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Fullname: Duncan MacKay
aka: Dunky MacKay
Born: 14 July 1937
Died: 23 December 2019
Birthplace: Springburn
Signed: 11 April 1955
Left: 6 November 1964 (Third Lanark)
Position: Right-back
Debut: Clyde 1-4 Celtic, League Cup, 9 Aug 1958
Internationals: Scotland
International Caps: 14
International Goals: 0
Biog
On his signing, he was proclaimed as the find of the season, and for the next season was “the best defensive prospect in the country“.
The stylish right-back made his debut in a 4-1 League Cup win at Clyde in August 1958 and would spend the next six years as one of the top performers in disappointing & underachieving Celtic sides.
Duncan MacKay had fantastic pace and stamina and he was a wonderful attacking full-back who was one of the first players in that position to use the over-lap as a regular feature of his game.
With fine control and a pin-point accurate pass, Duncan MacKay would always attempt to play the ball out of defence rather than just rely on the long clearance up the park. He was not overly physical in his defending either, preferring to win the ball through quick thinking and anticipation rather than just brute strength. So in some ways he was ahead of his time.
This refined approach to the game made him a popular player among the Celtic support and the Scotland selectors who capped him 14 times.
He became the captain in 1961, and then led the first team to the Scottish Cup matches v Dunfermline (the final & replay), but in both unfortunately Celtic once again came up short and lost. The side were perennially underachieving despite the wealth of talent on hand.
With Celtic so poor, he actually decided openly to request a move to England, but there was surprisingly little interest (Celtic’s poor state a likely major cause of the lack of interest). You have to take in the poor team management at the time at Celtic, lack of morale in the squad and the constant board meddling. It wasn’t an uncommon position. Jimmy Johnstone, Billy McNeill and Lennox were all also on the verge of leaving or giving up before Jock Stein’s arrival at Celtic.
Duncan McKay lost the captaincy to Billy McNeill in 1963, and his place in the first team later in the year. His last game was a single appearance in the 1964/65 season with a 4-2 defeat to Hearts.
He was not a heavy goalscorer, but curiously once he scored his first the others soon enough followed. He took a long time to score his first for Celtic, a penalty in a 7-0 victory over St Mirren in November 1962. However, over April & May 1963, he scored five goals (all penalties), including a double over Raith Rovers in a Scottish Cup semi-final. His last goal (also a penalty) was in October 1963 as Celtic defeated Aberdeen 3-0.
It was a great injustice to Duncan McKay’s wonderful ability that he never won any major trophies as a Celt. This popular player eventually left Parkhead in 1964 for Third Lanark after 236 appearances and 7 goals.
The saddest aspect is that he was a great player in one of the poorer eras for Celtic. After the League Cup win in 1957, Celtic did not win another major trophy again until 1965. His first team career sadly spanned practically the whole of this period. Jock Stein became the club manager only a few months after Duncan Mackay’s departure. If Jock Stein had arrived sooner then possibly Duncan Mackay could have won a medal worthy of his talents.
He is one of the finest regular long-term first team Celtic players to leave Celtic without a medal for a major trophy (Willie Miller is another in this group). He deserved better, and it is an indictment of the club at the time for just how poor the First Team were.
However, the Celtic support more then recognised his talent. In 1967, following the triumph in Lisbon in the European Cup, a poll by the Evening Times amongst its readers surveyed for the best Celtic team in living memory. To his credit, Duncan MacKay walked in at right-back. A great accolade and a mark of the respect the support had for him.
After Third Lanark, he moved to Australia to play for various sides and then later to coach clubs there also, with a brief period back home in Scotland between 1972-74 when he was player-coach with Juniors St Anthony’s.
He passed away in December 2018, coincidentally just a few weeks after the passing of Ian Young who had succeeded him as the right-back at Celtic.
