Carlos Borges, Danaeifard, and Cayasso: Scotland's World Cup Bogeymen
The first of those bogeymen was Carlos Borges.
He was a dynamic little winger and a prolific goalscorer, a graduate of the Penarol academy in Montevideo who was playing senior football at 14.
On 19 June, 1954, in Scotland's second game of their first World Cup, Borges scored a hat-trick for Uruguay in a 7-0 win in Basel. To this day, it's Scotland's heaviest defeat in international football.
To say they were unprepared is putting it mildly. In the heat, the Scots were wearing old-style boots, heavy cotton shirts and shorts that were ill-suited to the conditions.
"It was a shambles," recalled Tommy Docherty, who was in the Scotland team that day. Docherty was marking a guy called Juan Schiaffino, a player he knew virtually nothing about. "Nobody told me how good he was."
Had Scotland done a modicum of research they might have learned a thing or two. Not only were Uruguay reigning world champions, Schiaffino was one of their superstars, a goalscorer in the decisive match against Brazil in the 1950 finals.
Borges was the main man against Scotland, though. A tormenting presence; quick, relentless and two-footed. He scored his hat-trick inside an hour, then scored again in a 4-2 win over the England of Stanley Matthews, Nat Lofthouse and Tom Finney.
The winger went on to win a Copa America in 1956 and a Copa Libertadores in 1960, scoring the first ever goal in the competition. For that, and for one other remarkable reason, he's remembered as a hero in his homeland.
In July 1963, Borges boarded a steamship called the Ciudad de Asuncion, built in Scotland in 1929. The vessel, with 400 people on board, travelled daily across the Rio de la Plata from Montevideo to Buenos Aires.
That night of 10 July was foggy. Visibility limited.
Around 3am it crashed into the remains of a sunken Greek freighter and began to list. Shortly after, there was an explosion in the engine room. The ship was going down. Passengers began jumping into the river.
Borges was on deck as the tragedy developed. A woman recognised him and threw her three-year-old son into his arms, before sliding away to her death. "Save him for me," she shouted.
The lifeboats were crowded. With the boy in his arms, Borges scrambled on to a sheet of wood and drifted in the water for 11 hours until rescued by an Argentine ship. The following day he was there when the lad was reunited with his father. The mother was one of 70 fatalities.
Borges was haunted by the disaster. He was 31 at the time and stopped playing not long after.
Scotland were still reeling from a hiding by Peru at the 1978 World Cup when they rolled up to Cordoba to play Iran in front of a crowd of just 7,938.
Manager Ally MacLeod didn't overdo the homework, and didn't seem to take any notice that the Iranians had won the Asian Cup in 1968, 1972 and 1976. They weren't bad.
They'd lost their World Cup opener 3-0 to the Netherlands but put it down to being in awe of the Dutch. There was no danger of them being in awe of the Scots.
MacLeod's team led 1-0 through an own goal but, on the hour, Danaeifard took it round Archie Gemmill before beating Alan Rough at his near post. It was their first ever World Cup goal.
Rough thought Danaeifard was going across goal. "An all-time low," he said later.
It was MacLeod's nadir, a moment his reputation never recovered from. Failing to beat Iran was a monumental embarrassment and left Scotland needing a miracle against the Dutch which, of course, they almost achieved.
Danaeifard, a defender, played for Taj in Tehran. He'd won the first of his 17 caps only the year before. He, and others on that Iran team, have spoken about what their world looked like back then.
Iran was in political turmoil, riots destabilising the land. Security forces were coming down hard on protestors. The place was on the edge of revolution.
Since the national football team was deemed a symbol of the Shah's regime - the Shah backed them to the hilt and used them as propaganda - Danaeifard and his team-mates were allegedly subjected to death threats by radicals.
Protestors wanted to know if the players were pro Shah, the western-backed monarch, or pro-Ayatollah Khomeini, the fundamentalist Islamic cleric.
Danaeifard felt that the Shah's secret police had infiltrated their travelling party to the World Cup and was afraid to speak openly about anything.
After the finals, he returned to Tehran and the Islamic Revolution. The Ayatollah was in charge now and he saw football as a symbol of western imperialism.
