Paddy Crerand: Never Turn the Other Cheek

In 1949 there was a change in our family life. My mum got married again to a fella called Charlie Duffy. He was a great man who was also from Gweedore. It was a big burden for him to take on a woman with four kids. They went on to have another two girls. I used to see Charlie as my mate. He never hit me once in his life when it was the done thing to give a kid a smack if he stepped out of line. Mum would hit us and it never did me any harm, but Charlie didn’t. I’d walk with Charlie on his way to work just so I could be with him. He would wind me up by pretending to be a Rangers fan.

Me and my brother John used to argue about Celtic and Rangers, too, but we were very close. We played together all the time and he was a good footballer. John told me that he wanted to be a priest. He became poorly when he was twelve with rheumatic fever and I went to see him in hospital. Everything seemed all right because he was talking to me.

But everything wasn’t all right. I was sitting in the house one Saturday evening listening to the football results on the radio when we were told that John was dead. I couldn’t understand it because I had been to see him a few days before and he seemed fine. I was too young to properly understand what death was, but my mother was heartbroken. You don’t expect to outlive your kids and she was crying all the time. They brought the coffin to the house because there was nowhere else to take it. It wasn’t a big coffin, just a small thing. He was buried in the Catholic cemetery next to Celtic Park, not in the Protestant graveyard behind the jungle stand (the name Celtic fans gave to the covered terrace where the most vocal Celts stood because they said it was full of animals). Billy Connolly used to joke about those graveyards. ‘Why don’t they get buried together? Are they going to get up and fight with each other?’

All the relations came over for John’s funeral. A lot of drink was taken. It’s an old standing Irish joke that the only difference between a wedding and a wake is that there is one less drunk at the wake. It’s a great way of getting over things and I think the drink helped the adults.

I missed John terribly. When I wanted to play with him he wasn’t there. I missed talking to him about football and helping mum do household chores with him. I cried a lot and felt very alone. The adults could speak about it, but I couldn’t. When I did try to talk about it with mum she said that John wouldn’t be coming home again. The mood in the house was awful, but the adults tried to be normal with me.

When you are that young you can be resilient to almost anything and you adapt quickly. You just do. I had so many friends that before long I was immersed in football again and life continued as normal, only John wasn’t there. I never spoke to my mum about John in later years. I find death very hard to accept and I think she did too. My sister Bridie lost her husband when he was quite young and then lost her son in a car crash. He was returning from a Simple Minds concert in Dublin and driving back to Donegal. So what happened to my mum also happened to my sister.

Not long after John died, I did well in my exams and attained a very high pass mark to go to Holyrood, a school with a good reputation. They had their own red shale football pitches. Scottish international Alan Brazil went there, as did Eddie Gray who played for Leeds United. One of my schoolteachers, Mr Murphy, was the announcer at Celtic Park. Our school had a good team and we won the final of a schools’ competition at Hampden Park in 1955.

I read newspapers a lot more as I entered my teenage years and became very left wing. I still am today, but I’m much milder than when I was younger. I started becoming more politically aware in 1951 when Churchill got into power again. The war had been over quite a while but there was still rationing for people who had no money.

The political situation in Ireland was always pertinent for me. I came from a family that wanted a united Ireland and I still believe in that. I have never accepted the violence and, hopefully, we have seen the last of The Troubles. I’m pleased that there has been a lot of political progress in the last decade. People have realized that you get progress by talking and not by shooting each other and I’m more optimistic about the future of Ireland now than I have ever been.

The problems affected football as well of course. I was indifferent to Glasgow Rangers until I was about thirteen when I found out that they didn’t sign Catholics. The discrimination enraged me, yet it was something Catholics were used to.

I never had a girlfriend. If you had one aged fourteen in Glasgow then you had to fight everybody because you were considered a softie. Besides, I couldn’t go out on a Friday night because I always played football on a Saturday morning.

As I got older, I’d cross the River Clyde with my mates and go into the centre of Glasgow. It was an adventure going into town and seeing different types of people for the first time in my life. I looked in the windows of shops and marvelled at all the things that people could buy and we couldn’t. Plenty of my mates went stealing but I was never tempted. I had that Catholic mentality in my head that if I committed a sin then I’d go to hell. That, and the prospect of having to face my mother, who would have killed me.

