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Fullname: William S McPhail
aka: Billy McPhail, Teazy Weazy
Born: 2 Feb 1928
Died: 4 April 2003
Birthplace: Glasgow
Signed: 5 May 1956
Left: 28 Aug 1958 (retired)
Position: Centre-Forward, Striker
Debut: Aberdeen 1-2 Celtic, League Cup, 11 Aug 1956
Internationals: none
Biog
Billy McPhail, the younger brother of former Hoops skipper John McPhail, enjoyed a brief but memorable Celtic career. He’d had an interesting career before Celtic as a ladies’ hairdresser, a restaurateur and a period in the army (Blackwatch).
A clever and skilful centre-forward Billy McPhail, he was seen as a slimmer faster and more elegant player than his brother, and a reputation for a good head for goals.
He signed for the Bhoys in May 1956 from city rivals Clyde and made his debut in a 2-1 League Cup win at Aberdeen on August 11th. He’d signed just as his brother was retiring. Billy McPhail had begun his footballing career with Queen’s Park and played with them for three seasons before turning professional with Clyde.
He’d spent 10 seasons at Shawfield where he became a prolific scorer but gradually becoming injury prone, and a serious of injuries badly hit his time with the Bully Wee.
The signing was thus seen as a gamble due to the injury issue, but Celtic needed shoring up having fallen behind again since the glorious League & Cup double of 1953/54.
However, there was no doubting the talent of the player and in two seasons at Celtic Park he ensured his eternal place in Celtic history and in the hearts of all followers of the Bhoys.
In his first season (1956/57), Billy McPhail – who was nicknamed ‘Teazy Weazy’ – scored twice in the League Cup final replay as Celtic defeated Partick Thistle 3-0 to lift the trophy for the first time. He had already paid the club back for the risk taken on him. However, injuries continued to be his bane. An ankle knock for Billy McPhail against Dundee in March 1956 proved to be a sore one for both him and Celtic as he missed the rest of the season. His loss broke up the energetic winning partnership established between Billy McPhail, Fernie and Mochan.
He returned back in the new season after a good refreshing US tour, and it was to be a glorious time to come, as he made a return to Hampden and it was then that he would really make his mark in Celtic football folklore.
On October 1957 in front of 82,000 supporters at Hampden Billy McPhail scored a wonderful hat-trick as Celtic retained the League Cup with a now legendary 7-1 routing of rivals Rangers. The first was a header and the other two were well-taken shots.
Billy McPhail simply massacred Rangers centre-half Valentine that afternoon. He beat him in the air, he beat him on the ground. Valentine simply couldn’t get anywhere near his man. Billy McPhail ran his marker ragged all afternoon and such was the torment of the player and the Ibrox club’s support that a shower of bottles rained down from the Rangers end as Billy calmly slotted home his third – and Celtic’s sixth. He had run almost the whole of the opposition half to seal the goals. Wonderful, and a great work-rate.
Unfortunately the injury jinx returned to haunt McPhail and after just two seasons in the Hoops his career came to a sadly premature end due to knee problems. It was not long after the League Cup victory that his next major injury hit on 21 Dec 1957 in a 2-1 defeat to Partick Thistle after a collision with the goalkeeper. Billy McPhail’s injury turned out to be more serious than thought and he ended up with his leg in plaster.
After that he only managed sporadic runs till the end of the season.
His knee broke down in a pre-season traditional Celtic trial match between the Greens and the Whites on 1st August 1958, and his Celtic career was effectively all over.
He had played 57 games and scored 38 goals as a Celt, a magnificent return.
Billy McPhail was a consistently excellent performer and it will be for his Hampden performances that this hugely popular player will forever be remembered.
In many ways, the situation with Billy McPhail illustrated the poor run of luck that Celtic were having through much of the 1950s. Celtic were within touching distance of great success (admittedly with some great moments), and had a fine squad yet were underachieving. Celtic won some great silverware but not consistently. As much as there were hindrances due to the incompetence of the team management and the board, bad luck played its part too, and Billy McPhail’s situation illustrates that. However, he was taken on as a risk in the full knowledge of his history of injuries.
He passed away on 4 April 2003. A fine Celt, and we can only now imagine what could have been if it were not for the injuries.
