The comments by Jim Craig about his fellow Lisbon Lion Stevie Chalmers stated an awkward truth for Planet Fitba.
Craig told BBC Sportsound:
“There was a lot of politics involved at the time.
“You couldn’t have a team of 11 Celts, because you wouldn’t get much of a crowd.
“So you’ve got to take all that into account and that’s why Stevie only got a very paltry selection of caps.
“Thank God it’s a lot different now and your background doesn’t matter so much, it’s your keenness to play for the jersey.”
Sadly, back then “background” was rather important to the people running the national game in Fair Caledonia.
Only 15 years before a team of home-grown Scots in the Hoops scaled the heights of European club football in Lisbon, the SFA had a little local difficulty with a club formed by Irish immigrants.
The year after that showdown over the national flag of Ireland, a Church of Scotland report referred to the Irish in Scotland as “an alien race”.
In the 1920s the Church and Nation Committee had published the infamous report taking a Eugenics based view of Irish people.
The authors of the report made it clear that their difficulty was with the Irish in Scotland and not with Catholics per se.
When the Lisbon Lions triumphed in Stadio Nacional it was, as the opposing manager Helenio Herrera conceded, “a victory for sport”.
However, it was also hugely important psychological boost for an immigrant community that had been systematically othered for a century.
Of course, it can be argued that all is changed now, changed utterly.
However, I could be more sanguine about that if the governing body at Hampden was subject to rigorous journalistic scrutiny instead of staunch succulence from the Stenography Corps.
For example, it fell to a freelancer working out of his home in Donegal to tell Planet Fitba about Hugh Dallas.
Moreover, I doubt that the old Celtic board, quietly positioned at the back of the bus, would have litigated over the Jorge Cadete affair.
However, the Bunnet would not tolerate anyone harming his business and he got lawyered up.
That is why we found out about the late Jim Farry
The next person who was in line to give evidence in that probe was one Sandy Bryson.
Yes, he of the “imperfectly registered” Orwellian euphemism.
Of course, all of this is red meat for a genuine journalist and the role of the Fourth estate is to hold power to account.
Instead, Planet Fitba has the succulent lamb brigade.
Yes, there are one or two honourable exceptions, but even for them, there are rules.
For example, the word “Sevco” is banned from the airwaves and obedience to the liquidation denial is non-negotiable.
What was attempted in the summer of 2012 is prima facie evidence that the Ibrox brand has a preeminent position within the SFA mindset.
The footballing fortunes of a nation can have a golden age that is never to be repeated.
I was reared in a football-obsessed community where the menfolk would speak in reverential tones about the “Mighty Magyars”.
However, since the 1950s Hungarian football has been in long-term decline from those exciting times when they schooled England at Wembley.
Perhaps the mid-1960s was Scotland’s one time golden age.
If it was then the people at the SFA back then squandered the riches that they had at their disposal for reasons of, as Jim Craig puts it, “background”.
That was the same staunch chaps in blazers who thought that Celtic flying the Irish Tricolour was something that they should be concerned about.
At the start of the new millennium, the Church of Scotland made a very public apology to the Catholic community in Scotland for their previously held eugenicist stance.
Has the SFA ever apologised to Celtic for trying to strip the ethnicity out of the club in the 1950s?
They might have, but I cannot find any reference to it.
Now, the SFA clearly don’t have a problem in the 21st century with a captain called Kieran.
However, is that new dispensation fully appreciated at the level of on-field officials?
Certainly, in England, they are mature enough to have a conversation about diversity.
Moreover, if you think that the wider societal issues are only a matter of historical curiosity then I would commend the @Call_It_Out organisation to you.
Jim Craig is at that point in his life where he doesn’t see any point in not telling it how he sees it.
For that and for many other things he is a treasure.
Happy birthday Cairney!
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Obviously Genetic Research has come along way since those dark dim days of the past.
It is an undeniable fact that EVERYONE who ever set foot on these Islands is the offspring of immigrants at one time and another and that those who reside on the Emerald Isle are as closely related to those in Scotland as you are likely to find.
I am personally of Gallowglass lineage and happy to be such having come from a long line of people who inhabited both Dál Riata and Dhún na nGall At the behest of
Ó Domhnaill during the Norman Invasion.
Of course being of Gallowglass lineage you can also throw a bit of Norse into the mix which as we all know is something that can be said for much of these Islands and Northern Europe for that matter.
Our people’s (not to be confused with the peepul) are said to have come by these shores via Western Europe and from a starting point somewhere in the Middle East.
As was written in the Declaration of Arbroath.
Indeed there is a consensus that the Gaels/Celts are descended from the Original Tribes of Israel who left the Holy Lands in Exodus.
