Читать книгу Paddy Crerand: Never Turn the Other Cheek - Paddy Crerand - Страница 7
ОглавлениеHad anyone asked me on the tram car from Gorbals Cross where I was going, I could have answered, ‘To sign for Celtic.’ Nobody did, but that didn’t diminish the excitement I felt. The occasion was a game between the first team and the reserves, and while I wasn’t playing, I was there to sign a youth contract.
I wasn’t alone. Billy McNeill and a lad named Andy Murphy also turned up to sign. Billy had already met the reserve team manager, Jock Stein, because Jock had been to his house. Jock told Billy’s parents that he wanted their son to sign for Celtic and when they agreed he said, ‘If he’s cheeky, can I skelp him one?’
I met Jock for the first time after the game. He was a former miner and someone I warmed to, just as I had done as a player. I’d watched Jock play as a no-nonsense centre-half many times as a fan. He used to knee the ball a lot when others kicked or headed it instead. He could knee the ball as far as some players could kick it. In 1953, Jock captained Celtic to Coronation Cup success, Celtic surprising many by beating Manchester United, Arsenal, and Hibernian to become unofficial champions of Britain. He was still captain a year later when Celtic won their first league championship since 1938 and their first League and Scottish Cup double since 1914. I had travelled to Easter Road to see Celtic win the league against Hibernian and I’d watched them beat Aberdeen in the cup final.
An ankle injury, which left him with a limp, forced Jock to retire from football in 1956, aged 34. He was then given the job of coaching the reserve and youth players at Celtic. But he was far more than a reserve team coach. He persuaded the Celtic board to purchase the Barrowfield training ground, because he realized the importance of preparation.
Jock came out with many sayings over the years which became famous, among them: ‘Football is nothing without fans,’ and ‘Celtic jerseys are not for second best, they don’t shrink to fit inferior players.’ There were no grand speeches for me that day. He shook my hand firmly, wished me luck and said he hoped that I had a career as a professional footballer.
I was given a provisional contract until the end of the 1957/58 season, so I still played some games for Duntocher and some for Celtic’s reserve teams, while all the time working at the shipyard.
I soon realized that Jock was far superior to any of the other coaches I’d worked with. This was no surprise because I hadn’t played at a professional level, but I’d still say that he was well ahead of his time. He’d used his experiences in football well – always watching and learning. During Scotland’s performances in the 1954 World Cup Finals, he’d witnessed the shambolic preparations and, like Roy Keane in Saipan in 2002, he didn’t like what he saw.
Jock also studied foreign tactics, particularly the Hungarians who were revolutionizing the game. As a man he was sometimes as complex as the tactics he talked about, capable of sympathy and understanding, yet also very hard when he needed to be. He was one of the few people at Celtic with a car and he used to regale us with football stories as he gave us a lift home. My only regret was that I lived so close to the training ground because I wanted to stay in his company for longer.
As a manager he started implementing his ideas. In training, he would place chairs at different positions around the pitch. To make your passing more accurate, you had to hit the chairs from distance. It doesn’t sound revolutionary now, but training at Celtic before then had amounted to long runs and practice matches. Jock would work on set plays and encourage me to hit free-kicks towards Billy McNeill’s head. We’d repeat this in the games with success. Jock employed formations that no team in Scotland had used. But he would also issue simple advice, like telling you to keep your head up all the time. He was a visionary who would use players in different positions so that you could appreciate what it was like to play from the perspective of others. The players adored him and the excellent team spirit he generated lifted a talented group of young players, many of whom were local lads, so that they were good enough to go on to become European Champions with Celtic in 1967.
Crowds of up to 10,000 would watch Celtic reserves when the first team were away and in 1958, we won the second XI Cup with an 8–2 aggregate triumph over Rangers. That was Jock’s first success as a manager. I was fortunate in that my arrival at Parkhead coincided with Jock’s managerial career taking off. There was a feeling that he was special because when we played the first team in practice matches we would often beat them because of Jock’s organization and tactics.
Other people at the club began to notice me and were pleased with my progress. Celtic offered me a professional contract worth £9 a week at the end of the 1957/58 season. It was far more than I had been earning at Fairfield’s Shipyards, but the money didn’t matter, I just wanted to leave that place as much as I wanted to play football full-time.
I started the next season still in the reserves but I was soon called up to train with the first team. The difference was that the reserve players could be identified by the red marks on their necks caused by the rubbing of their rough old jerseys, whereas the first team’s kit was newer. We used to run through the streets around Parkhead during training sessions most days and nobody paid us much attention. Back then if folk wanted to see a star they went to the cinema. Footballers were not stars, but seen as part of the community. If you became big-headed you would get slaughtered.