Playing Career
| APPEARANCES | LEAGUE | SCOTTISH CUP | LEAGUE CUP | EUROPE | TOTAL |
| 1956-58 | 33 | 4 | 20 | – | 57 |
| Goals: | 13 | 4 | 21 | – | 38 |
Honours with Celtic
Scottish League Cup
Pictures
Links
Articles
Billy McPhail
(The Scotsman Newspaper)
Born: 2 February, 1928, in Glasgow
Died: 4 April, 2003, in Canniesburn Hospital, aged 75
BILLY McPhail may have spent just two years at Parkhead but the striker ensured he will be enshrined as a genuine Celtic legend.
His hat-trick in one of Celtic’s most famous victories, the remarkable 7-1 League Cup final defeat of Rangers at Hampden in 1957, was the obvious highlight of a playing career which was cut short cruelly by injury the following year when he was 30.
McPhail achieved fame in later life by waging a legal battle for compensation for the onset of pre-senile dementia which he claimed had been caused by his frequent heading of heavy leather footballs. He lost his case, although his stance was later vindicated when an English coroner recorded a verdict of death by industrial disease on Jeff Astle, the former West Bromwich Albion and England striker, who had the same complaint. McPhail – like Astle – made his name as a great header of the ball. Indeed, his League Cup final hat-trick against Rangers consisted of three headed goals.
McPhail, it seems, like hundreds before him, suffered in an era when footballs were heavier than now. Weighing in at 1lb, the absorbent leather balls could double in weight during a rainy game, and it was not uncommon for players to be knocked out by the ball. One expert recently compared the impact of the ball to “being hit by a good amateur boxer”.
Born in Glasgow, McPhail attended St Mungo’s Academy and started his football career with Queen’s Park in 1944. He was unable to claim the centre-forward position with the Amateurs, and in 1947 moved to Clyde. Ironically, Celtic were also interested in him at that time, but were unwilling to match the signing-on fee McPhail was offered by the Shawfield club.
He established himself as one of Scottish football’s brightest number-nines, although he was dogged by injuries, one of which ruled him out of the 1955 Scottish Cup final which saw Clyde defeat a Celtic side which included his older brother, the Scotland international John McPhail.
In May the following year, Billy was sold to Celtic for £2,500 and he endeared himself to the Celtic supporters in October 1956 when he scored twice in the 3-0 victory over Partick Thistle at Hampden in the League Cup final replay.
It was the first time Celtic had won the trophy, but they would retain it in staggering fashion the following season, an occasion which is secondary perhaps only to the 1967 European Cup final triumph in Parkhead folklore.
In front of 82,293 at Hampden, Rangers were swept aside with a breathtaking display of free-flowing football. John Valentine, the Ibrox club’s centre-half, was given a torrid afternoon by McPhail and would see his Rangers career end soon afterwards.
Sammy Wilson and Neil Mochan put Celtic 2-0 in front at half-time. McPhail added number three eight minutes into the second half. Billy Simpson pulled a goal back for Rangers, but McPhail went on to complete his hat-trick, Mochan claimed another and Willie Fernie sealed the rout with a last-minute penalty.
In all, McPhail scored 38 goals in 57 appearances for Celtic before being forced to hang up his boots by knee and ankle injuries in 1958.
Nicknamed “Teazy Weazy” by his team-mates, because of his resemblance to a TV hairdresser of the time who used that name, McPhail went into the hairdressing business and later ran a restaurant.
Hoops bid farewell to hat-trick legend Billy
News of the World (London, England)
April 6, 2003
CELTIC legend Billy McPhail has died in hospital after a long battle with illness.
The former Parkhead star, 75, died on Friday night at Glasgow’s Canniesburn Hospital.
Billy, from the city’s Maryhill district, is survived by wife Ophelia, a retired shop-owner.
The striker become a Hoops hero when he scored a hat-trick during Celtic’s 7-1 win over Rangers in the 1957 League Cup final. Billy and his team-mates -including Bobby Evans, Bertie Peacock, Willie Fernie and Charlie Tully -were immortalised in poems and songs written about the day by ecstatic Celtic fans.
The star player joined the Celts in 1956 and also played for Clyde and Queen’s Park in a career spanning 17 years.
