Quintin Jardine's blog

A story. When I was little, my dad, who was a teacher, was heavily involved with schools football, at local and national level. I think he was a selector for a while, as there were a couple of occasions when he went to away games in England with the Scotland boys’ team.

One of those, in the early 1960s, was with the senior squad, the Under-16s, to Wembley. I might have been six or seven at the time, but I remember this as clear as if he was still telling the tale.

My dad was a reserved man. He observed, he praised sparingly, and he never went overboard. Apart from one occasion.

He came back from the Wembley trip absolutely raving about one of the English boys, who was he declared, the best footballer he had ever seen, any age. He never changed that opinion. A couple of years later, that boy was a full international. And only a few years after that, he died in the Munich disaster.