When asked for his comment after the game, Alex James simply beamed a smile and said, "We could have had ten!" Back in Scotland the pubs did rather well and the newspapers were not slow in piling praise on the heads of those little no-hopers of the Scottish side.
The Glasgow Herald was a typical example when they said: "Want of height was looked upon as a handicap to the Scots' attack, but the Scottish forwards had the ability and skill of such high degree as to make their physical shortcomings of little consequence." Scotland skipper Jimmy McMullan took time out from the after match celebrations to comment on the way he saw the game: I want to emphasise that all our forwards are inherently clever. ... But I wish to say that the English tactics were wrong. The Saxon wing-halves paid more attention to the wingers than the inside forwards – therefore the latter were given a lot of space. It is a common thing in England to let wing halves, and not fullbacks, mark the wingers. It doesn’t pay and I don’t know why they pursue it. It was a gentlemanly comment, as he did not belittle the English effort or try to elevate his own side to the abnormal, but merely made an observation which was probably just about right. By adopting those tactics, England placed themselves at the mercy of a much-underrated Scotland attack. The rain made matters worse for England too. It was also a historic day in the story of Wembley Stadium. In a booklet published by the stadium owners in 1945, the story is told like this: English football fans shudder when the year 1928 is mentioned. The traditional enemy, Scotland came to Wembley and gave the Sassenachs a first class lesson in the art of playing football. So much so that, to this day, that Scottish team is still spoken of as 'The Wembley Wizards'. All Scotland seemed to come to town for that match, and the fans actually brought their own scaling ladders to make sure of getting into the stadium. As a result of this, Wembley afterwards became a barbed wire fortress. The King and Queen of Afghanistan were among the mammoth crowd who saw the Scots make rings around England. It was Scotland’s day without a doubt. Alan Morton, Glasgow Rangers' Wee Blue Devil, and Alex Jackson, then with Huddersfield and later with Chelsea, were on the Scottish wings and the English defenders just couldn’t do anything about them. Also of course there was the great Alex James – he of long pants who rarely scored a goal but made openings for hundreds.
Ivan Sharpe, the ex-player and writer, commented on the victory for the
Athletic News: "England were not merely beaten. They were bewildered – run to a standstill, made to appear utterly inferior by a team whose play was as cultured and beautiful as I ever expect to see." More than 30 years later he was still writing the same thing, adding that he had never seen a performance to match it in all the time that he had been watching football. The Wizards were never selected again en masse for an international match.
Tom Bradshaw never played another game for Scotland, despite effectively marking Dixie Dean out of the game. Bradshaw was the last surviving member of the victorious Scotland side, dying in February 1986 at the age of 82, four months after the death of goalkeeper Jack Harkness at the age of 78. The last survivor from the losing side was Joe Hulme, who died in September 1991 at the age of 87. ==Notes==