Читать книгу Football Extreme - Rob Crossan - Страница 10
ОглавлениеHow Stirling Albion scored more goals in one professional British game than anyone else in the 20th century
On the face of it, there wasn’t a lot of glamour involved in a Scottish Cup tie between Stirling Albion, at that time languishing in the bottom division of the Scottish league, and Selkirk of the Border Amateur League in December 1984.
Supporters of Albion had little cause to believe the game would be a shoo-in. They’d won only four games all season and were understandably nervous at the prospect of playing an unknown quantity. Little were they to know just how easy it would be.
Selkirk, it should be said, were doomed from the start. The small team from an eastern Scottish town were forced to field their reserves on that fateful day. The first team had, due to financial problems, temporarily folded and so the Selkirk Vics were promoted to take over first-team duties and allow the club to keep its place in the Scottish Cup. They probably wish they hadn’t bothered.
A mere 371 spectators turned up on a freezing December afternoon to see Alex Smith’s side rack up a comfortable 5-0 advantage by half time. It was something of a surprise to the gaffer. His scouting team had been to watch Selkirk only a few weeks before, and in that match the minnows had raced into an early 3-0 lead. This kind of total capitulation wasn’t meant to be on the cards at all.
Whatever happened in the Selkirk dressing room at half time is probably best left to the imagination, as in the second 45 minutes they fell apart in a way that has never been repeated. As Stirling went on the rampage, scoring roughly once every three minutes, textile worker Richard Taylor, Selkirk’s hapless keeper, let in another fifteen goals. Yes, you read that right. Fifteen.
As the mud on the Annfield pitch became increasingly boggy, the Selkirk players seemed to almost disappear in the encroaching gloom. Willie Irvine scored five and winger Dave Thompson scored seven. Eight different players got on the score sheet for Stirling by the time the 90 minutes were up in the most extreme British football score of the 20th century. The final result was that poor old Selkirk lost by a staggering twenty goals to nil.
Pilgrimage to the site of this ultimate extreme result doesn’t give much of a sense of what it must have been like on that chilly afternoon. Annfield was sold off to become a housing development in the early 1990s. Stirling still rattle around in the lower reaches of the Scottish league while the Selkirk manager on that fateful day, Jackson Cockburn, took probably the only sensible measure after the worst day of his club’s sporting life. He emigrated to Qatar.
Selkirk did eventually recover from their financial plight, however, and now play in the East of Scotland League. But, a quarter of a century on, Cockburn still feels the scars. ‘Every year I wish that some team will win 21-0 and take the record away from me,’ he said in an interview in 2005. ‘You can’t take away the fact that it was the worst result of the 20th century. I just wish it had never happened.’
DID YOU KNOW?
When Dundee Harp beat Aberdeen Rovers 35-0 in a Scottish Cup first round tie on 12 September 1885, everyone must have believed they had witnessed a record score that wouldn’t be beaten for years. But, incredibly, on the same day and in the same competition Arbroath beat Bon Accord 36-0 – and that is still the biggest winning margin in British football history.