On the football field my life was progressing well. Up to the age of fifteen I was a prolific centre-forward. I was stronger than most of the other players and found scoring goals easy. I wasn’t quick, but I could brush players off and I had a hard, accurate shot. My reputation was growing locally and I was approached by a man called Hugh Wiseman. He ran a football team called RanCel, short for Rangers and Celtic. He wanted to get Celtic and Rangers fans closer together and asked me to play in his team on a Saturday afternoon. But I just wanted to watch Celtic, especially as I had just joined a Celtic supporters’ club and travelled on a bus with them to matches. They used to subsidize the travel for the young fans and that meant I could go to away games, loving the experience of travelling with my friends. My mother got the needle with me and told me that I couldn’t let Mr Wiseman down. Everyone knew him because he used to keep the toilets clean on Cumberland Street. So I didn’t let him down and played. He got me my first pair of football boots. Mr Wiseman encouraged me to play in midfield rather than up front. I could hit the ball a considerable distance accurately and he thought that I was better suited to playing in the middle.

After playing with RanCel, I was told that Duntocher Hibs, one of the junior sides, wanted to sign me. I was still just sixteen, but within the space of a few weeks I went from going to watch Celtic to playing in front of 3,000 most Saturdays in Duntocher, close to Clydebank where my dad had a job.

I still needed to work, and while I’d done well at school it was hard getting a job with the blatant sectarianism that existed. Newspaper adverts declared: ‘No RC (Roman Catholics) or Irish may apply.’ There was always a feeling that the Irish immigrants were taking jobs away from the homebred Scots.

I got a job in Fairfield’s shipyard on the River Clyde, where I was taught to prepare the steel plates for the welders. I was up every morning at six to catch a lorry which came by Gorbals Cross half an hour later. We’d stand in the back of the lorry in all weathers and started work at ten to seven. I earned £2 10 shillings a week, but I loathed every minute of it. You were outside all the time, it was cold and miserable. I used to ask myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ It wasn’t living, it was surviving, but rather than becoming disillusioned, it made me determined to get out and be a footballer.

The best thing about work was the great camaraderie among the workers, but there was always a divide between Celtic and Rangers supporters, a real ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality. If someone said that they supported Partick Thistle we thought that was just an excuse for being a Rangers fan. It was ridiculous. Men were working together, helping each other make the same ship, yet basically hating each other because they supported different teams. You never knew when an argument might get out of hand. I became a target for the Rangers followers because in their eyes Duntocher was just a junior Celtic team. In the yard, as at home, I had to be ready to hit back. It was a return to the law of the streets.

My week would come alive on a Saturday. I’d catch a red bus from Glasgow to Duntocher. The standard of football at Duntocher was very high, the games ultra competitive. I loved every minute playing for that club and stayed for two years. A lot of people who lived in Duntocher were Catholics who had come from Donegal. All the top scouts were constantly coming to watch us. When Duntocher Hibs became defunct Drumchapel moved into their ground and they have stayed there to this day. The Drum are still one of the top amateur teams in Scotland and many big names in professional football have started out there, including Sir Alex Ferguson, David Moyes, Andy Gray, Archie Gemmill, Asa Hartford, and John Robertson.

I got to know a lovely man called Jimmy Smith at Duntocher. He had been a great player for Rangers before the war and was acting as a scout for them after it. He frequently said to me, ‘I’d love to sign you for Rangers, Paddy.’ But he couldn’t because I was a Catholic. Again, I considered that ridiculous. Jock Stein, when he became Celtic’s first Protestant manager, was asked in his first press conference: ‘If there was a Catholic and Protestant of equal ability, which one would you sign first?’ Jock replied straightaway: ‘The Protestant. Because it would stop Rangers getting him. And then I’d get the Catholic anyway.’

My football was going well and the papers began to talk of senior clubs being interested in me. In fact, I think the Manchester City scout was the most persistent but Jimmy McLean, who ran Duntocher, never allowed any of them to speak to me because he knew that one team dominated my thinking.

It was a bright summer’s day in August 1957 when I found out that Celtic were keen on me. Jim, a Rangers supporter, met me coming off the pitch at Ashfield away one day. He kept laughing and saying, ‘You’re going to enjoy this.’ We went through the dressing room, then into a side room where he introduced me to a complete stranger.

He was Teddy Smith, Celtic’s chief scout, but I didn’t know that until he asked, ‘How would you like to sign for Celtic?’ I remember those were his exact words. A pretty ordinary sentence, but to me they were the greatest words in the world. I was stunned and just said, ‘Yeah.’ He told me to go to Celtic Park the following Monday evening. I went home straightaway, my head buzzing and full of thoughts. I ran into our house and told my mum. She put her arms around me and hugged me tight. I felt like the proudest man alive. As I pulled away, I saw that mum was crying. It was the best present I could have given her.

TWO (#ulink_782c1be3-ff62-5287-b012-5a0762c819fc)

A Grand Old Team to Play For? (#ulink_782c1be3-ff62-5287-b012-5a0762c819fc)

Had 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.