Minute-by-minute retro coverage of Group 4 gameThe Fiver: Ally’s Army on the brink of eliminationGet in touch! Email scott.murray@theguardian.com 4.56pm GMT
A defiant final roar from our “born winner”! A couple of drops remain of his signature optimism. There’ll be a couple of drops of malt downed tonight, that’s for sure, both in Mendoza and back home. Goodbye,
Argentina ‘78, we hardly knew ye. This campaign will surely go down in legend as one of the most reckless, hopeless, needlessly farcical failures in the entire history of the World Cup. Sent homeward, tae think again. Again. But hey, at least you can’t say it was boring. And maybe we’ll look back at all this carry-on with fondness given time. After all, who knows what other horrors may supersede it years to come? 4.50pm GMT
A word with Ally MacLeod, who makes sure we get the top line of his message. “It’s just one of those things.” He says this six times in a five-minute press conference. “As manager you must take the blame. I told my kids to save up to see us defend the
World Cup in
Spain but it’s not to be. When we were 3-1 up, I looked at the clock and saw there was 20 minutes and realised it might be in our hands. But you get a bit elated when it’s like that and you get caught. It’s just one of those things. If we’d played like that from the beginning, we would have won the competition.”