winning trophies galore for Rangers – but he is one of those players who squeezed every ounce out of the considerable ability he had. When chances came, he took them.

“My first call-up for Scotland was when we played Argentina, who were the world champions,” he recalls.

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“I think Diego Maradona heard I was in the squad because he never turned up! I was gutted. But there were four us who made our debuts that day – me, Robert Fleck, Craig Levein and Stewart McKimmie – and all of us ended up making the squad, which would be unheard of now.”

The memories of Italia ’90 – “the summer of our lives!” – flow easily but it did not start well. “We got to the tournament and you have to remember it was a different world back then. Nowadays you can go on Wyscout, find out everything about a team, watch all their games at the click of a button,” he says.

“But we knew nothing about Costa Rica, our first group opponents. This is a true story: Craig Brown, our assistant manager, had gone out for dinner two nights before and got a taxi home and it was a South American driver. And the guy said to him ‘The ‘keeper is really small’. So that was pretty much the sum of our analysis of them – they had a small goalie.

“So Andy Roxburgh picked Alan McInally to start because he was good from crosses. Well anyway, on the day of the game this medium-sized ‘keeper was warming up and we thought ‘OK’. He was their third ‘keeper.

“Then this giant comes out, he was 6ft 3ins. All we were doing was putting crosses in because that’s what we’d worked on and he was just plucking the balls on the penalty spot!

“Then they score and it was most the embarrassing night of my life. Of course now we know how good South and Central American teams are but back then it was like we’d been beaten by a bunch of waiters, which was disrespectful to them because they had some really good players. Scotland fans were chucking their scarves at us. But three days later we had a chance to turn it around.”

They subsequently beat Sweden before running Brazil very close in the final game. “It was Roy of the Rovers stuff for me to play all those three games and I think the Scottish public gave us a decent reception when we came back,” he says. “We’d restored a bit of that pride.”

At Euro ’92 in Sweden they had the misfortune of running into the Netherlands, reigning European champions, and then Germany in the group stages.

“We played CIS in the third game, which was the Russian federation,” he says.

“They’ve got two of my Rangers teammates in the squad and they came off their coach and we’d heard they had the champagne on ice in the bus. They had kept it tight in the first two games and thought ‘If we beat Scotland in the third we’re through’.

“The CIS had actually planned where they were going to stay for the next round, they’d booked their hotel and it felt like they were taking it for granted.

“Honestly, we had so much luck in that game. If it had been diced up over the three games against Holland and Germany where we’d been really unlucky we’d have gone through.

“We finished on a high, won 3-0. We did what we’d hoped to do, win a game, given ourselves a chance.

“[Oleksiy] Mykhaylychenko was one of my teammates and I asked him afterwards ‘Now you don’t need that champagne, can we have it on our bus?’ He was absolutely stoney faced.

“That night we went out in Sweden to a huge marquee and it was a Tomas Brolin party because it was full of Scots and Swedes doing the conga as they’d knocked England out the day before. It’s the only time England had gone home before Scotland!”

‘Scotland have got a chance’

Euro ’96 cuts a bit deeper. Scotland came closest as they beat Switzerland in the final game, missing out on qualification by a single goal after England’s 4-1 win over the Netherlands.

“We found a way not to get through, didn’t we?” he says ruefully.

“It was a great game against Switzerland, back and forth. We stuck big Colin Hendry up front when it looked like we needed more goals, then the word comes to us England are 4-0 up and he went back in defence. As soon as Patrick Kluivert scores, he’s back up there!

“Gordon Strachan was first in the changing room afterwards and said ‘You should be so proud of yourselves’. We were so close, missed out by one goal but couldn’t have done much more.

“Don’t ask me what else happened in that tournament, I was straight on a plane to visit Mickey Mouse. I was in Florida for the rest of Euro ’96, getting it out of my memory.”

McCall thinks this Scotland side can go one better than his vintage. “Scotland have got a lot of quality in there now,” he says.

“When I was coaching for the national team with Strachan back in 2016 we only had one player playing in England but now there’s a lot of players doing well in England. There’s no doubt they’ve got a chance – Germany is a tough one then Switzerland second and Hungary.

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“Steve Clarke is a great manager, really underrated, and there’s ability there. [John] McGinn’s the key man, the midfield of [Billy] Gilmour and [Scott] McTominay, [Andy] Robertson and [Kieran] Tierney – there’s quality right through the team there.

“If we hadn’t had a few of the injuries we’d had I might be a bit more optimistic but there’s definitely a big chance.”

McCall turned 60 this week and is currently driving Highway One, seeing the spectacular sights of the west coast of America with his wife to celebrate. It meant turning down punditry work during the tournament but it was an all-time ambition to do the highway.

Writing on the wall at Sheffield Utd

Downtime was needed after a bruising season assisting Paul Heckingbottom at Sheffield United before the pair were dismissed in December.

“Look, people remember how it ended but it was a brilliant, brilliant experience. Play-offs in the first year, automatic promotion in the next,” he says.

“Then we lost our two best players in the summer and were right up against it. People talk about injuries last season. When Newcastle had that spate we’d had a lot worse. There’s no excuses. We knew what we were up against. The main thing was we wanted to be competitive.