I made my debut against Queen of the South on 4 October 1958. We won 3–1 and I did all right. The first team manager Jimmy McGrory told me that I was in the first team on the Friday morning before the game. I was very excited and quickly told my mum, who rang all the family in Donegal. They dropped everything they were doing and travelled to Derry for the night boat to Glasgow to watch me.
Jimmy was a Celtic legend and still holds the records for the most goals scored for the club in a season and overall. He was a nice man, but he should never have been a football manager. He was an old school type who wore a cap and smoked a pipe. ‘Find the corner flag,’ that’s all he ever said to me before my debut and in subsequent games. His thinking was that there was a winger out there somewhere and if I hit the ball towards the corner flag then hopefully the winger would get it.
We had a party in the house on Thistle Street after the game to celebrate, with family and friends in attendance. There were about thirty or forty people in the house which was usually full with four people, but the night did not pass off without incident. A fight broke out near my house. It was nothing to do with us, but a few of the more curious ones including me went to see what was happening. The police turned up and arrested me. They took me to the police box on the corner of Crown Street and Cumberland Street, which was like a telephone kiosk. I was quaking with fear, but people gathered outside and protested that I had done nothing wrong. The police realized the strength of feeling and let me go.
I kept out of the gangs who divided the Gorbals into territories. It seemed to me they had nothing else to do than fight each other, while I had my football. I was never a drinker either. I never had a single pint in a Gorbals pub, despite knowing most people in them. I didn’t drink because I thought it would impair my football ability, but on a Saturday night I would go to a pub where they played Irish music with my mum and her pals. They played republican and rebel songs like ‘James Connolly’ and you’ll still hear them sung in Glasgow now.
My second Celtic game was against Falkirk and they beat us 4–3, largely thanks to a lad they had just signed from Alloa called John White. English and Scottish scouts had watched him many times at Alloa and usually went away saying that he was too frail. Falkirk went for him and they got a brilliant player whose greatness lay in his ability to drift into spaces without the opposition realizing it. He was always in space and that made it easy for team-mates to find him with a pass. However, people never really understood this ability and tended only to notice his inch perfect passes which would split open a defence and lay on a scoring chance for someone else. Maybe the fans and the journalists didn’t see it, but as an opposition player I’ll tell you that he destroyed us that day. The scouts carried on watching him, unable to make their minds up until Tottenham signed him in 1959. It was no coincidence that Spurs became a great side with White. He was an ever present in the double-winning side of 1961, scoring 18 goals.
The word Falkirk always seems to be associated with negative things in my career. I’d not been at Celtic long when we played a five-a-side tournament at Falkirk. Those tournaments were big in the 1950s, all of the main clubs would enter a team, and large crowds would watch. Back then, Falkirk was the most anti-Catholic, anti-Celtic town in Scotland and we used to get horrendous sectarian abuse, far worse than we ever got playing against Rangers.
You were not allowed to pass the ball back in your own half in five-a-side. This referee let a Falkirk player get away with it so I called him ‘a f***ing wanker’. He sent me off. Three Falkirk players came charging towards us so me and my mate Mick Jackson punched them. Mick was dismissed as well, leaving Celtic with two outfield players. Outside the changing room, a journalist from a Sunday paper had a go at me. I was raging with anger and charged towards him, something he wasn’t expecting. He looked terrified and with every justification. I had completely lost the plot. I was suspended for that and also fined by Celtic for something I wasn’t proud of.
Even though I wasn’t playing in the first team every week, I was delighted to be around heroes of mine like Charlie Tully, Bertie Peacock – who was great with the young lads – and Bobby Collins. Billy McNeill and I used to watch and listen to how the senior players operated. My cousin Charlie Gallagher played at Celtic, too. He was about a year younger than me. Charlie was a great passer of the ball with either foot – it must run in the family. Passing was my greatest skill, that and fighting.
But it wasn’t long before players started to drift away from the club. In May 1959, Charlie Tully moved to become player manager of Cork Hibs. Earlier that season, Bobby Collins had gone to Everton when he was at the peak of his game and Willie Fernie went to Middlesbrough. Celtic made a statement about the players being ‘dissatisfied’. If they had added ‘with the chairman’ that would have been the truth. There was another reason why Celtic sold Collins and Fernie. They needed money to install floodlights at Parkhead and to fix holes in the roof of the jungle stand.
