This piece was written by Scott Murray for The Blizzard Issue 50.

I was nine and a half years old in the summer of 1982, and I’d love nothing more than to say that the first single
I ever bought with my own pocket money was something by the Human League, Adam Ant or ABC. Sadly that’s not something I’m able to do. The identity of the seminal seven-inch platter that launched a little boy’s lifelong love of pop? ‘We Have A Dream’ by the Scotland World Cup squad featuring John Gordon Sinclair and BA Robertson. Yes, OK, I know, though a collaboration between 22 half-cut footballers, a teenage actor who couldn’t hold a note and a piss-poor Ian Dury pasticheur ended up much better than it had any right to be.

This purchase was the culmination of a lengthy passive-aggressive negotiation between my mother and me regarding national identity. I was born in the south of England to parents from the very north of Scotland. Football was beginning to become a thing for me and Mum thought it more accurate, realistic and beneficial to my general state of happiness going forward if I threw my lot in with the English. She probably had a point, and I was issued with an England pencil case to take to junior school; similar brazen propaganda was pasted in jaunty cartoon wallpaper format next to my bed.

Not only do snaggle-toothed drawings of a grinning Mick Mills, vaguely sinister Phil Neal and strangely youthful and uninjured-looking Kevin Keegan haunt my dreams and every waking hour to this very day, they were never going to do the trick at the time either. Not when dad was undermining the whole brainwashing enterprise by telling fantastical tales of heroes with evocative,  awe-inspiring names like Slim Jim, Jinky, Deedle, the Lawman and King Kenny. All possessed awesome superpowers. Amazing close ball control! Wonderful passing ranges! Sharp-eyed shooting! Unnaturally low centres of gravity! Attitudes to authority and the English that could best be described as ambivalent! A fat arse! Factor in a few pairs of hollow legs and there was no contest. It was an absolute rout.

Even so, I can say with good conscience that I still gave England a fair chance to win my heart. A pal had a copy of the long player ‘This Time: The Album’ (K-Tel) which, among the oompah paeans to Ron Greenwood’s 22 and lumpen entreaties to fly the flag, contained some spoken-word beat poetry by Ray Clemence. ‘The Road to Spain’ told the story, in surround-sound monotone, of how the team nearly blew it against Romania, Switzerland and Norway. “I know that we didn’t qualify in the way we would have liked, but hopefully that’s in the past,” it concluded, a rousing call-to-arms that barely moved the needle on Iain Duncan Smith’s patented quiet-man-o-meter. Miserable entitled bastards! Compare and contrast to ‘We Have A Dream’, performed on Top of the Pops by a Jim Kerr lookalike in a tartan suit screaming in the possessed style at the top of his youthful lungs over a lilting, yearning melody about his John Robertson-induced night fevers, and what’s a nine-and-a-half year old to do? It was funny and self-deprecating, which suited me down to the ground. Once again, England, you blew your chance.

The grooves on that gorgeous single were nearly worn out by the time the tournament came round. The next couple of seven-inches I chose from the rack at WH Smith were given a good whirl as well: ‘Matador’, the upcoming ITV World Cup theme, its jaunty melody carried along by that most Spanish of sounds, the synthesised pan pipes, and the BBC’s choice, “’Jellicle Ball’ from Cats, strings swirling upwards in anticipatory crescendo, Andrew Lloyd Webber proving, like BA Robertson before him, that stopped cocks can be right twice a day. These weren’t exactly cool pop picks, but the upcoming World Cup was going to be my first all in, and everything pumping out of the TV seemed to be geared towards it. I had no option to become thoroughly obsessed. There’d be plenty of time for ‘Mirror Man’, ‘Goody Two Shoes’ and ‘All of My Heart”’ later in the year.

So, anyway, on the subject of blowing it.

Now let’s get this straight: nobody in their right mind was making any claim for Scotland at España 82. Lessons had been learned from the Argentinian fiasco, which had thankfully unravelled hubristically without my cognisance, my concerns back then more Hartley Hare and Bagpuss than Alan Rough and Teófilo Cubillas. Admittedly the B-side of ‘We Have A Dream’ was called ‘Wrap Up The Cup (We’re gonna take it away!)’ but nobody took BA Robertson seriously, his involvement with Swap Shop supergroup Brown Sauce (Cheggers on Fender Strat, Noel Edmonds on drums) saw to that. Realism was the order of the day.

Unless you were nine and a half years old that is. Scotland did their best in Spain. They beat New Zealand as expected, if not by a margin that would give them leverage later in the group. They went ahead against the mighty Brazil through David Narey’s toe-poke. They drew against the USSR. They went home. I’ve been assured I definitely watched Alan Hansen and Willie Miller’s silent-movie routine live, but I don’t remember doing so and all memory of it is a retrofit. I do however vividly recall sitting at the dinner table afterwards, all snot and tears running down the dark blue Scotland-themed top my mum had got with tokens from the Sun newspaper. Onside now with my choice, she had my back, like she always did. Dad ruffled my hair.

I also can’t recall any of the fun that would have been ruthlessly poked out of me in the playground the day after. Was it even a school day? No need to check, because it’s not important. I can’t in all honesty recall watching Rossi beat Brazil, Schumacher kick Battiston upside the head or Tardelli wheeling away in reckless abandon in the final. I’ve been told I did, but those seismic moments didn’t lodge themselves in the memory bank either. Not like all the tears, all the love, John Robertson handing the ball to me. Every note of a novelty single that helped me make one of the biggest decisions of my life, one that’s shaped me for better or … no, it’s certainly not been for the better. But I’m stuck with them, I still love them despite their nonsense, and I think you get the point.

A few months later, I bought the 20th- anniversary reissue of ‘Love Me Do’. That opened a door to a whole new world as well. 1982 was a good year for singles.

Scott Murray woke in the night with a fever, later going on to score the winning goal for you.