george-young

First posted on Facebook on October 27th, 2016

Born on this day in 1922 was Scotland and Rangers legend George Young. George played for Scotland from 1946 to 1957 and was Captain an incredible 48 times in his 54 cap career. In terms of the World Cup, George is perhaps one of the really unlucky Scotland players. In 1950 despite actually qualifying he was denied along with his teammates a place in Brazil 1950 as in a bout of hubris the SFA had declared they would only go as the Home International Champions; a defeat to England would see the Scots placed runners up which would have been good enough to qualify but the SFA would have none of it; so ‘Corky’ and the rest of the team stayed at home.
1954 and Scotland Qualified. Whoo-hoo! However his club Rangers, refused to release him and others to travel and so George embarked on a North American tour with his club side whilst his National side were playing in Switzerland.
He would play in the opening two games of the 1958 qualifying; two victories against Spain at Hampden and Switzerland in Basle where he played his last Scotland game.
George passed away in 1997 at the age of 74. To this day he still holds the record for most games as Scotland captain. The top ten are as follows;
George Young (48)
Billy Bremner (39)
Gary McAllister (32)
Darren Fletcher (30)
Barry Ferguson (28)
Graeme Souness and Roy Aitken (both on 27)
Archie Gemmill (23)
Colin Hendry (22)
and finally Scott Brown with (21).
Of course, the shortest Captaincy is the unofficial 3 seconds or so of John Collins in the game that never was in Estonia.

David Stuart