Another great player, Bobby Evans, left Celtic after 535 games for the club and joined Chelsea in the summer of 1959. He had been the first Celtic captain to lift the League Cup in 1956 and he famously helped defend it a year later against Rangers in what will forever be know as the ‘7–1’ game. Celtic cited ‘personal reasons’. There were suspicions at the time of Bobby’s departure, whispers of games not being right and strange goings on. I never saw Bobby do anything wrong, but looking back I’m convinced that games were being fixed. I was a kid who was oblivious to the politics and I didn’t want to ask awkward questions, but I was present at one meeting in Glasgow with some of the senior players. I was only on the periphery, but there was talk of games being fixed. On one hand I could understand why players were being tempted not to be totally honest. Players were frustrated that the crowds were high and the wages were low. There was a lot of loose talk and allegations about where the money was going, but none of it could be substantiated. I wasn’t comfortable with what I was hearing in that meeting and left. Stories of match fixing were investigated by journalists in Glasgow, but a lack of concrete evidence meant that they were never published. For his part, Evans said that the manager had no influence over team decisions or tactics, but that the orders came from the directors’ box and were passed to the pitch by a trainer. In that sense Evans was right. I saw orders myself being given from the likes of Bob Kelly.
Bobby’s departure created a space for me in the team. We went on a tour of Ireland in the summer of 1960 and I played in every game, doing well for a large part of the tour. Billy McNeill had got into the team just before me and there was a feeling that a new wave of home grown Celts were coming through. It was exciting to be part of it, but success would take some time coming.
Some of the press bought it and coined the phrase ‘the Kelly Kids’. One journalist even suggested that we would surpass the fame of the Busby Babes, eight of whom had lost their lives at Munich two years before. You might have thought that with a headline like that Kelly, not Jimmy McGrory, was our manager. Bob Kelly was the Celtic chairman, yet such was his power at the club that he picked the team, too. And that was the crux of the perennial problem at Parkhead.
Unlike at Old Trafford, Celtic had no Matt Busby-type figure with a long term plan. At Parkhead, there wasn’t the quality among the trainers or the ambition from the board to spend money when it was needed. Jock Stein had the talent, but he was looking after the reserves and Jimmy McGrory wasn’t really football manager material.
And while Matt Busby let players serve an apprenticeship and blooded them when they were ready, Celtic did not. Players barely out of junior football were expected to play in Celtic’s first team and cover for the experienced men who had left. Worse, they were played in different positions to cover for deficiencies. Jock had done that in the reserves because it made your game better and there was room to experiment. You couldn’t take chances like that in the first team, but Celtic did. Billy McNeill played right-half, right-back, and centre-half. He was a great footballer, but it was too big an ask for most of the young lads. Young players were naturally full of promise, but they were also vulnerable to losing self-confidence when things didn’t go right. At Old Trafford, United had the correct strategy of mixing youth and experience. It also didn’t help that the team changed every week at Parkhead. In the first four months of that season, Celtic used six different outside-rights, four inside-rights, four centre-forwards, four inside-lefts, and three outside-lefts.
While some of the media talked up the Kelly Kids, by the turn of the year in the 1959/60 season Celtic were 11th in the league. After one 3–2 defeat by Dundee at Parkhead, watched by a crowd of just 10,000, the Glasgow Evening Times wrote: ‘Tonight the unpalatable fact is this – Celtic are being deserted by hosts of their fans. They believe the SS Celtic is in trouble and they have no great desire to stand on the deck of a sinking ship.’
The fans booed us off the pitch after that game and had a go at Kelly and the other directors. Legend has it that one fan, upon hearing ‘Off to Tipperary in the Morning’, over the public address system, shouted: ‘If they give me the fare I’ll not wait until the morning. I’ll be off on the Irish boat tonight.’
Supporters realized that Kelly ran the club from top to bottom, that McGrory was merely his puppet and they rightly criticized the chairman. Kelly’s response to his critics was to tell them to stay away and come back in two years when we’d have a good team. Yet such was the belief, a few good results and we’d get 50,000 back at Parkhead.
Even though I was playing more and more for the first team, I was dismayed when Jock Stein was allowed to leave the club to manage Dunfermline in 1960. I think he felt that as a non-Catholic, he would be overlooked as a future manager of the club. It was one of the few times he was wrong. Jock wanted me to go with him but I didn’t want to leave. I hoped that he would do well at Dunfermline before returning to Celtic to become first team manager. Jock’s first game at Dunfermline was against Celtic. They scored after 15 seconds and his good start proved to be no fluke as he helped them avoid relegation and created a side that were difficult to beat. Almost every week we had had the bittersweet feeling of reading how well Jock was doing.
