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Intro:
Detective Inspector McVicar is doing a little
sleuthing in Edinburgh's central library.
He is looking through the sports pages of
newspapers dating from December 1969.
McVicar is interested in a dastardly deed at
Murrayfield that might have had recent murderous
consequences...
McVicar
was looking only at the back pages, at the
sport.
He smiled at what he found.
It
was like a breath of fresh air.
He
had forgotten so many things.
Like the fact that, in these far off days
when rugby was an amateur sport, players’
initials appeared in the team listings, along
with their surnames.
It was like a school team, he thought,
even when it was a side chosen to represent a
county or a nation.
He remembered the names – and the
initials - that had almost been erased from his
memory: T C Munro; F H Crawford; A R G
Henderson; and M A Brown.
The Courier’s rugby correspondent at
that time was a man called Russell Weir.
He wrote of the players as if they were
school pupils, as if it was his job to compose
notes for their end-of-year report cards.
“Henderson is a persuasive passer.
He has belligerent pace and a keen
appetite for hard work.”
That’s what Weir had written in his
preview of the Final Trial, a match in which
Henderson was to start for the Possibles
- the second-stringers.
He would be facing Brown, the man in
possession in Scotland's national side.
Weir’s verdict on Brown was that “his basic
rugby grammar is sound although his kicking can
be mercurial.”
“For “mercurial” read
“shite””, thought McVicar.
© David
Gray |
