Giuliano Sarti – The ‘Ice Goalkeeper’.
On 5 June 2017, in the Italian city of Florence, Giuliano Sarti, one of the most decorated goalkeepers in the history of Italian football passed away following a brief illness, aged 85. Sarti had been a prominent member in two of the country’s greatest club sides. In the fifties, he played under Fulvio Bernardini at Fiorentina as I Viola topped Italian football securing the Scudetto in 1955-56, and losing controversially to Real Madrid in the second European Cup tournament. The Coppa Italia and European Cup Winners Cup were later added with legendary Hungarian Nándor Hidegkuti in charge. After almost a decade in Florence, he would join Inter Milan in 1963, becoming a key element in the success of Helenio Herrera’s ‘Grande Inter’ team, winning a further two Scudetti, successive European Cups and Intercontinental Cups. On the way, he would also become the only Italian goalkeeper to appear in four European Cup Finals. Continue reading →
Thomas Gravesen – A very differesnt brand of Danish Dynamite!
Featuring the likes of Michael Laudrup and Preben Elkjær, the Danish team at the 1986 World Cup with jet-heeled strikers and elegant midfielders played such a dynamic and explosive game that they were lauded as the Danish Dynamite. Some years later, Thomas Gravesen would earn a similar appellation, but for an entirely different reason. Continue reading →
Mark Viduka – Leeds United’s reliable Aussie goal machine in troubled times.
Mark Viduka arrived at Leeds United from Celtic in exchange for £6million as David O’Leary continued the spending spree that would eventually bring ruin to the club. In the summer of 2000 though, such things were just the whisperings of people labelled as naysayers doo-mongers, as is often the case when someone seeing a looming crisis on the horizon. At the time the Elland Road club looked like a club on the way to regaining a pre-eminent position in English football. Continue reading →
Jock Stein at Dunfermline and the launch of a legend.
The name of Jock Stein is lauded – and rightly so – throughout British football as one of the greatest managers of all time. Whilst manager of Celtic, he would accumulate ten Scottish league championships, eight Scottish Cups and six Scottish League Cups. He would also lead the club to unheralded glory when they lifted the European Cup in 1967, becoming the first British club to ascend to such honour.
Many years before that momentous Lisbon evening however, Jock Stein, coach to Celtic’s reserves after injury ended his playing career, would be told that he would never be promoted to the manager’s chair due to his Protestant beliefs. It was this barrier that caused him to leave the club in 1960, in pursuit of a managerial CV that would compel the cub to rethink. Five years later, he achieved that goal and returned to Celtic Park as manger to lead the club to glory. In between those times though, he would cut his teeth as manager and begin the legend of Jock Stein the manager that wold lead to European glory, at lowly Dunfermline Athletic. Continue reading →
“You don’t want to walk in another man’s footsteps, you want to create your own.” Henrik Larsson – Celtic legend.
In July 1977, the then Celtic manager, Wim Jansen pounced when Feyenoord fell into a contract dispute with their star striker. In four years with the Rotterdam-based club, he had notched 26 league goals in 101 games, but a move now seemed inevitable. Jansen convinced his board to part with £650,000 to complete the transfer, and the Hoops welcomed Henrik Larsson to Glasgow. The rest, as they say, is history. Continue reading →
Conduct Unbecoming – The 1967 Intercontinental Cup games between Celtic and Racing Club.
Any clash of cultures can be prey to disorder and dispute as two different, and sometimes diametrically opposing, views of the way things are conducted bump up against each other, with truculence and violence often the outcome. This can also be the case in sporting encounters when teams that are used to different ‘norms’ are placed on opposing sides of the same field. Whilst nowadays, the Intercontinental Cup, often now termed as the FIFA World Club Championship, is a structured, disciplined and well organised tournament, the early years of its existence were much less so, and the confrontations between Glasgow Celtic and Racing Club of Buenos Aries is very much a case in point. Continue reading →
Bobby Collins – The wee man who made the big difference.
I’d be eleven at time, although only just and, as was our wont, every other Saturday, I was at Fellows Park with my dad, watching Walsall play. It was 11th November 1967, and the Saddlers were entertaining a Bury side that had been relegated from Division Two the previous season and on their way to rebound straight back at the first time of asking.
As a callow youth at the time, I knew little of the players from Gigg Lane, but my Dad did, well, one of them in particular, anyway. He was a short, stocky midfielder, who Dad said had been a really good player a few years previously. I didn’t take much notice at the time, as the name meant little to me. As the game went on though, it quickly became clear that the player Dad had pointed out was very much running the game. Well, perhaps running is the wrong word, as he often broke into a trot, but rarely a run, with legs that had seen many a battering over the years. He held the game in the palm of his hand though. Continue reading →
Cup glory, a nose for goal and a couple of pints. The fairy-tale year of Raith Rovers.
“Unthinkable surely for the skipper to miss.” It’s funny how things work out sometimes. The next words were, “But he has!” Jock Brown, commentating on the 1994 Scottish League Cup Final at Ibrox, uttered that particular harbinger of doom for Celtic’s captain Paul McStay in the penalty shootout that decided the game. McStay saw his shot saved by Raith’s goalkeeper Scott Thompson and the Kirkcaldy club, managed by Jimmy Nicholl had secured the unlikeliest of cup triumphs.
The unlikeliest? Well, of course it’s always a major coup for any club outside of Glasgow’s top two to land a trophy and for a second tier club to do so, only added to the lustre. But there was more to it than that. A series of coincidences, links and cross-cutting threads about the game and various subsequent events, marked the game out as a watershed moment for both clubs. Continue reading →
The club that led Britain into the European Cup.
Hibs soon added Bobby Johnstone to a forward line already including Gordon Smith, Lawrie Reilly, Eddie Turnbull and Willie Ormond
Although the European Cup is the the preeminent competition for club football, and participation in it is regarded akin to a ‘coming out party’ as a top club for any who secures it, British clubs’ relationship with European competition was not always anything like fully committed. Continue reading →
Stiliyan Petrov – A modern footballing hero.
Petrov – Cancer picked on one tough opponent.
Back in March 2012, Stiliyan Petrov made a call to his agents. In these days of commercial opportunities it was the sort of thing professional footballers do all the time. This time however the content was very different. When Base Soccer Agency took the call from their client, it was to receive a plain truth. Petrov simply said: “I have got leukaemia.” It was the very phlegmatic way in which the popular Bulgarian captain of Aston Villa decided he had to deal with the illness.
Following a game against Arsenal a few days before, Petrov had complained of feeling feverish. Fearing a virus was to blame, the club swiftly took blood tests, and then a bone marrow scan, which led to the startling diagnosis. For anyone, in any walk of life, the dread ‘C’ word delivers a harsh realisation. For someone like Petrov, living out the dream of millions with a comfortable lifestyle and financial security, it would have been easy to lash out at the perceived injustice. Petrov was not like that however. This time, cancer had picked on the wrong man. Continue reading →
Gary Thacker 