Just Look At This Face

It may only come around every four years, but boy does the World Cup bring some rich pickings with it.

Still, now that England have finished embarrassing themselves, you’ll be wanting some other World Cup related entertainment to pass the time and fear not – we have a recommendation.

A new quarterly football ebook, “Just Look At His Face” has just been launched, and edition one is a World Cup special.

“Just Look At His Face” specialises in interviews with the great and the good from football’s rich history, and this first issue is crammed with them, including an interview with our own Craig Brown.

Craig looks back at his time with the Scottish national team, most notably as manager in the 1998 campaign, from the rigours of qualification and “one team in Tallinn” to the nightmare of playing second fiddle to the competition’s opening ceremony in Paris.

There’s plenty more in there too including an interview with Poland’s Jan Tomaszewski on how Poland ended England’s World Cup hopes at Wembley in ’73, Jan Molby on the great Danes of ’86, Cliff Jones on Wales’ sole World Cup in 1958, Claudio Reyna on the growth of the USA as a footballing power and the likes of Ray Wilson, Maurice Norman and Tom Finney on England’s trials and tribulations from 1950 to 1962. There’s even a piece on why Brazil’s World Cup triumph of 1970 was an even greater achievement than the moon landings of a year before.

There’s 41,000 words of interviews, insight and intelligence while they’re still allowed, so fill the rest of the summer with some quality reading matter.

You can download it as ePub, Mobi or pdf file for as little as £1 from www.justlookathisface. com/download And you can follow on twitter @ohlookathisface

Still not convinced? How about a taster from the interview with Craig Brown then? Here we go… “Be careful what you wish for” is an adage that football fans with an inky fetish would do well to have tattooed on their forearm for while the thought of change always seems to hold so much promise of a brave new world, the reality can very often turn sour.

Take the case of the Scottish nation. Once upon a time, they were regular diners at the groaning table of major international tournaments, barely ever failing to RSVP when the biannual beanfeasts came around. But in the 21st century? The Tartan Army take their summer holidays at home these days thank you.

Over the course of 16 long years, Scotland’s supporters have had time to reflect upon a golden age that took them all the way from 1974 to 1998 an era that came to its conclusion in a World Cup that the Scots had the privilege to open – not that you’d be wise putting it that way to their then manager Craig Brown.

“The opening ceremony is a menace, it really is. There are so any things going on before your game, obviously the stadium, the pitch, is being used for the ceremony, so you can’t get into your work, players can’t warm up properly.

“They had an indoor area which was ok, but it isn’t the same as getting out on the pitch, getting a feel for it, for the stadium, for the atmosphere, and you’re just waiting for it all to be over so you can get on and do your job, so it does contribute to a few additional nerves I’d say.

“I’m certainly not blaming that because both sides go through it, but we lost a goal early on, which was unlike us, just four minutes in, and it came from a corner which was very unlike us too. It wasn’t a clean header, but it went in and to find yourself a goal down to Brazil, the holders, after four minutes is the last thing you want.

“Nobody can say for definite, and I’m not looking for excuses, but if we’d had a proper warm up, it might have helped. We took a good deal of pride in our warm up, we prepared thoroughly, physically and mentally and we were always switched on right from the start of games.”

While Scotland’s football team was in good nick going into qualifying for France ‘98, the same could not be said of the national stadium, Hampden Park. The giant footballing bowl had long since reached the end of its natural life and following the catalogue of stadium disasters that disfigured the 1980s, the decision to rebuild it had finally been taken. For World Cup qualification, it was out of commission.

“The anomaly for that qualification was that we had no national stadium and therefore we had to take games around the country to different stadia in different cities, though we obviously also played at Ibrox and at Celtic Park. In some respects, that was helpful because we created very strong atmospheres, most notably at Celtic Park because it’s a much tighter stadium than the old Hampden, and I felt that intimidated nations such as Latvia.

“We played Estonia at Rugby Park and then Belarus at Pittodrie and I do like the idea of taking the national team out to the nation. With less attractive countries such as those as visitors, there was always a question of whether we could get supporters to come and fill a place like Ibrox, but by going to Kilmarnock and Aberdeen, it pretty much guaranteed that we would have full houses and again, that intimidated those two countries I felt.

“Of course, you would always rather play at the national stadium – and fill it! – but in the circumstances we faced at the time, I felt we made good decisions as to who we played where. Latvia was the final fixture and we chose to take that to Celtic Park because of the atmosphere and the place was duly packed that night which helped us enormously.

“Looking back, the key game was the 1-0 home win over Sweden when Jim Leighton gave a superb performance for us. Jim is a Scotland legend of course, he played 91 games for his country and posted 45 clean sheets which is some record by any standards. He’s not playing in goal for Italy or Germany, he did that with Scotland and so that is a quite remarkable statistic.”

There’s plenty more from Craig in the first edition of “Just Look At His Face” available from www.justlookathisface.com/download

This article originally appeared in RedMatchDay Issue 01