The Scotland Epistles Football Magazine

I thought I would dig out some pictures of a few of our away strips. For the first one, here’s Graeme Souness with the away strip from 1980-82 and quite a fetching wee number it is too. As far as I can tell this was the only time the strip was worn with red socks as generally it was a white sock.
As for the game, it was our first match ever against Israel, which took place in Tel Aviv on 25th February 1981. Kevin Donnelly in the second issue of the Epistles magazine tells a tale of the match in his excellent Shalom ’81 piece and mentions the very strong Scotland team fielded that day. It was a very experienced team that ground out a one nil win and would see us through to Spain 1982.
The line-up was Alan Rough, Danny McGrain, Frank Gray, Kenny Burns, Alex McLeish, John Wark, Graeme Souness, Archie Gemmill, John Robertson, Kenny Dalglish and Steve Archibald. Jock Stein must have been worried about losing a goal to Israel as he brought on Willie Miller for John Wark at the start of the second half. Kenny Dalglish scored the only goal in 54 minutes and was replaced by Andy Gray in 69 minutes.
At the time of the match, the combined total caps won by the 13 players on show was 312. By the time they had finished their Scotland careers it was a whopping 612.At the back of this cutting there is a small note on Walter Smith as he has just announced he is retiring from playing, a strange coincidence given how much Souness and Scotland would become involved in his life in the years to come.