Big Jock’s biggest pal remembers
ANDREW SMITH
ACROSS the 28-year span Jock Stein served Celtic, the one constant is Sean Fallon; the playing confrere who became confidante, then the coaching accomplice. In all the monochrome images that capture Stein’s colourful odyssey at the club, Fallon is in every frame.
Those craggy Sligo features are unmistakable as he sits alongside Stein on Celtic’s open-topped bus on the way out of Hampden after the Double was completed in 1954. Another much-published print shows Stein directing youngsters over hurdles when both men were coaching the club’s reserves in the late 1950s. In the famous picture of a nervous Stein walking towards the tunnel as full-time approaches in Lisbon, 1967, Fallon is captured preparing to leap from the dug-out. But he is alone in a 1975 still, puffing furiously on a cigarette, as he directs operations from the sidelines in the absence of Stein, hospitalised after a car accident that almost cost him his life.
In an Irish brogue that has not been diluted by his 55 years in Scotland, Fallon – now a genial 83 – describes Stein as “the partner on the field who became the partner off it”. Although very much the junior off the field, without Fallon, Stein may not have been given the platform to demonstrate the qualities that marked him out as a management legend.
Stein arrived from Llanelli in December 1951. Recruited as a stop-gap centre-half, the Lanarkshire-born miner was earmarked to help youngsters while playing in the reserve side. A host of injuries led to the then 29-year-old being immediately pitched in to the senior team, however. Although he retained his place, the arrangement was not considered long-term. But that changed when Fallon surprised his team-mates by appointing Stein as his vice-captain the following season. In the intervening years, Fallon has been credited with great prescience for such a move. Now, however, he is willing to admit to a more prosaic reason for this decision.
“I liked him,” he says. “But more than that, I like the way he handled himself over other players’ gripes that we had signed a has-been. This peeved me because I was few months older than him, though in those days you lied about your age. My closest friend in the team was Berti Peacock but I chose Jock over him mainly because I wanted to prove to the others lads that players his age weren’t washed up.”
Shortly after being captain in 1953, Fallon suffered a complicated arm fracture that meant immediate promotion for his second in command. By then Stein had proved his worth to his colleagues.
“He was completely left-sided, but had a good right knee that he would often clear the ball with,” Fallon says. “Without much pace he was limited, but there was little he wouldn’t win in the air. He had great positional sense, too, and always said that speed of thought would overcome quickness of movement.”
Stein had plenty to say to Fallon on a daily basis by then, which proved crucial to Celtic capturing league and cup the following season to end 13 years without a championship. Each afternoon after training, the teetotal pair, along with fellow non-drinker Peacock, would sit in Ferrari’s restaurant on Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street and discuss football, the flix and what nags to have a flutter on.
“We all liked betting but, apart from the odd trip to the cinema, we would spend hours chatting about how the game should be played. Our manager, Jimmy McGrory, was a fine man but he could be lax with preparations. Jock was keen that we work out game plans to deal with the players we would come up against that weekend. He was the best football technician I ever knew, and I have known many great ones.”
By the late 1950s, both Stein and Fallon had retired through injury and were coaching the club’s second and third sides. Stein was given the more senior role through having been forced to give up playing first. He did so in 1956 as the result of a botched ankle operation that left him with a limp. This, however, did not prevent him impressing the club’s autocratic chairman, Bob Kelly, with a highly cerebral, hands-on approach to coaching.
Stein’s interest in management had been stirred by a trip to the 1954 World Cup finals in Switzerland. Kelly paid for the entire squad to go over and watch Ferenc Puskas and the great Hungarian team – but Fallon remembers the trip for a wager made by the waterside in Lausanne. For this, all but Stein among the squad’s gamblers bet that Fallon wouldn’t be able to swim back to shore from a boat they were taking out.
“I thought it would be a rowing one and so we wouldn’t go far but then we were ferried miles out by this thing with a bloody great engine,” recalls Fallon, one of the few major Celtic figures from that era still alive today. “I noticed then that it was a glacier lake, and if I’d known that from the off I wouldn’t have risked the bet.
“I didn’t want to let Jock down, though, so I didn’t tell him about my concerns. Not that it would have mattered. He was always a brilliant judge of people’s strengths and weaknesses and he knew I would come through. Mainly because what he didn’t tell the rest of the boys was that I was a champion swimmer in my youth in Ireland. Jock and I pocketed a fortune.”
Little more than a decade on and the two men’s alliance would underpin Celtic’s previously unimaginable harvest of silverware riches. Not, however, in the way that had been anticipated.
Fallon was regarded as the anointed when it came to a successor for McGrory. Stein, in leaving for Dunfermline in 1959, felt that, as a Protestant and a man who would not accept interference in team selection from Kelly, he had gone as far as he could at Celtic.
