For many years a trip by Motherwell to Hampden was a rare event. Recent successes have made the journey to Mount Florida a more routine experience and younger fans might even come to expect that they should regard the three visits we made last season as the norm. For those of us longer in the tooth Hampden memories tend to be associated in the main with Scotland games.
The chance to see claret and amber favourites don the dark blue and face world class opposition comes too rarely but the visit of the Czech Republic on Euro 2012 duty sparks some golden memories.
A smoky start at Hampden
Fifty years ago, almost to the month, Ian St John lit up a rainy Hampden with a 3-2 win over Czechoslovakia. The qualification campaign ended in a playoff against the same opposition in Brussels and though St John bagged a couple we lost out and failed to reach the finals in Chile.
We can gloss over the fact that he had just joined Liverpool for the purposes of this article but what we can’t overlook is that the current national squad would dearly love another in his mould. What is certain is that none of the team who played on Saturday would have the same post match experience. In today’s match programme there is an interview with our old boy and it quoted hime talking about the 1961 game – “The players got next to nothing. Not even the taxi fare home. I scored at Hampden against a team that went on to finish runners up in the World Cup Finals and afterwards was left to catch the bus home to Motherwell”.
Changed days!