Genetics again would seem to back this theory up as the markers make a nice wee path out of that Region along the Med and up through Spain into France and across to Ireland ,Scotland and Wales.
Now either those who passed on the Oral Traditions of that time and transcribed them into the Declaration of Arbroath were just lucky in their guesstimates or they had some form of Quantum Leap into the future and had access to the Genetic facts that back these claims up?
Ignorance is bliss as they say which is kind of ironic given it was the Irish who more or less gave us the written language and Christianity to these shores.
It goes beyond ignorance of course as this was purely a bigoted approach to defining what is and was to be considered “Scottish” at that time.
Nowadays they simply cannot get away with it anymore.
Not openly.
Not that they would do that of course given that the bulk of the Scotland first picks and best players play for the all conquering Celts nowadays.
Ironic.
If Celtic were to pull the plug on both the SPFL and the National side the dim wee bulb that is Scoddish Fitba’ would most certainly go out and once again we would be consigned to the dark ages before enlightenment.
Some it could be argued are still there of course.
Some even further back walking with their knuckles dragging with their over enlarged facial features making weird grunting noises banging away at the Lambegg as form of communication.
At some point the Neanderthals that inhabit Ibrox on a match day will eventually catch up with the rest of Society (currently only 3 and a half Centuries behind) and embrace the Diverse vibrant Society that most of thankfully now live in.
It would be easy to blame the Schooling of course but that like History and Biology is evidently a sore subject for them.
🎵Well here we are in a special place
What are you gonna do here?
Now we stand in a special place
What will you do here?
What show of soul are we gonna get from you?
It could be deliverance, or history
Under these skies so blue
Could be something true
But if I know you you’ll bang the drum
Like monkeys do… 🎵
So here we go. Gerrard wants Andre Gray on loan from Watford.
That will be the multi million pounds buy who has recently started banging in the goals for his club and will be at the lower end of the EPL wage structure, say £50k per week.
If you add in Defoe and Davis these 3 will be costing Rangets around £7m per annum, thats 25% of their last reported total annual turnover.
Oh and £7m to bring Kent in from Liverpool…… Aye right.
Bobby Madden given an opportunity on Clyde last night to defend himself and his fellow whistlers.
It’s extremely reassuring to hear that Bobby and the other officials in charge for Celtic’s last visit to Ibrox were unanimous in thinking that Beaton played a blinder!
A blinder that undoubtedly means that he will never ever have to put his hand in his pocket at his local Bellshill drinking hole.
Let’s see how many Celtic players are maimed this weekend before Beaton is forced to take action.
Of course, the Scottish media were at pains to describe Bill McNeill as the first “British” player to lift the European cup. Scottish isn’t quite good enough, is it?
It has taken hundreds of years to get the establishment to recognise the institutional bias that is,to an extent,still maintained today;that Scottish Protestantism is superior to any other race/religion.
Re.incident with St.Alphonso’s priest is a step in the right direction with a custodial sentence for the perpetrator.This has to be a constant,the jailing of perpetrators for racism and bigotry etc…
My guess is that it will most likely take the same amount of time to get full equality.
I sincerely hope I’m wrong in that regard.
Great read Phil,tyvm
HH💚🍀✅
Talking about bias within the SFA. In 1987, when I was just a wain, Scotland played an away fixture in the European qualifiers against Bulgaria. If Scotland had won (which they did) it would ensure the Republic of Ireland would qualify for EURO 88.
Four Rangers players withdrew from the squad, John Brown being entirely honest for his and probably their reasons, was they did not want to help the Republic. I was young but I can not recall any action being taken against the Rangers players by the authorities. They basically said to the SFA, yes we are racist and we are sectarian and we do not want to play for our country, but was anything ever done about it? I did what I could, I stopped supporting Scotland.
Well I was an adult back than and can confirm that you’re talking absolute nonsense. Brown wasn’t even quoted for Scotland squads at that time never mind being in one and pulling out. Gough, McCoist and Cooper did withdraw though.
Were their reasons explained?
They were Rangers players! Souness regularly pulled his players out just as he had a habit of being “injured” himself when he couldn’t be arsed. The same 3 were withdrawn from our final game against Luxembourg. (I was there and actually managed to have a good moan about it to Ernie Walker before the match!)
I remember Cooper also being pulled out of the Dublin match and being man-of-the-match for his club the Saturday before and after. Unfit for the midweek Scotland game though, quelle surprise!
Going back to Brown, he actually wasn’t even a Rangers player at the time!
Thanks for that Daveboy. I was only young at the time and believed what the adults around me were saying and in all honesty looking back their would not have been one Rangers fan amongst them all. They were quick to pick up on the lack of Rangers players in the team and run with it and I believed them, my apologies.
