The World Cup and Dundee United

An exciting week as my team Dundee United’s World Cup involvement continues. United’s formidable Slovakian goalkeeper Dusan Pernis has celebrated the club’s glorious Scottish cup win by sitting stoically on the Slovakian bench for his nation’s matches. He might not have made it onto the grass yet but whispers from the Slovakian camp suggest he has been the best performer in training and a really good guy to have around – though that information is offered with the caveat that I’ve not heard any whispers from the Slovakian camp and I’m not sure how I would go about doing so.

As Dusan spends his days quietly going about his business in training and geeing up the rest of the Slovakian lads my thoughts turned to United on another occasion. While I sat in sunny Dundee watching Portugal and Brazil play out one of the greatest games in World Cup history, my mind drifted to the strange story of Dundee United and Josimar.

Josimar, many will remember, was a rampaging Brazilian full back who was one of the stars of the 1986 World Cup and memorably sent this forty-yard howitzer past the despairing hands of Pat Jennings. His performances attracted international attention, presumably including a number of leading British clubs and so it was somewhat surprising that two years after the tournament it was United who made their move for the Brazilian.  

Even now it seems a little hallucinatory, and as I said it’s been a real scorcher today in Dundee, so I have just located this Glasgow Herald article from the time. Emil Pinheiro, the much respected Club Botafogo Vice-President, delivers the killer line – “We have had a formal offer for Josimar from the Scottish club Dundee United”. To be fair there’s no word on the facial expression that Pinheiro was making at the time but the evidence is there for the boo boys to see.

Over the years I’ve heard plenty of United fans insist that Josimar also appeared in a kilt in a Scottish tabloid before the move fell through, though Google has failed me in that regard. Either way, Josimar went to Seville instead and a few years later was nicked for possessing cocaine. We don’t need that kind of stuff in Dundee, the effects of the city’s Cheeseburger Wars of the 1980s are still being felt today, but it has to be concluded that if Josimar had submitted himself to the Stalinesque rule of United’s Jim McLean he could have gone on to still greater things.

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