42 Years On

We lived in one of the worst areas of Glasgow. It wasn’t planned like that – it was planned as a new start to take families out of the grime of early sixties Glasgow city and move them to the fresher air of the country. The problem was that whilst the houses, the streets and the schools in Easterhouse were all brand new, nobody had thought to put in any recreational facilities for the thousands of kids who were suddenly transported into a social wilderness. No parks. No football pitches. No libraries. Nothing!

But it wasn’t all bad.   There was the canal where kids fell in with astonishing regularity. There were the two lochs where you could fish if you were prepared to walk the 3 miles to get to them and then there were the floodlit streets, illuminated by yellow sodium lights which allowed the boys to play football late into the night. Adults, of course, objected to normal size footballs battering into their cars and so we played with tennis balls and that’s why Scottish footballers of the time were hailed as ‘tanner-ba’ players. The ball cost a tanner – a sixpence and if you could play football with a tanner-ba, you could play with anything and anybody.

We used to play directly outside my house as the street was straight, was well lit by street lamps and the residents usually took notice when we pleaded, ‘aw mister – don’t park your car there, that’s right on our pitch’.  

And so we played our games, night after night. One side Rangers- the other side Celtic.

And just occasionally a Mr Jim Craig would pass us by and encourage us. That Mr Craig was to become one of the first British footballers to win the cherished European Cup with Celtic in 1967. A trophy not even the mighty Liverpool or even mightier Manchester United had come close to winning, although once Celtic broke the deadlock, Man Utd won it the following year and of course, Liverpool won it several times in the 70s and 80s.

Although a top class footballer, Jim Craig lived in a rented council house just round the corner from the Cupples’. I remember once going and knocking on his door to ask for his autograph. His wife answered and I sheepishly asked if Mr Craig would be so kind as to sign the grubby bit of paper I handed over. He did of course – he was a good guy despite being a Celtic player.

After he won the European Cup, he must’ve moved house because I don’t recall seeing him around but although I was a Rangers fanatic, it was quite something of a schoolboy boast to say I lived ‘next’ to a European Cup winner.   

The thing which strikes me now is that Jim Craig’s equivalent today would be earning well over £1 million per year as a footballer and would be staying in one of the wealthier suburbs of Glasgow. To imagine a star player today living in a council house is unthinkable. And he wasn’t just a footballer. Jim Craig was a qualified dentist but decided football was a more interesting career than looking at the nicotine stained teeth of your average Glaswegian.

So, as Manchester United head into their Champions League final tonight, it will all be a totally different scenario from when Celtic triumphed over Inter Milan on May 25^th 1967. The first British team to win it and with a team full of players, not one of whom was from foreign shores. In fact not a single player was from outside the Glasgow boundary, they all lived within 30 minutes of Parkhead. Astonishing!