The rest of the game was almost a rerun of the 1961 Cup final with poor finishing, an inspired and lucky goalkeeper and sheer bad luck, almost as if some divine power has decreed that you are not going to get a goal. It was anguish. Goalkeeper Donald MacKay had just joined United from Forfar Athletic in the summer. It was the best game of his career but – as with Eddie Connachan in April 1961 – there was a considerable amount of luck as well. It recalls how men like Julius Caesar and Napoleon always looked for commanders to work for them who were “lucky”.
That massive Celtic crowd – as large as had been seen in the city of Dundee since the boom days of the late 1940s – roared on their team with their vast repertoire of chants and songs including their new one called Sean South of Garryowen and the old one about how they beat the Rangers in the Cup 5-0 in 1925, but eventually when Mr Phillips pointed to the pavilion, the heads went down. But then, just as the teams were leaving the field shaking hands (it had been a very sporting and civilised encounter) a cruel rumour spread that Dundee had beaten Hearts at Tynecastle and that Celtic had qualified after all. For a while cheering, dancing, hugging and slapping each other’s backs was the order of the day until the Tannadice PA system, obviously enjoying the discomfiture of both Celtic and Dundee, announced brutally that Hearts had in fact beaten Dundee 2-0.
The blow was severe, and although one cannot travel in time and change history, it is nice occasionally to indulge in “what if” speculation. The reality was that Hearts went on to win that trophy in October beating in the final an outraged Kilmarnock. Kilmarnock thought that they had equalised through Frank Beattie at the very end only to have the goal disallowed by referee Tom Wharton. The controversy about this goal, incidentally, would have been much greater if this game had not coincided with the Cuban Missile Crisis which was reaching its height at that time and threatened the world, apparently, with nuclear war! But nuclear war or no nuclear war, BBC’s Sports programme that night featured Andy Stewart singing “The Heart of Midlothian”, and oh, how jealous we were of the Hearts! Yet, had we known what the future was bringing to the men from Edinburgh (they did not win another trophy for 36 years, they would transfer Willie Wallace to us, they would go bankrupt, they would be relegated, they would lose Scottish Cup ties to teams like Forfar and of course, there was Albert Kidd in 1986!), then we would have realised that jealousy was a redundant emotion.
But to return to “what if ”, Celtic could have won the League Cup that year. They would have faced Morton in the quarter finals, then St Johnstone in the semis (Kilmarnock beat Rangers at the equivalent stage) and we would have faced Kilmarnock on the day that John F Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev’s itchy fingers were being tempted by the nuclear button. Had we won that game, (and always assuming that no nuclear holocaust happened) we would have faced the rest of the season with our supporters celebrating, the League Cup bedecked in green and white, and the real horrors of 1962/63 would not have happened. Pat Crerand, for example, would almost certainly have stayed with his beloved Celtic.
But in the reality of early September 1962 (Glasgow’s tram lines were being dismantled at that time) Celtic simply had to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, take the blow on the chin and come back fighting. On a personal level, Charlie Gallagher had done more than enough to prove himself worthy of a green and white jersey. His passing had on occasion been a sight to behold, and not for the last time the word “silky” was applied to him. He also had a phenomenal shot. Although he lacked the speed of Lennox or Chalmers, he was no slouch either and had a surprising ability to resist a tackle, something which his slender frame would not have indicated. The club’s decision to persevere with him, after the horrors of the 1961 Scottish Cup final seemed justified.
The support, although clearly devastated by the events of Tannadice, were still optimistic, for their team had played some good football, but the John Divers issue would not go away. Someone would say “Divers lost a lot of money by forgetting his boots” and another would say “Aye, but Celtic lost a lot more” as if Divers might have made a difference to Celtic qualifying for the League Cup quarter finals. He might have, of course, for every game would have been different, but it is hard to imagine that he would have been a lot better than Gallagher. The problem did not lie
in creating goal scoring opportunities – the traditional role of an inside forward – it lay, as Tannadice had painfully highlighted, in actually scoring them. John Hughes had his moments. There was no doubting his potential or indeed his achievements. It was just that he seemed to find it difficult to do it every week.
The defence was good. Frank Haffey, that great character, would never play for Scotland again after his Wembley fiasco in 1961, but his cheerful extroverted nature hid a very good goalkeeper indeed. And even in our misery at Tannadice that day, he had endeared himself to the support by his clear identification with the cause, talking to supporters and asking how long to go as Celtic mounted attack after attack on the distant Arklay Street goal. Full backs MacKay and Kennedy were experienced and competent, and in Billy McNeill, there was as good a centre half as you would find anywhere in the British Isles. Wing halves Pat Crerand and Billy Price were excellent players with Crerand in particular, apart from his unfortunate tendency to miss important penalties as good a passer of a ball as had been seen since Peter Wilson in the years before the war.
But the team was poorly led. Training was still haphazard and disorganised with emphasis on running round the track to the expense of ball control. This was no real problem to Gallagher with his innate ability to pass a ball, but he still could have done with some coaching, not least so that the other forwards could read his intentions. Charlie himself was always a great “reader” of a particular game and could take into account ground conditions, the fitness of his team mates, the abilities of the opposition defenders and even the way that referees and linesmen would react to certain given situations. He was a very thoughtful player. But, like everyone
else, he needed encouragement.
The Manager of course was the great Jimmy McGrory. Benign, pipesmoking, modest, charming and of course in 1962 the greatest football player still alive, McGrory, however, was no real Manager. Frankly, he was too nice a person. He lacked the ability to bawl someone out, to turn nasty or to even pretend to be angry, and Celtic would suffer for those deficiencies. But McGrory was only a front man for Chairman Bob Kelly, who was a different kind of person altogether.
