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I know it doesn’t rhyme but I’m sure you know what I mean. Anyway this card is from the early 70’s and to tell you truth had I known of the existence of these large cards back then I’m sure I would have pestered the hell out of my mum to buy Typhoo tea. However, we were a Brooke Bond family at the time and we collected the cards from the tea packets such as the History of Aviation, Prehistoric Animals and the like.

I collected cards from an early age of almost any type be it Football, TV Series themed and even the Monkees. Every football season brought new cards and I rushed out to the ice cream van and shops at any opportunity to buy cards. Of course, things change and eventually I swapped the cards for football programmes, which I swapped for Marvel Comics, which I then swapped for 7” singles. Of course, with vinyl on its way back big time I sold my collection a few years back to buy football cards. Elton John once sang a song about it.

Of course had I known that in forty years Scottish football cards would be worth a good sum maybe I might have kept them. As I was starting to buy cards on eBay I came across the Typhoo set and found them quite interesting but the fact they were selling at over a tenner each put me off. Then I came across this one and thought ‘oo’ need to buy that one sometime. There are a few Scotland players featured such as Willie Henderson, Denis Law, Billy McNeill, Dave Mackay and others, however, this is the only one with a player with a Scotland strip on.

The strip itself is quite nostalgic as I received this for Christmas; I think when I was five and six and used to imagine that I was Alan Gilzean, my Scotland hero at the time. Funny enough I grew up to be just like him i.e. bald! As I say it was a Christmas gift but this is one I actually tried on before the big day. I seem to remember it was my older brother Andy who figuratively killed Santa Claus for me with particular glee. I probably didn’t believe him when he told me Santa didn’t exist and so he took me into my parents room and showed me were my gifts were hidden and of course with minutes I had decided, bugger the whole Santa thing and had the strip on. I do wonder if my parents ever realised but the reality is that kids at five aren’t generally bright at folding away gifts in their packaging so I guess they did.

Back to the card and Colin Stein. There are not too many footballer cards of Stein as a Rangers player, in fact I can only think of one. I do wonder if he tried to get more than the tenner A&BC paid in copyright to players for their image and that’s why.

The card describes Colin as having a rumbustious style and of the type that goalkeepers least like playing against. Like Andy Gray, Colin was full tilt and I don’t think too many keepers liked the idea of him bearing down on them. Overall, Colin played 21 times for Scotland; 17 as a Rangers player and 4 as a Coventry one scoring 10 goals although six of them came against Cyprus; a bit like Steven Fletcher who has 8 with six of them against Gibraltar.

 

David Stuart