WEMBLEY. The word sends a chill down my spine. It evokes the sort of fear one would feel if one was standing naked in a puddle on a muddied pitch with a primeval centre-half bearing down with baleful intent. And that has only happened to me once.
Wembley has happened to me many times. I am not speaking here of the trips down to watch cup finals, grab the Scots players and type up some nonsense. No, I am talking about Wembley. The biennial trip to London to watch Scotland take on England.
It was once a rite of passage for the young Scotsman, a tradition for the older man. It was, in those days, an almost exclusively male jaunt. Women were simply too intelligent to subject themselves to the rigours of a trip that would have made a commando wince.
There were basically three ways of travelling to Wembley: car, train and bus. Planes were only used by players, press, SFA and bookies. It was car, train or bus for the rest of us.
It is, perhaps, best to gloss over the bus trips. These were journeys of such decrepitude that the buses should have been destroyed on return rather than cleaned. The journey on such transports could only be endured with the aid of a carry-out of Mount Everest proportions. This, of course, consequently produced its own problems.
Suffice to say that I ventured to Wembley once by bus. I’d rather watch a boxset of Last of the Summer Wine than do so again. I’d rather eat a boxset of Last of the Summer Wine than do so again.
The train was similarly chaotic, though it did have toilets. Well, at least at the start of the journey. Indeed, the toilets were used in a non-traditional fashion. The cliche is that is where passengers without tickets hide. On the Wembley Express – or the Rail Line to Hell – it was where the ticket collector hid, traumatised by the prospect of posing such a rude inquiry as “have ye paid?” to a horde that had been rejected by Genghis Khan on grounds of raucous unruliness and wilful insubordination.
On one trip from Stirling in the 1970s, I did indeed pay my fare. I spent the rest of the journey being treated as a prize exhibit with fellow passengers being brought to my carriage to witness The Eejit Who Paid.
The journey, of course, was long and tedious. The first five hours were spent reaching Motherwell as everyone had to have a shot at the emergency cord. The train thus staggered in unconscious imitation of its soon to be unconscious passengers. Police left the train with the speed of rats with a lower berth on the Titanic.
Most of the passengers then contented themselves with tugging ring-pulls from cans. There is an equation that always equals chaos: drunk people drinking more alcohol +plus time = mayhem. The train eventually arrived in Kings Cross or Euston – though it could have been both – to be welcomed by the London constabulary who treated the Scottish support with open arms and soon to be closed cells.
To be fair, the polis were fairly tolerant. They had to be. A quick glance around fellow marauders confirmed the belief that all could face arrest for a variety of offences ranging from breach of the peace to being in possession of a demented psyche in a built-up area. The polis, showing an understanding of brutal realities, simply lifted the worst and herded the others towards a series of bars.
The train back defies description, though Dante once had a good go at it.
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