Wean is the proper way of spelling child. Not wain
Both are acceptable, wean being most ‘used’ in the West of Scotland
Quelle surprise, John Beaton courtesy of John Fleming takes the whistle for the Dons game at the weekend.
See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil if the colour of the jersey is blue is his mantra given his performance in the last Ibrox fixture.
It’s still unclear, courtesy of the silence from Fleming and the SFA, whether Beaton actually saw any of the 3 incidents that should have seen Morelos red carded.
As their was no retrospective action from the Compliance Officer then we have to believe that Beaton did see the 3 incidents and made the decision that neither a yellow nor red card was justified.
How Fleming remains in situ is anyone’s guess as he continues to churn out fast track graduates, not one of whom is of the half decent variety.
It makes you wonder exactly what attributes that you must have to reach Grade 1 status.
Phil a question for your readers if I may.
Does anyone have any experience of young Catholic qualified refs finding it hard to get games?
Obviously just a completely random thought !!!
The mindset of those in charge back then still exists today its just that they can not get away so easily today with the same cheating and secret dealings as they could in the past, in the modern social media world we live in today, everything has become open to question, a good thing but there is still lots of work to be done to clean up .
Phil can you start a campaign for the rest of our Lisbon lions to surround our captain Billy its good we have the one with him but there’s more than just him the rest of the team should surround him the Celtic family will pay for it thay don’t need to be as tall as Billy, wot a site that’ll be all the Bronze Lisbon lions our Heroes God Bless
I believe Beefy Beaton is in charge on Saturday!
Queens Park and the SFA tried the same stunt when we rented Hampden in the 1990’s right up until the day we played our first preseason friendly.
Ask our former club secretary at the time and he will confirm for it was he who took the calls from Farry on behalf of Queens Park to explain the tricolour was not welcome.
That’s another reason Fergus went after them when he did.
The great pity was that Farry was the trophy, but his minions who carried out his instructions remained in their jobs to then oversee the biggest scandal and cheating in British sporting history.
When Jock Stein did his dual Celtic/Scotland manager role back in the mid-sixties the team, was picked by the manager, but the SQUAD was picked by a “Selection Commitee”. The final straw was when he was handed a 22 men list containing TWELVE Rangers players.
Fergus did not go far enough. He should have demanded that the league title won by cheating should have been stripped.
Met Cairney a few times at various events at Paradise. His knowledge of all things Celtic is very impressive.
Me and a couple of mates were discussing the scandalously low number of caps that all of the Lions achieved over their careers.
As we are all aware, this issue has been ongoing since Celtic came into being. We counted up the amount of caps achieved by our 3 highest (Scottish) scorers is a magnificent 22 caps BETWEEN THEM! McGrory, Lennox and Chalmers. There’s about 1000 goals there.
The bias against Celtic and its players being capped for Scotland did not surprise me however I thought surely the three gentlemen mentioned must have garnered more caps than that. NOPE, I had to start looking somewhere so for handiness Wikipedia Celtic’s top scorers and their caps for Scotland
Name caps goals for Celtic
1. Jimmy McGroary 7 502
2. Bobby Lennox 10 301
3. Jimmy Quinn 11 239
4. Stevie Chalmers 5 236
Shocking.
My thoughts are with the families of Billy and Stevie, their friends and the living Lions, be strong for each other.
Sorry about it being all scrunched up. It looked better before i copied and pasted it from word any way it paints some kind of picture.
One word: – MASTERPIECE
Karma indeed would see the company which encapsulates the SFA being liquidated.
Just like that old Rangers.
The way the Hampden diddies are dragging the national men’s team into the gutter, they might be sitting alongside a rather small crowd for the Cyprus game – in June – in an Athletics Stadium.
Or, fingers crossed, the blazered dinosaurs might get taken out by a Hampden bound meteor first!
The ‘hunt’ for the new manager appears to be moving at 5 mph.
What else can be expected from an organisation led by Maxwell, supported by those two fine fellows, McRae and Petrie.
The deal to clinch the purchase of Hampden seems to have stalled, paying off McLeish won’t have helped.
Before the Tartan Army squander their monies on the Cyprus game perhaps the salaries of Maxwell, Doncaster and co should be under the microscope and compared with similar roles in businnesses with a similar turnover to Scottish football.
Perhaps if these payments were somehow linked to performances then perhaps that would be acceptable but instead they are driving Scottish football to hell in a handcart.
I recommend the report laid bare on SFM of the SFA meeting with the lower leagues, re the pyramid system etc.
We are indeed being led by pygmies!