Paul Rouse: Denis Law stood for the swagger and style of Scottish identity
YOUNG TURKS: Denis Law, then of Manchester City, with rock star Rod Stewart, both are holding a Royal Banner of Scotland in 1974. Pic: B. Gomer/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
More than 30 years ago, I saw Denis Law walking down a Manchester street. It was a sight that was both normal and not at all normal.
He looked different than anyone else on that street. He was not a big man and he was not expensively dressed, but he exuded charisma and the sort of confidence that was real and likeable. He walked with a lightness of foot that left it easy to imagine how elusive he was in the penalty area.
There was a smile and a word for anyone who wanted it. And almost everyone he met on the street said hello to him. It was all unhurried and gracious.
Even in the early 1990s, the fame of Denis Law was something truly immense. He was renowned as one of the greatest forwards ever to play for one of the biggest soccer clubs in the world. This was enough in itself to make of the world a goldfish bowl.
It cannot have been straightforward to adjust to that reality – and then to live it for decades.
He played 11 years for United. At his peak he was part of an attack that also featured George Best and Bobby Charlton. He scored some 237 goals in 404 appearances and won the European Cup and two league titles. He claimed the Ballon d’Or in 1963.
On that day, on that street at least, Denis Law looked like a man who was entirely comfortable in himself.
Part of that comfort was a deep loyalty to Scotland. He may have lived and worked outside the country of his birth for all of his adult life, but there was no denying his Scottishness.
He loved playing for Scotland. He was their all-time leading goalscorer, scoring 30 times in 55 internationals.
He was hugely admired by Pele who wished he was Brazilian, was considered the most intelligent footballer Bill Shankley saw play, and was deemed by Alex Ferguson to be his hero.
Law was ferocious in his commitment to play for Scotland – not least when they played against England. He could not watch the 1966 World Cup final, choosing to play golf rather than see England win. As he reached the final green, he was met by jubilant English members of the club. He later wrote in an autobiography that it was “the blackest day” of his life.
This story is recounted in a brilliant article by Professor Richard Holt, entitled 'King over the Border: Denis Law and Scottish Football'.
As Holt notes, however, for all that he was devoted to Scotland, Law was the subject of significant criticism from the Scottish press. In 1965, for example, the demanded in block capital letters that “LAW MUST BE LEFT OUT OF THE SCOTLAND SIDE TO PLAY ITALY”, and added the jibe that no man, no matter how famous, was bigger than the national team.
The logic of dropping their best player was that he didn’t labour with sufficient dedication to the cause. Running through the argument – which filled most of Law’s career – was the sense that he was too long in England. Back after the Scotland’s traumatic 9-3 defeat to England in 1961, there were also calls to drop Law, as one of the men who played in the English league – the argument was that only players who played their club football in Scotland should be selected: 'LET US STAND OR FALL BY AN ALL-TARTAN COLLECTION'.
A clear pattern emerged, as Richard Holt wrote: “He was blamed almost every time Scotland was defeated in an important game.”
Crucially, the ambiguity about Law was a reflection of a wider confusion about what exactly it meant to be Scottish and how Scottishness should be manifest.
In the same year – 1992 – that I saw Denis Law in Manchester, there was a General Election in the United Kingdom. Despite the fact that the Labour Party were led by a brilliant and thoroughly decent man in Neil Kinnock, the Conservative Party won the election and were returned to power once again (having held it since 1979).
The other great losers as well as the Labour Party were the nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales.
For the Scottish National Party, their dismal result was epitomised by the fact that their deputy leader Jim Sillars failed to win a seat.
In the aftermath of his defeat, Sillars had a right cut at the many supporters of the Scottish national soccer team in his constituency who had failed to vote for him. He said: “Scotland has too many ninety minute patriots whose nationalist outpourings are expressed only at major sporting events.” David Lloyd George had said something similar about Welsh football lovers in the 1890s.
Both men were making a point which reveals how sport and identity were important to how the United Kingdom functioned from the late 19th century onwards.
There was no doubting who the dominant force in the union was: England increasingly enjoyed the greater share of population, wealth and political power.
It was sport which often seemed to offer the only really successful assertion of identity. For the Welsh it was rugby and for the Scottish it was soccer that sat at the very heart of popular national consciousness and the idea of a distinct cultural identity.
The extent to which this was true was related to how sport was a channel for collective resentment and it thrived as a means of asserting not just difference but equality.
In terms of Scottish soccer, Denis Law made plain the belief that on a football field at least, Scots were at least the equal of the English. Or at least that they should be.
It had been that way from the late 19th century. When soccer truly emerged as the most important game in the land, many early professionals in England were Scottish and so were many of the first managers.
For 100 years, they played England on an annual basis and the two countries were more or less even on head-to-heads until the 1970s.
Massive crowds appeared at those matches. Crowds of up to 120,000 came to the game at Hampden and from the 1920s Scots started to travel to Wembley in enormous numbers.
By 1930, some 30,000 were making the trip south, usually on trains. “Wembley Clubs” saw men save a shilling a week to finance the trip down. They were waved off from the station by their families as if they were soldiers going to war.
And the banners flown referenced Bannockburn, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce.
There was also a swagger and style to how the Scots played. The English team that won the World Cup in 1966 was derided for being ‘Ramsay’s Robots’, for their lack of style, for privileging organisation over talent.
Law chimed in with this. He noted that England had only won the World Cup at home, that they hadn’t had to qualify.
And when Scotland beat England in Wembley in 1967 (declaring themselves ‘Unofficial World Champions’ on the back of it), with Denis Law among the goalscorers, he was ecstatic, referencing it as the best day of his life. The Scottish press was at one with him on this occasion: newspaper wrote: “Now we know how William Wallace felt after his success at Stirling.”