But title success had proved elusive in the 11 years since the 1954 triumph and Kelly was forced to bite the bullet. In 1965, he coaxed Stein back from Hibernian to take over as the first non-Catholic manager at the club and at the same time relinquished any rights to lay down the law on how playing personnel should be deployed.
“I heard all the rumours about me becoming manager,” Fallon says. “But while my ambition was to reach the top with Celtic, I had to acknowledge that Jock was someone who knew the requirements better than I did. He had gone away and proved himself. Hell, at Celtic we knew that only too well because his Dunfermline team bloody well beat us in the 1961 Scottish Cup final.
“I was told at a board meeting that Jock’s return was imminent and shortly afterwards he phoned and asked me to come over and see him one night Hibs were playing at home to Aberdeen. ‘You know I’m coming as manager,’ he said, ‘and I know you’ll be disappointed. But I want to reciprocate for you making me your deputy by asking you to become my assistant’.
“I wasn’t disappointed but just happy to serve my club in any way I was wanted. And gratified when Jock then said he chose me because he could trust me implicitly. ”
This wasn’t all that the opportunistic Stein told Fallon this evening.
“As I was leaving, he asked me if I was interested in a young player called Davie Hay. I told him I was but knew that Chelsea were moving in. Jock told me that if I wanted to stop that happening I should make my way down to the Caledonian Hotel where Davie was with his dad waiting to meet Tommy Docherty. I did, spirited them back to Paisley in my car, and convinced them to sign for us even before we arrived. I don’t think the Doc has ever forgiven me for that.”
The impact Stein had on Celtic was instantaneous and with the Scottish Cup claimed inside three months of his arrival, the foundations were quickly laid for the glittering spell of trophy bagging. This reached its apogee in 1967, when the European Cup was captured as Celtic swept the boards in the five competitions they entered. Says Fallon: “I’m proud that we achieved something no other team has but it was just all about living the dream with my club.”
Fallon’s affinities with his club dated back to his days at a school run by the very same Sligo Marist order to which Celtic founder Brother Walfrid belonged. While the monk shaped the early Celtic, Stein was responsible for hauling the club into the modern age in spectacular fashion. Without the piety of Walfrid, it must be said.
“Jock wouldn’t suffer fools and if he felt anyone wasn’t treating the game in the serious way he did, or that they were not following his instructions, he would let them know in no certain terms,” Fallon says. “Football was his religion, though, and he studied tactics as some would the Bible. There was no-one to touch him when it came to using the blackboard to impress on his players how they must play and how the opposition would play. He made those under him the best they possibly could be by concentrating only on their strengths. He never asked anything of players that was beyond them.”
When Fallon deputised for Stein as he recuperated from that near-fatal car accident in the summer of 1974, more may have been asked of the dedicated Celtic servant than was fair. This season proved the first since Stein’s return as manager that the club’s trophy cabinet remained bare.
“It was impossible to go in and follow exactly in Jock’s footsteps,” he says. “I had done so before when he had a heart attack in late 1972. Then I would go to see him in the hospital and if we hadn’t won in the previous game he’d say ‘Surely to God you have been working with me long enough to know how things should be done’. He wasn’t near as perky after the crash though and was very quiet. It took him a long time to regain his spark but his passion for football eventually drew this out of him.”
Celtic benefited with a Double in 1976-77, by which time Fallon had been placed in charge of scouting as Davie McParland was made Stein’s assistant. This demotion the Irishman accepted because it meant he still had a job at his beloved club but the move “hurt deep in the heart”. As did Celtic’s desultory offer of a job fronting the Celtic Pools that Stein was offered on being replaced by Billy McNeill in 1978. Both Stein and his managerial mucker then left, Fallon becoming “disillusioned with football” on taking up a post at Dumbarton that Stein was angry he had rushed into accepting.”He said I should have waited around a little longer. But while it was perhaps time for me to go, Jock should have been retained. It was an insult to ask him to become Pools director and the biggest mistake Celtic ever made. Jock’s relations with the board soured after the death of Mr Kelly in 1971. As fellow Lanarkshire men who loved their football and horses, they had an understanding. This wasn’t the case with any of the other directors. If it had been, they would have been smart and kept him on. His knowledge and experience could have been invaluable.”
Instead, Stein was to rediscover his enthusiasm for football by taking charge of the Scotland national side. In living only 50 yards away from Fallon, the position meant he had licence to take his faithful friend on road trips doubling up as business. For Fallon, the last of these took on added poignancy following Stein’s death in Cardiff exactly two decades ago.
“We never socialised together because we weren’t really socialisers,” he says. “But we still spoke and saw each other regularly after we left Celtic. Jock used to ring me up to see if I fancied going to watch games in England and I always had a chuckle when Ernie Walker turned up at my door in the official SFA car. A week before Jock died we were down south for a game and he was just the same as all those years before in Ferrari’s, telling me this player and that player wouldn’t make it and asking what I thought. I miss those conversations.”
(Source: The Scotsman; http://sport.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1330&id=1921292005&format=print)