Memory is the dodgiest of our mental faculties. You appreciate this fact as you get older and short-term memory becomes a trial and often disappears. Now, where was I?
Curiously, some old memories become sharper in focus, and things that happened in the dim and distant past can appear in the mind as if they had happened yesterday.
Smartphones are a fabulous aide-memoire, but not everything that has ever happened in sport is in the archives and not every archive is available to the public – which reminds me, when are we ever going to get that Scottish rugby museum?
This weekend will see the second ‘half’ of the Edinburgh Rugby v Glasgow Warriors contest for the 1872 Cup, and while some disagree, this really is the oldest ‘inter-city’ match in the world. This match at Murrayfield is also the best example possible of a full-scale trial for the Scotland squad for the 2024 Guinness Six Nations which begins in just a few weeks’ time.
Try as I might, I can’t recall every scoreline of all the international trial matches that I watched, but I do remember my impressions of several such games........