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Graeme Souness details the poor standard of food at Scotland's hotel during Mexico 1986

Graeme Souness outlined just what went wrong with Scotland at the World Cup in Mexico in 1986, hi...



Graeme Souness details the poo...
Soccer

Graeme Souness details the poor standard of food at Scotland's hotel during Mexico 1986

Graeme Souness outlined just what went wrong with Scotland at the World Cup in Mexico in 1986, his relationship with Alex Ferguson and the reason behind him losing a stone and a half during the competition.

The former Scottish footballer discussed just how difficult it is to play at 7,000 feet altitude without the proper acclimatisation but what made it worse was the food he had been given upon arrival at their team hotel in Mexico.

"Our planning was poor. I was always a fit lad but I found it really, really hard," Souness remembers.

"When we we played what was West Germany in the second game, I'd been struggling to eat out there because the very first meal when we had arrived, I had asked for an omlette, so we were in this hotel in Mexico, it wasn't a great hotel and I was sitting at the table and the girl brings the bread basket and on the bread basket there's bread with little spots on it and on closer examination.. it was chicken shit on the bread.

"From not eating very well before that and when we played West Germany and that was 100 degrees and 7,000 feet and I was a stone and a half under where I normally played."

He says he never made peace with Fergie for dropping him in the last game but he understood that he was 33 at the time, had lost untold amounts of weight in such a short time and had not done well in the previous games to justify playing against Uruguay but felt the game was "tailor-made" for him.

South Americans are always cynical and Souness believes he would have been able to handle that better than his replacement for the game.

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