I was a Celtic first-teamer, but my life didn’t change much away from football. I used to hang around with the same mates outside one of the pubs. The pubs shut at 9.30 pm and the saying was that you took the pavements indoors at that time because nothing was safe when people spilled out of the pubs.
Players couldn’t be seen in a pub. I was never a beer drinker, but thanks to the Gorbals’ grapevine if I’d have had one pint it would have been reported as ten by the time I got to training the following morning. There were no nightclubs at that time, although there was the Locarno dance hall where me and my pal Eddie Duffy sometimes went on a Saturday night until it finished at 11 pm. There was no booze in the place and you would get searched for alcohol before going in. The music was great – Sinatra and Dean Martin and big dance bands.
There were about twelve or thirteen of us who used to hang around on the street corner and they were all mad Celtic fans. The next day’s Daily Record – or ‘Daily Ranger’ as we called it because we thought it was biased towards Rangers – would come in about 11 pm and we would discuss the stories. Even though I played for Celtic, one lad used to take the mickey out of me for my ability. He kept saying that I couldn’t run and claimed that he was a faster runner than me. I used to laugh it off, but one night I said, ‘F**k it, do you fancy a race then?’ He said yes. I absolutely destroyed him and was back with my mates before he had got halfway. He couldn’t believe how quick I was. What did he expect? I was a professional footballer, as fit as anything. He never did mention my pace again. I was criticized for my lack of speed but I could run 100 yards in 11 seconds. You don’t have to run that far in a game – runs of two or three yards are common – and I was a tackler and a passer, not a winger. And anyway, my brain worked quicker than other players.
I felt confident and despite the team not doing particularly well, the fans took to me. If things were going badly I would still want the ball and fans appreciated that. They saw that if your midfield players have control of the game then you will win. It’s a team game, but the midfield players are so important. It’s easy to destroy, far harder to create.
Financially, I was earning enough money to rent a house in a more middle-class area of Glasgow, but I never thought of leaving the Gorbals because I would have hated people to think that I had changed.
As I became better known I started to receive letters from fans. One guy sent me a series of diagrams showing me how to take successful penalty kicks. Another sent me a genuine mourning card – made out to me and edged in black. I guessed that must have been from a Rangers fan. A Glasgow girl called Moira Gallagher, who was originally from Gweedore, used to post me a good-luck greetings card before every single game. She was a bus conductress and was so dedicated to Celtic that she applied for a permanent night shift so that she never missed a match. I saw a newspaper article that showed she had a shrine dedicated to me in her house which consisted of press cuttings pasted on the walls. The journalist asked her if she had a boyfriend and she replied, ‘The men in my life are the 11 boys in green and white. What better could I find?’
We had a tight relationship with supporters and they often kept us amused. At Broomfield, the home of Airdrieonians, my team-mate Bobby Carroll, who wasn’t the thinnest of players, went to take a corner from the right. Suddenly there was a movement in the crowd – and a giant black pudding came sailing through the air and landed at his feet. At the same time, a voice cried out: ‘There you are. That makes two of you.’ Every player was convulsed with laughter and play was held up for about a minute.
My first Old Firm match was on 9 May 1960 in a Glasgow Merchants’ Charity Cup semi-final at Ibrox. It was actually a low key affair as only 14,500 turned up, but I was still delighted to score in a 1–1 draw. I was less happy that Rangers went through to the final on the toss of a coin.
Now I was a first team regular, there was a growing expectation that I would soon receive a full international call up. But my relationship with the Scottish selectors was always fraught. Sectarian bigotry and, later, the bias against selecting ‘Anglos’ (Scottish players at English clubs) ensured that I made only 19 appearances for Scotland.
I played one game at Under-23 level at Ayresome Park, Middlesbrough, in 1960 when we beat an England side containing Bobby Moore. My full debut came in May 1961 in a World Cup qualifier against the Republic of Ireland at Hampden, a game which we won 4–1. It was one of the proudest moments in my career, but coming from an Irish family it felt strange to play against Ireland. I was pleased that my performances for Celtic had been recognized, but when the band played ‘God Save the Queen’ I didn’t sing. Had the band played ‘Scotland the Brave’ or ‘Flowers of Scotland’ I would have joined in, but I couldn’t sing ‘God Save the Queen’ when I loathed what the British royal family stood for. When the Irish national anthem started I sang along. I confused Billy McNeill and probably a few of the other players standing alongside me.