He was widely known for his Ronald Colman-style moustache.
In 1998 he launched a legal battle to claim benefits for the dementia he said was caused by heading leather balls.
A benefits appeal tribunal ruled against him.
BILLY McPHAIL
by David Potter
Considering the tremendous influence that this man had on Celtic and their followers, it is quite astonishing to record that he only played 57 times for the Club. And of his two seasons a considerable part of both was lost to injury, particularly a knee injury, which eventually caused his permanent retirement in 1958.
Billy McPhail learned his footballing craft in the Army and joined the Club in 1956 from Clyde, more or less at the same time as elder brother John was leaving. He was immediately seen as far slimmer and faster than John. The Club had lost men like Jock Stein to injury, and the fans were far from happy with the way that the team had tamely surrendered to an admittedly good Hearts side in the 1956 Scottish Cup Final. Yet good players abounded – Collins, Fernie, Tully, Evans and Peacock – so there really was no excuse for Celtic not having a good side.
At long last with McPhail on board, the team got off to a good start to a season. They had been notoriously slow starters even in their good season of 1954 and therefore the League Cup had never been decked with green and white ribbons. The League Cup Section of 1956 was the very strong one of Rangers, Aberdeen and East Fife. Celtic won it convincingly, dropping only one point to Rangers at Ibrox. McPhail scored two goals in six games, not perhaps a completely impressive yield for a centre forward, but fans noticed his ability to head a ball, to turn defenders and to draw the defence out of position by fine running.
The start to the League campaign was a less than total success, but Celtic did cheer up their fans by capturing the Scottish League Cup for the first time ever in October 1956. McPhail scored twice against Dunfermline in the Quarter Final, twice against his old team Clyde in the Semi Final, then twice in the Replayed Final against Partick Thistle. Bobby Collins scored the other goal in a purple spell at the start of the second half as Celtic won 3-0. This League Cup Final was good, but next year’s one would be even better.
But before that, McPhail hit injury trouble in early December 1956, and although he returned in January, was back on the treatment table by March, thus ruining Celtic’s season. A fit McPhail might just have made a difference in the League and Cup campaign, particularly in the Scottish Cup Semi Final where Celtic, without McPhail, went down to Kilmarnock in circumstances eerily reminiscent of last year’s Final against Hearts.
Summer 1957 saw Evans sacked as captain and replaced by Peacock (on board ship as the team sailed to America!), and the return from injury of McPhail. He had a successful American tour, which lined him up as it were for the League Cup campaign. This was McPhail’s moment of glory. In 10 games he scored 13 goals, famously three against Rangers in the 7-1 League Cup Final of October 19 th 1957 – a triumph that shines out like a beacon in several years of under-performance by Celtic. The first goal was a header, the second was a tap in after Wilson’s shot was blocked and the third was when he left poor John Valentine stranded from almost the half way line.
But even a hat-trick and all the adulation accompanying it in some ways underestimates what McPhail did that day. The Rangers defence was run ragged as he teamed up brilliantly with the rest of the forward line of Tully, Collins, McPhail, Wilson and Mochan, leading the line in the spirit of Jimmy McGrory, unselfishly laying off chances for others and pulling experienced defenders like Shearer, Caldow and McColl apart. All that apart from what he did for the luckless John Valentine, who never played again for Rangers.
Yet, after that game, it was almost as if Lady Luck had decided “Thank you, Billy McPhail. You have now done your job!” A couple of months later in December he was injured again, and like the previous year, only returned when the damage had been done to the League campaign. The team had also exited the Scottish Cup in his absence. The following season 1958-59 saw him injure his knee yet again in the pre-season Trial Match, and this time it was so bad that he decided to retire at the tragically young age of 30.
Billy involved himself in the hairdressing business (his dapper good looks had led him to being called Teasy Weasy after a well-known TV character) and he also owned a restaurant.
In later years, Billy suffered from dementia – a condition brought on him by too much heading of the wet and heavy ball that they used in the 1950s. Because of this and his famous hat-trick in 1957, a myth grew up (and it has crept into the works of some journalists who should know better) that the 7-1 game contained an all-headed hat trick by Billy McPhail. This is not true, but that in no way diminishes the outstanding, albeit short-lived contribution to Celtic of Billy McPhail.
