The Lion King: Jock Stein profile
Sunday Herald
Tom Shields makes a case for the man who made Celtic roar in Lisbon and gave his life for football and Scotland
The Jock Stein effect was nothing short of miraculous. He took an ailing team to an immediate Scottish Cup final victory. He turned a squad of disparate players into a cohesive unit and led them to a stunning European victory.
It is no surprise when fans gather in the Jock Stein Lounge they speak in awed tones about what the big man did for their football club.
This is Dunfermline Athletic we are talking about. What Jock Stein went on to achieve with Celtic was beyond a miracle. Dunfermline’s stunning result in Europe was their 6-2 defeat of Valencia in the 1962 Fairs Cities Cup. It was a remarkable rout of a top-class Spanish team by a side which had in previous years been better known for their routine flirtations with relegation to the old Scottish second division. When Stein took over at East End Park in 1960 the team needed six consecutive wins to avoid the drop. The deed was duly done.
The next season he ended the Pars’ history of non-achievement by beating Celtic in the Scottish Cup final. In his four years with Dunfermline Stein laid the foundations for a decade of success which their fans could scarcely have dreamed of — a further Scottish Cup win and an epic journey to the semi-finals of the European Cup-Winners’ Cup. Stein was the best Scottish manager quite simply because he was a winner. His personal road from Llanelly to Lisbon is signposted with conspicuous success. Celtic’s £1,200 purchase from a lowly Welsh non-league team went on to captain the Parkhead club’s league-winning side in 1954, their first since 1938.
When he returned to Celtic as manager in 1965 he led them within six weeks to a Scottish Cup win, their first piece of silverware for eight years. As a young fan exiting Hampden after Billy McNeill scored the winning goal in the 3-2 defeat of Dunfermline I experienced unaccustomed feelings of exhilaration and thought life could not get better. It did, of course. Stein deserves first place on the podium in this examination of Scottish managerial excellence if only for his exploits in the 1966-67 season. His team won every competition they entered, even the BBC television Quizball trophy. Celtic won the European Cup, the first British and northern European team to do so. And with a squad of home-grown talent.
These words are often repeated but somehow I never tire of reading them. Stein is simply the best not just because of his many victories, but because of the manner in which they were achieved. For the fan on the terracing, Stein’s commitment to fast, attacking football, with the nourishment of individual skills at the heart of it, elevated mere success to something sublime. Stein was simply the best because he was proficient in every department of the managerial trade. Even before his playing career was over he was an avid student of coaching.
He learned from masters such as Helenio Herrera, whose defensive Inter Milan team were to be beaten by Celtic’s storming attacking play that day in Lisbon in 1967. When Stein was honing his skills as youth and reserve coach at Celtic Park he was acquiring knowledge that would make him a modern man in a set-up still in the dark ages. That he could spot and nurture young talent was beyond doubt. Many of the Lisbon Lions had been his boys in the youth and reserve teams. He was responsible also for the Quality Street generation, and the likes of Kenny Dalglish, David Hay and Danny McGrain who followed the Lisbon Lions.
Stein was also bold enough to give youth a chance on the big stage. At Dunfermline he played a 16-year-old called Alex Edwards to great effect in that demolition of Valencia. I remember a 15-year-old George Connelly being sent on at half-time at a European tie at Celtic Park to give a keepie-uppie exhibition as a taste of what was to come from this rare talent. Stein’s greatest ability was harnessing talent. Any man who could cajole and control Jinky Johnstone and keep the wee man on the straight and narrow had management skills of the highest order.
Anyone who could channel Bertie Auld’s wickedness into an on-field asset was no mean negotiator. Stein achieved both simultaneously and dealt with a succession of players who were no shrinking violets. He was something of a genius in the field of football psychology. The manager’s attention to detail was complete, even to the extent of getting on the mower and cutting the Parkhead grass to his own specifications. Also in the Jock Stein array of consummate skills was his role as a propagandist. He invented the Celtic View newspaper so the faithful could get their fix of information and opinion straight from the horse’s mouth. The big man was an adept manipulator of the media.
If he didn’t exactly have the football writers on a short leash, he had them well-trained to come to heel when necessary. Stein held sway over players, fans, and media through the power of his personality and his strength of character which was forged in industrial Lanarkshire, down the pits, and playing part-time for Blantyre Victoria juniors and Albion Rovers (surely a test of anyone’s endurance).
He was a hard man but respect, rather than fear, is the message that comes across when you talk to footballers who played for him. I am no expert on tactics, but Stein’s success was due in no small measure to his understanding and knowledge of the game. His translation of Bobby Murdoch from inside-right to right-half in the Lisbon Lions team is often quoted as an example of Stein’s ability to make a good player great.
What makes Stein stand taller than the rest in our parochial world of Scottish football was the fact that he made sectarian attitudes gloriously irrelevant. A boy from a blue-nose Burnbank household, he became Parkhead’s first non-Catholic manager and the greatest Celt ever. Stein spoke of how some of his friends in Burnbank took it badly when he joined Celtic. ‘Maybe they weren’t friends really,’ he said.
As Celtic manager, he was a pragmatist on the question of the Orange and Green divide. Given the choice to sign two promising young players, he would sign the Protestant for Celtic, knowing Rangers would not employ the Catholic. Stein was not averse to the odd Irish rebel song being blasted over the Celtic Park tannoy to energise the crowd for important games. We were all lucky to have a piece of Stein’s magic. Celtic fans benefited mostly and Dunfermline supporters to a satisfying degree. Hibs aficiados will bemoan the brevity of time at Easter Road, although he did lead the team to a Summer Cup and a 2-0 victory over Real Madrid.
All of Scotland could savour his time as national team coach. It is significant that Celtic entered a period of relative decline when the ancient regime shamefully forced Stein out of Paradise. It is reasonable to assume that decline would not have been so severe if Stein had been retained in a position of real power and responsibility. But Celtic’s loss was Scotland’s gain. He presided over two successful World Cup qualifying campaigns. Ultimately, he gave his life for football and for Scotland. His death that night in Cardiff was epic.
His life had been epic. Jock Stein is the one.