Four days later Scotland played the Republic at Dalymount Park in Dublin in another World Cup game and again we won comprehensively, 3–0. I always gave my best when I played for Scotland and I was proud to be acknowledged as one of the better players in those games against Ireland, but Irish fans booed me off the pitch after I kicked one of their players. I felt as Irish as them, but they didn’t see it the same way.
If I was playing today, I would choose to play for the Republic of Ireland, but you weren’t allowed to decide your allegiance in those days. When I used to watch Scotland at Hampden Park as a kid, I’d support Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland against Scotland.
A week after the game in Dublin we had another important World Cup qualifier against Czechoslovakia in Bratislava. I usually played in the same half-back line as my Celtic teammate Billy McNeill and Jim Baxter of Rangers. Many Scots thought that we were so good that we would not only qualify for the 1962 World Cup Finals in Chile, but that we would win the competition. Buoyed by the two convincing wins against the Republic of Ireland, we went to Bratislava in good spirits. Our hosts made us feel welcome and the day before that game we visited a chocolate factory. We came out and gave the chocolate away to kids. The police stopped us and that annoyed me. They were my chocolates and I should have been able to give them to who I wanted. Had I argued with them, they would have probably arrested me.
The game was a nightmare, as the Czechs beat us 4–0 and I was sent off along with their inside-forward, Kvasnak. I found out later that it was his job to deliberately needle me. He was about 6ft 3in and he kicked me, so I chinned him. As I walked off the pitch, I could see that the crowd were going potty and I was thinking, ‘I’ve got a big problem here because he’ll kill me off the field.’ I was preparing myself for a fight, but as I neared the tunnel I saw him do a runner, leaving me to stroll gently back to the dressing room. I knew I’d let myself down badly, but I was surprised to get a fine of £200, nearly ten times my weekly wage. No doubt some of the Scottish selectors enjoyed seeing me get that. And if that sounds embittered it’s because I was.
We beat the Czechs 3–2 at Hampden Park in October 1961. That result meant that we had to play a one-off game, again against Czechoslovakia, to decide who qualified for the 1962 World Cup finals. The play-off was at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels. We had a lot of players out but we were leading 2–1 with just a few minutes to go when they equalized. After 90 minutes the score remained 2–2 and we gathered around before extra-time. The trainer passed me a sponge and Jim Baxter tried to grab it out of my hand. We finished up on the ground trying to punch each other. We were about to play the most important half hour in Scotland’s football history and yet we were fighting with each other over a sponge. We were both pals, but we were so angry because they had equalized so late on that we took it out on each other in the heat of the moment. We lost 4–2 in the end.
I played in an unofficial Scotland game when an Italian league XI came to play the Scottish League XI in November 1961. Denis Law played for the Italian league as he was in Serie A with Torino. Almost 120,000 showed up at Hampden to see us gain a creditable 1–1 draw, before the Italians went to Old Trafford and beat the best of the English league four days later. I remember being in a hotel in Glasgow before the game and seeing Matt Busby for the first time. I admired him, but I didn’t have the courage to introduce myself to Matt.
Playing alongside my friend Jim Baxter was one of the best things about my international career. Although he was one of the greatest footballers Scotland has ever produced, Jim was also a head banger. Nothing fazed him and he had such a carefree attitude. Coming from Fife, religious bigotry didn’t mean a thing to him either. Despite playing for Rangers, he’d join the Celtic players each afternoon in a restaurant called Ferrari’s at the top of Buchanan Street. It made the best minestrone soup I’ve ever had. He came because he was mates with me, Billy McNeill, Mick Jackson, and Jimmy Daly. The Rangers board were not happy and they warned him off coming a few times, but he didn’t change. And of course Bob Kelly loved the idea of Rangers’ best player eating with the Celtic lads every day.
Even when I didn’t see Jim we still kept in frequent contact. My mother got a telephone in her house, which was unusual in the Gorbals, and once Jim got hold of the number he used to ring me all the time, at all hours. He did his National Service stint in the army at Stirling and used to ring me when he should have been on guard duty. The man in charge was a Celtic fan, but he loved Jimmy so much that he let him do what he wanted.