“We’d got beaten 2-1 at Manchester City, 2-1 Manchester United with [Diogo] Dalot scoring on 80 minutes, we were 2-1 up at Tottenham when the referee puts the board up for a ridiculous amount of injury time.

“They scored after 98 and 101 minutes and they celebrated in that stadium like it was the Champions League final because they’d been on such a good run.

“The killer was Newcastle at home. We were competitive for 20 minutes and the worst thing that happened for us was [Harvey] Barnes went down injured. I said to Paul ‘That’s not good news, look who is coming on’. It was Anthony Gordon, now I’d see Anthony at Everton and he’s a top, top player. He ripped us to bits.

“We were 3-0 down at half-time and we made positive substitutions because we thought ‘We need to get the next goal and get back into it’. In the Championship that’s probably the right thing to do and you can get the next goal but in the Premier League it backfired and we got done [for] eight.

“It hangs over you. We went to Arsenal, were only 2-0 down with 50 minutes gone and we lost another three but the killer was going to Burnley and getting beat five. That was the game. [Ollie] McBurnie gets sent off at half-time and it gives us no chance. The writing was on the wall then.”

McCall now wants to get back into the game next season, most likely as number two to Heckingbottom, who has visited Bayer Leverkusen and Girona as part of six months out of football. There has been interest in Heckingbottom – mostly from Championship sides, McCall says – but he wants to make sure it’s the right opportunity.

Bradford City regrets – but more memories to make

“I understand that but if you wait for the perfect job, well there’s no such thing. You can’t get the perfect scenario,” he says.

“Things couldn’t have been much worse for me the second time I was at Bradford but we had a great time in spite of what was happening off-the-field. People say ‘How could you put up with it’ but we were focused on what we wanted to do.

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“[Former Co-owner Edin Rahic] was an irrelevance to me, even though I had to sit and listen to his shite and taking players I didn’t want to, because we had a group and a squad of players who were focused on what we wanted to do, it was great.

“I said to Paul ‘Sometimes, whatever you hear you’ve got to go with it’.”

Mention of Bradford brings an admission from McCall: of all the things in his career, his dismissal in late 2020 to bring to an end his third stint, cuts deepest.

“I’ve never been as disappointed in my career as when I got released last time,” he said.

“The Edin one and the sacking then, I knew what we were dealing with and could put up with it, we’d had a bad run of one win in 16 and I understood and accepted it.

“The one that killed me was the last spell at [Bradford] City. We weren’t doing great but we were in Covid times, playing behind closed doors. You should be at least given two transfer windows unless something is going seriously wrong. You want to get players out as well, build your own culture.

“People hammer me about letting [top scorer] James Vaughan go. Listen, I spoke to James and look, I know he scores goals but he’d been on loan to Tranmere, it’s 20 minutes from where he lives and he didn’t want to come up the M62 every day.

“[CEO] Julian [Rhodes] said ‘You can keep him’ but after two days in pre-season training you could tell he didn’t want to be there. He told me he’d be quitting in a year’s time and he did. He didn’t do anything wrong, he’d fallen out of love with football. There was nothing I could do about it. So it’s things like that – there were other players who I wanted rid of but couldn’t.

“I bought in Elliot Watt on £1200 a week, he got voted in the PFA Team of the Year, Levi Sutton came in on £800-a-week, Billy Clarke on £1000. The finances were right, I’d saved the club money in wages and was told ‘There’s more money in the pot’ but I said ‘Let’s wait until January’.

“There were just moments when it went against us. We had three successive 1-0 defeats away from home where we’d come close.

“If I were a chief executive I could say ‘Yes they’ve been shit’ but players are coming back, they’ve not had the breaks. We went to Oldham and had 20-odd shots on goals but lost.

“The thing that hurt me when I left was people saying ‘We don’t want your reputation to be tarnished’. Honestly, I’m not interested in that.

“I was told ‘This club can’t afford to go out of the league’ but there were 30 games left, 90 points to play for. You have to give people a chance if you have faith in them.

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“In January I was getting [Andy] Cook in, I was getting [Alex] Gilliead in. They’re going to make you a better team. I knew who they were getting rid of and who they were bringing in. That rankles with me – people say to me ‘He was a great manager but not that good of a manager’.

“I say: ‘Look at my second spell, when we got to the play-off final. I inherited a good group but we brought in some really, really good players’. We were so close to the Championship and you need a chance.

“I did a Q&A with Bradford fans the other week, just after they’d been beaten at Harrogate and the mood at Bradford was so low but I said to the fans then ‘You need to get behind the manager Graham [Alexander]’. He needs a chance. If you keep changing your manager every six months, you’ll never get anywhere. You must give people an opportunity.

“What fans don’t see is the players we’d got in and the ones we were getting rid of. It’s about moulding a team.”

Does he sense unfinished business at Bradford – perhaps a fourth go at it?

“I’m not bitter in any way, just a bit regretful,” he says. “I don’t want a headline saying ‘McCall wants to come back!’ but between us, deep down in my heart….” He trails off.

“Look, I was one lucky footballer in so many things – not getting on for England, being able to play with some incredible players for Rangers but as a manager, little things maybe just haven’t gone for me. But I can live with it, I’ve had a fantastic career and hopefully there’s a few more memories still to make.”

It is a message Scotland’s players should heed ahead of their big night in Munich.