But I didn’t waken up, and we got home by about 10.00pm after an idyllic and triumphant journey. The green and whites had returned. Parkhead was Paradise once more. Sunday was spent talking about nothing else, and the whole world had changed. Rangers and Hearts supporters avoided me – Hearts in particular, for that day was the start of untold miseries for them, but Rangers supporters as well knew that the game was up. Jim Baxter, their hero of the past few years, was beginning to play up and cause trouble again. Celtic’s success was one of those things that did not apparently have any direct connection with Baxter – but we all knew that it did. It was almost as if a switch had been pressed and for the next decade, with a very occasional exception, everything would run in favour of Celtic. The world had indeed changed.
It was like what Churchill said. “Before Alamein, we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.” It was apparently based on something that Pitt the Elder had said of the Seven Years War, and it wasn’t 100% literally true – but it was close enough.
We felt similarly about Saturday, 24 April 1965. For the next ten years our defeats would be rare, and our successes would be repeated and indeed expected.
An extract from The Celtic Rising by the late, great David Potter
David’s bestseller The Celtic Rising ~ 1965: The Year Jock Stein Changed Everything is completely sold out in print on but is available on Amazon kindle, with all the photographs of the hardback edition, for HALF PRICE at just £3.49…