The game suffered and Danaeifard headed to America where he played for the Tulsa Roughnecks for four years.
He was in the States when he heard of the death of a friend, a former team-mate and then-Iran captain, Habib Khabiri. Aged 29, and a supporter of a resistance movement, Khabiri was arrested, tortured and executed along with 40 other dissidents.
Danaeifard's story and the story of Iranian football in that era puts Scotland's disaster in 1978 into a little bit of perspective.
When we think back to Scotland playing Uruguay in 1986 and needing a win to progress, the mind's eye captures the brutality of the South Americans and the red card flashed at Jose Batista after 52 seconds.
The filth and cynicism of the Uruguayans was impossible to miss in a horrific 0-0 draw - good enough for them to go through but not enough for the Scots, who went home.
The architect of it all was manager Omar Borras - the Professor. Uruguay had many talented players - Enzo Francescoli being a gem of a footballer - but Borras believed in grit above grace. He became a reviled figure at home and abroad as Uruguay kicked, stamped and spat their way into the knockouts at Scotland's expense.
When Uruguay lost 6-1 to Denmark five days before the Scotland game, such were the death threats that his home had to be put under armed guard. Avoiding defeat against Scotland, therefore, was his priority, by any means necessary.
The aftermath of the farce in Neza was ferocious. Ernie Walker, secretary of the Scottish FA, famously called Uruguay cheats and cowards - "the scum of world football". Alex Ferguson, Scotland manager, called them a disgrace.
Borras had the extraordinary cheek of criticising referee Joel Quiniou for sending off Batista for taking out Gordon Strachan. "There was a murderer on the field today - the referee," he ranted.
Fifa banned him for Uruguay's last-16 game against Argentina, which they lost 1-0. The media savaged him. The fans were mortified by the anti-football.
Francescoli said he felt personal shame at the way the team behaved. He spoke of being ordered to chase long balls and fight aerial duels when he was built to create and attack.
Borras was sacked as an anti-hero of Uruguay football. Not that it eased Scotland's pain all that much. He just joined the list of people who have stopped them getting what they desperately want.
Costa Rica didn't exactly break a gasket when qualifying for their first World Cup in 1990. They beat Panama 3-1 on aggregate and then received a walkover against Mexico after the Mexicans infringed age eligibility rules.
Hey presto, Costa Rica were going to Italia '90.
We all know how it turned out. Juan Cayasso is an immortal, a player who means so much to people who weren't even born when he scored his country's first ever goal at a World Cup - against Scotland, of course.
He's probably the ultimate Scotland bogeyman, one of nine children, a player they called 'el Nene' - the Kid. He was the one who got the only goal at Stadio Luigi Ferraris on 11 June, 1990. Disaster for Scotland. Again.
"Children stop me in the street to greet me and say, 'you're Cayasso, the one my dad told me scored a goal in 1990'." He did and it was the reason why Scotland tumbled out of the tournament early.
Cayasso said that his goal was written in the stars. "We were playing so bad I thought we had not much chance before going to the World Cup."
He reckoned without Scotland getting the wobbles once more.
"I don't know if I remember it because I always see it on video," Cayasso said some years ago. "But I could never be prepared for that moment.
"My team-mate Claudio Jara, knocked the ball to me – we call it a taquito here. I was close to him, I step back and when he does the taquito I read it. At first, I'm like, 'oh…' I'm frightened. But then I have to react, it's at my foot.
"Jimmy (Leighton) is out. Then it hits his belly and goes over him. I turn around and look at the referee, and he's going to the centre of the field.
"First I'm frightened, then I don't believe it, then, 'yes, goal'. I had gone far away in that moment. My mind was all about Costa Rica. I wrote a book called 'The Goal from Italia 90: Destiny, Luck or Chance'. It was so crazy."
Cayasso's goal helped earn Costa Rica a place in the knockouts - they lost 4-1 to Czechoslovakia - and from the country's president, a gift of a Toyota Corolla. All the team got one.
It also won him a move to German football with Stuttgart Kickers. He won promotion to the Bundesliga with them.
Cayasso won 49 caps, but one stands above all others. Unforgettable in two different countries but very different reasons.
