JIMMY Scoular, who has died at the age of 73, was a wing-half of fearsome physical presence, astonishing durability, and no little skill.
His football career started in Tommy Walker country at Livingston Station, although the outbreak of war meant that he would never play senior football in Scotland.
Called up to the Royal Navy, he first made his name in Services Football in the Portsmouth area, where he turned out for Gosport. This quickly brought him to the attention of the Portsmouth club itself, so quickly in fact that he played for both Gosport and Portsmouth in the FA Cup competition of 1946, the registration rules being rather lax in that first post-war tournament.
Success came early to him and he became a member of the Portsmouth side that won the English League first division in consecutive years, 1949-50. That Portsmouth side contained another wing-half, Jimmy Dickinson, who would also go on to play, as did Scoular, in more than 600 league games.
Scoular personified the ''no nonsense no stars here'' approach of the Fratton Park club, which lifted successive championships without possessing any players who could have been said to be touched with the greatness of the immortals.
By the early 1950s, his consistency had brought him to the notice of the Scottish International Selectors. His inclusion in the Scotland side however, was not universally applauded. It was felt that his tackling too often trespassed from the hard but fair to the brutal. This was, too, the time when the inclusion of centre forwards such as Billy Houliston, in pursuit of ''rummle 'em up'' tactics, created critical opposition.
Yet an argument could be made for the fact that these players were sacrificed on the altar of national strategy.
Certainly Scoular was no mere spoiler and his distribution could be breathtakingly effective. He won nine caps, all of them with Portsmouth and, unusually for his time, the great bulk of them were against continental opposition.
In 1953, a transfer fee of #22,250 secured his removal to St James's Park where for the next eight years he would be a most influential member of the Newcastle United side in the company of such other famous Scots as Ronnie Simpson and Bobby Mitchell.
All three were in the Newcastle side which defeated Manchester City 3-1 in the FA Cup final at Wembley in 1955, Scoular, indeed, being man of the match.
In his combative midfield role, he was miraculously a near-ever present, perhaps because opponents used often to opt out of tackling him when in full flight. He specially relished away games against such as Blackpool and Preston North End, where he could measure himself against such as Stanley Matthews and Tom Finney.
In January, 1961, he moved to Bradford Park Avenue as their player coach and in June, 1964, he became a manager proper with Cardiff City. He stayed at Ninian Park for what would now be regarded as a long nine years and then went on to complete an unusual Welsh treble, managing the now non-league Newport County before acting as a part-time scout for Swansea Town.
His worth can best be judged by his then rivals for the wing-half positions, the elegant Ian McColl, of Rangers, and the tirelessly bustling Bobby Evans, of Celtic.
If he was more distinguished at club level, this could well have been because the club managers he worked for understood him better than the international selectors who picked him to do a specific negative job and then discarded him for doing it.
Bob Crampsey
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