When I got called up to do National Service I didn’t want to go. Somebody told me that a good way of getting out of it was to explain that you wet the bed. I said that I was a bed-wetter on my application form and then I had to go for questioning at an office in Buchanan Street, Glasgow. The official asked me how serious my bed-wetting problem was. I told him that it was driving my mother to despair. So I was deemed unfit for National Service.
Jim once stayed up gambling all night before a Rangers v Celtic game and claimed that he had won £3,000. It didn’t affect him the next day as they beat us 3–0. When he signed for Raith Rovers, his first professional club, Jim struck a deal where he got a £250 signing on fee – plus a washing machine for his mum.
There were rumours that my sister Bridie was dating Jim. Newspapers ran articles; one even suggested that they were secretly married. There was a silly story that Jim was going to change religion and play for Celtic. People started shouting ‘turncoat’ at him in the street.
Jimmy was a big drinker and everyone loved him – even Celtic fans. Celtic and Rangers fans loved great footballers. Jim was one of the best natural footballers I have played with or against. When he got possession he hated to pass until he was satisfied that the man he was giving the ball to was in a position to use the opening to advantage. He didn’t just dominate matches, he took them over. Jim won ten winner’s medals in his five years at Rangers in the first half of the 1960s. I didn’t win one at Celtic. When he died in 2001, Celtic fans paid their respects, just as Rangers fans did when Bobby Murdoch died. Glaswegians love football – how else can you explain how 127,000 turned out for the 1960 European Cup Final between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt at Hampden?
I used to watch Rangers play in European games when I was a Celtic player and they used to look after us. Rangers played Eintracht in the semi-final and I went with Billy McNeill and Jock Stein. Rangers were a tremendous team, but Eintracht won 6–1 in Germany and 6–3 at Ibrox. Rangers were a different class to us, Eintracht were in a different league to them. Then Real Madrid beat Eintracht in the best European Cup final ever. Loads of Rangers fans went to that game. Most supported Eintracht because Real Madrid was perceived to be a Catholic club, given that Spain is a Catholic country.
Jim came from Fife but he was an idol in Glasgow, where Rangers fans worshipped the ground he walked on. Nicknamed ‘Slim Jim’ because of his tall, slight build, he was the best football-playing half-back to kick a ball. He did not have great defensive powers, but with the ball at his feet you could not hope to see a better player. He had a natural ability which made him the complete master of the ball and he possessed unlimited self-confidence. I remember before one game at Hampden there had been a great deal of talk about how we were going to mark the opposition, but as we ran down the tunnel I heard Jim’s voice at my side saying, ‘Ah’ll no be markin’ anybody. Let them mark me!’
Which, of course, was a difficult thing to do. He could beat a man with ease, so the only way was to stop him getting the ball. Once it was at his feet the opposition were bang in trouble because he had a brilliant football brain and a delicate touch which allowed him to slip perfect passes exactly where he wanted to put them. Jim, at his best, could almost guarantee a Scottish victory when he was in a dark blue jersey and his best performance was in our victory over England at Hampden in 1962.
That was a special game because of what had happened the previous year at Wembley when we suffered a humiliating 9–3 defeat. When England came to Hampden a year later there wasn’t a Scot in the ground who did not fear a repeat. There was tension in the days before the game, and on the eve of the match I was glad to get to bed and be alone with my thoughts.
As usual when we played for Scotland, Jim and I were sharing a room. We were staying in a hotel in Kilmacolm, which Scottish teams used a lot in those days. The SFA chose it because it was usually quiet, but that night was different as two coach loads of England fans had booked in there. They were in no hurry to go to their beds.
It was getting late when three of them stopped to have a loud conversation outside our bedroom door. Jim didn’t like the idea of English people disturbing the Scottish team, and he told me to go and give them a telling off. But I said I would just ignore them as I didn’t want to get up again.
Jim waited a few minutes more, then jumped from his bed, threw open the door, and gave the English lady and her two friends a dressing down they wouldn’t forget in a hurry. If Jim’s words shocked them, then his appearance must have given them a bigger shock. Jim never wore pyjamas and didn’t have a stitch on.
Jim had a brilliant game the following afternoon and we beat England 2–0, but I doubt whether the Scottish left-half made as big an impact on those three supporters in the game as he had done the night before. We did a lap of honour after the game as it was the first time Scotland had beaten England in eleven years, but I think it wouldn’t have been unfair if Jim had gone around the track on his own.
I wasn’t to know that my eleven appearances for Scotland between 1961 and 1963 were to be followed by only five more. Nor that my love affair with Celtic was soon to hit the rocks.