Playing Career
| APPEARANCES | LEAGUE | SCOTTISH CUP | LEAGUE CUP | EUROPE | TOTAL |
| 1955-64 | 162 | 33 | 37 | – | 236 |
| Goals | 5 | 2 | 0 | – | 7 |
Honours with Celtic
none
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Duncan MacKay
Source: http://sesasport.com/?p=760
Duncan MacKay had a relatively short but stellar career with Celtic, racking up 236 games for the club from 1958 to 1964 and 14 Scottish caps in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He moved to Third Lanark in 1964 when Bill Hiddleston was engaged in the destruction of that club and in 1965 Frank Burin from the Croatia club in Melbourne persuaded him to try his luck in Australia. Mackay had an immediate impact on the club which had just been promoted to the Victorian State League, the top division.
Croatia had been up and down between the State League and lower divisions over previous seasons but this time president Enver Begovic organised an open cheque-book approach that resulted in the expenditure of £5000 in two months. Hammy McMeechan from Slavia was signed for a Victorian record fee of £1200. Other newcomers were Joe Keenan, Ian Currie, Bobby McLachlan, Bill McIntyre and Brian Adlam.
Croatia finished sixth in 1965. It was the ‘Glamour Team’ of the season, according to the Victorian Soccer Federation Yearbook. The early season form had been poor, six of the first seven games were lost, and it looked as if Croatia would go back down again, but the attraction of Duncan MacKay and the other players resulted in a transformation in the second half of the season when it finished with eleven wins. Croatia was also runner-up in the Dockerty Cup in 1965.
The team which was to take Croatia to the top in Victoria and Australia was now in place. Croatia finished 6th in 1966, 3rd in 1967 under Jimmy Adam, and won the State League for the first time in 1968 under coach Mijo Kiss, finishing seven points clear of Polonia. Only four league games were lost all season. In addition, Croatia won the Ampol Cup and the Dockerty Cup, to complete an extraordinary triumph.
In 1972 after an incident involving crowd trouble in a match against Hakoah, Croatia was suspended from the Victorian Soccer Federation and eventually refused permission to regain its position in the State League. It was not till 1974 that the Croatians took over Essendon Lions and resumed participation at a lower level. Duncan MacKay returned to Scotland in March 1972 and was player-coach at St Anthony’s, but he came back to Australia to the Azzurri club in Western Australia in 1974 and in 1977 he returned to Melbourne with Essendon Lions as player-coach.
Death of Celtic great Duncan MacKay
By: Newsroom Staff on 26 Dec, 2019 11:31
http://www.celticfc.net/news/17326
EVERYONE at Celtic Football Club is saddened to hear of the death of former player, Duncan MacKay, who has passed away at the age of 82.
Dunky, who played for the Hoops between 1955-64, making 236 appearances and scoring seven goals, is rightly considered a Celtic great. His first-team debut came in August 1958, in a League Cup tie against Clyde at Shawfield, which Celtic won 4-1, and he soon established himself as first-choice right-back in the team.
A highly-rated defender who was an early exponent of the attacking full-back role later honed by the likes of Tommy Gemmell and Jim Craig, Dunky MacKay was a firm fans’ favourite and his leadership qualities were identified by Jimmy McGrory, who made him captain in 1961, succeeding Bertie Peacock as skipper.
He would later pass on the captain’s armband to Billy McNeill for the start of the 1963/64 season.
In November 1984, he moved to Third Lanark, before heading out to Australia where he would eventually settle after a brief return to Scotland. He also gained 14 caps for Scotland during his playing career.
The thoughts and prayers of everyone at Celtic are with Duncan’s family and friends at this very sad time.
The Celtic players will wear black armbands at today’s game against St Mirren as a mark of respect.
Obituary: Duncan Mackay, highly esteemed Celtic full-back who won honours in Australia
By Matt Vallance
(2)
Source: https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/18141730.obituary-duncan-mackay-highly-esteemed-celtic-full-back-won-honours-australia/Former Celtic captain and Scotland full-back
Born:July 14, 1937;
Died: December 23, 2019.
IT IS a long way from Maryhill to Melbourne, but in his 82 years that was the journey made by the esteemed former Celtic and Scotland full-back Dunky Mackay.
