Wednesday 18 August 2010

More from the diary

Saturday 2nd May
Received an envelope stuffed with cuttings from Bill Hutcheon, the editor of the Dundee Courier and Advertiser. There are no match reports just news articles and interviews from titles across the DC Thomson network. A three-part series of interviews, which appeared in The Weekly News in the early 70s, is particularly insightful and speculates that an anti-Anglo bias explains why Gilzean won so few Scotland caps. This is intriguing because Gilzean suggests in Kenny Ross's book that there were two reasons why he left Dundee for Tottenham: the first was financial, the second because he feared his international career would suffer if he remained at a club which enjoyed sporadic success.
Another notable gem is the revelation that Gilzean is not Coupar Angus's only famous son. Dr John Bain Sutherland, who after emigrating to America as a teenager in the 1920s, went on to become one the most successful coaches in American Football history as a coach of Pitt University, the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Pittsburgh Steelers. His portrait is hanging in the town's council chambers on the day Gilzean is presented with a watch for scoring the winning goal against England at Hampden in April 1964, a victory which sealed a hat trick of Scottish victories over the Auld Enemy.

Friday 8th May

I've ramped up my research on the back of reading Kenny Ross's book.
I went to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow today to look at their back catalogue of Herald newspapers. There are a number of articles of interest from the 1961-62 season. The first concerns a supporter who died in police custody after scuffles involving Dundee and Celtic supporters after the sides' league meeting on November 4th.
In an outside column at the foot of the sports pages the newspaper reports that a 20-year-old Celtic supporter, Peter Richard Gilroy, had died in custody after being arrested following one of the incidents which followed the Dundee-Celtic match at Dens Park.
Gilroy from 15 Porterfield Road, Renfrew passed away at Dundee Police Office. Mr James Clark, procurator fiscal, said he was investigating the matter. A post mortem was carried out on November 6th. His family were told of his death on Sunday 5th November after his sister Mrs Ruth Neill went to Dundee to identify the body.
The Herald gives substantially more coverage to the match, however, noting that: “The feat of Gilzean, Dundee's inside left who scored four of their goals must surely force the Scottish international selectors to reconsider their plans for the World Cup play-off match with Czechoslovakia. Not only did Gilzean, who has been an Under-23 cap, score four times but he was within inches of scoring four more and in every aspect he was the superior of [Ralph] Brand, Rangers' inside left.”
However, for whatever reason, Gilzean wasn't named in the team. The man who lined up at inside left? Rangers' Ralph Brand.
It adds significant weight to the idea that there was not just an Anglo-bias but a provincial bias, too.

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