Two defeats in two games left Scotland needing to beat Uruguay to advance to the last 16 and Ferguson with a decision to make.
Captain Souness, by then 33, had struggled with the heat and the altitude and, after a meeting of the coaches, it was agreed he would be left out. The manager went to the midfielder’s room to break the news, which was apparently met without fuss.
A couple of months before, it had been announced Souness would be leaving Sampdoria to revolutionise Rangers. A Rangers side that would threaten Ferguson’s Aberdeen and a Dundee United team represented in Mexico by five players.
Neither Miller nor Bannon recalls any tensions as a consequence, although the former suggests the dynamic had shifted given more than half the squad were Scotland-based, and the latter recalls whispered conversations between the captain and defender Richard Gough, who would arrive at Ibrox the next summer.
“His room was two doors down from mine and I chatted to him a lot,” says Rough. “He told me he was trying to sign Chris Woods and Terry Butcher, who were both in the England squad, and I just laughed.
“But you could see he was really trying to learn about the Scottish game.”
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