LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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