Like many before him, Duncan’s father, also Duncan, had left the West Highlands for the city, where he worked at several jobs to keep a roof over his family’s head. He insisted the young Duncan wore his Mackay tartan kilt every day. But getting into schoolyard scrapes when responding to taunts of “Kiltie, kiltie cauld-bum” began to wear thin with the youngster, and he persuaded his parents to get him into long trousers.
At St Columba’s High his exceptional skill with a football got him noticed. He moved to St Mary’s Boys’ Guild, where Celtic signed him on a provisional form, farming him out to juniors, Maryhill Harp. By now the teenaged Mackay had seen the great Hungarian side of Ferenc Puskas and the sort of attacking football he wanted to play. He had left school and started an apprenticeship as a marine engineer.
He turned full-time at Celtic after completing his apprenticeship. During the 1958-59 campaign he made the first of his 236 first-team appearances in a League Cup tie against Clyde. By season’s end he was first choice, and an Under-23 cap. On April 11, 1959, aged 21, he made the first of an eventual 14 appearances for Scotland, against England at Wembley.
His full-back partner that day was Rangers’ Eric Caldow and the pair hit it off immediately. Indeed, they played together 12 times for Scotland, making Mackay Caldow’s most frequent international partner. Caldow would relate how, as Scotland captain, he once distributed ‘fan mail’ when the national squad was training at Largs; finding one addressed to “Donkey Mackay’ he quipped, “This lassie must have seen you playing, Dunky”. In reality, Caldow, rated his Celtic friend very highly as a player.
But, if things were going well with Scotland, all was not well at Celtic Park, where, following the 1957 League Cup win, the side struggled to compete with Rangers, Kilmarnock and Hearts, then the top teams. Bertie Peacock left the club and Mackay was appointed team captain in 1960, leading them to the Scottish Cup final of 1961, where they lost to Dunfermline after a replay. Indeed, along with 1940s goalkeeper Willie Miller, Mackay shares the “distinction” of having won more Scotland caps than medals as a Celtic player.
In 1963 he lost the captaincy to Billy McNeill, then, after injury he lost his first-team place, partly because, it is rumoured, manager Jimmy McGrory and chairman Bob Kelly, who picked the side, did not like Mackay’s attacking sorties up the wing.
In November, 1964, he left Celtic for Third Lanark. This is one of Scottish football’s great “what-ifs”; maybe, had he hung on until Jock Stein returned in February, 1965, he would have regained his place. Stein certainly preferred attacking full-backs. But Thirds were starting to implode and at the end of that season, Mackay joined Melbourne Croatia, who were spending big in a bid to become the top side in the Victoria League.
He was an instant success, being appointed captain and winning the Player of the Year title in his first season. He led Croatia to several trophies, including a league-and-two-cups treble in 1972, but the club fell foul of Australian Soccer financial rules and collapsed. Mackay returned to Scotland for two seasons, working as a bookbinder and coaching junior outfit St Anthony’s.
His first marriage, when a young man, had failed. But while, back home, he married his second wife, Marilyn, before, in 1974, Perth Azzurri, in Western Australia, offered him a player-coach role.
He led the Azzurri to back-to-back league titles, then returned to Melbourne, to Essendon Lions, as Croatia had now become. Here he found success as a league-winning coach, before winding down his active involvement in football with South Melbourne Hellas.
Melbourne clearly suited Mackay. In his first spell with Croatia, he turned down the chance to join Pele at New York Cosmos. His non-football working life turned full circle when he joined Transfeld Ship Builders as a Senior Procurement Buyer – the post he filled until his retirement.
He and Marilyn, who survives him, had two daughters, Shone and Elissa. He is also survived by son Duncan Junior, from his first marriage, who also lives in Australia. Paul, another son from that first marriage predeceased his father. In retirement, Mackay enjoyed listening to the Beatles, Barbra Streisand and Tony Bennett.
Dunky Mackay was a very good full-back. He was Celtic’s Player of the Year in 1963, and Man of the Match when they played Real Madrid at Parkhead in a friendly. Sadly, he never had the medals to show for playing at a low point in the club’s history, but on the other side of the world he finally won a few medals, forged a good reputation as a coach, and perhaps showed Scottish football what it lost when it allowed him to leave.
MATT VALLANCE