Sport’s Greatest Team — The Lisbon Lions
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Laurence Binyon was on the Cornish coast when he wrote those words in November 1914, but more than a century on, they couldn’t be more apt to describe The Celtic Football Club’s Lisbon Lions — the greatest team in the history of sport. An hour or so after the Scottish champions had shocked mighty Internazionale of Milan — twice winners of the European Cup in the previous three seasons — Bill Shankly, Liverpool’s manager, and Hugh McIllvanney, the prince of sportswriters, went down to the dressing room to find Jock Stein.
According to Shankly, Stein had just emerged from the bath, and ‘was sweating as much as the players’. Shankly, never short of a word, just looked at him and said: “John (his proper name), you’re immortal now!” McIllvanney, who passed away last year, recalled Stein just repeating the one line several times: “What a performance. What a performance…”
And it was. There are few instances in the annals of sport that can even compare to the magnitude of what Celtic achieved that sunlit evening. India’s victory over West Indies in the 1983 cricket World Cup final merits a mention, but then you’re talking of a sport with just half a dozen competitive teams. When Celtic won the European Cup in 1967, the field included — apart from Inter — Ajax, Liverpool and the two Madrid giants, Real and Atletico.
This was also an era when there were magnificent teams from behind the Iron Curtain. Celtic saw off Dukla Prague, conquererors of Ajax, in the semi-final, but their biggest test had come a round earlier against the champions of Yugoslavia, Vojvodina Novi Sad. It needed a last-minute goal from Billy McNeill at Celtic Park to stave off a play-off match in Rotterdam.
What the emphatic nature of Celtic’s victory in the final — McNeill, their talismanic captain, is on record as saying the 2–1 scoreline flattered Inter, and the match footage proves his point — also did was ensure that Helenio Herrera’s catenaccio tactics wouldn’t be the blueprint for future generations.
There is no good or evil in football, no right way or wrong way. Teams try to win as best they can with the resources at their disposal. But Inter’s pragmatism was never easy on the eye, and sport wouldn’t exist if it was about results alone. Stein’s Celtic didn’t lack for results — they won every competition they entered that season — and they played with a verve and imagination that hasn’t been forgotten more than half a century later.
To watch the reels of the game is to see wave after wave of green-and-white-hooped attacks battering the Inter defence, until it finally parted in the second half, first to a thunderbolt from Tommy Gemmell and then to the cutest of deflections from Steve Chalmers.
At the heart of it all was Stein, quite simply the greatest coach/manager that ever lived. What he achieved in Lisbon cannot and will not be replicated. To take on Europe’s finest with a team all born within 30 miles of Celtic Park, and to win the trophy in such style is the stuff of myths and legends.
Most of those players had grown up in less-than-modest circumstances. Born during World War II, and growing up in a post-war world where everything was scarce, several of them didn’t even have a full set of teeth by the time they made it to Lisbon. In fact, one of the quainter stories from the final is of a small bunch of Celtic players rushing towards Ronnie Simpson’s goal to retrieve their dentures before the crowd invasion made it impossible.
More than half of them are gone now. Bobby Murdoch, for so long the midfield fulcrum, was the first to go, in 2001, and Simpson followed three years later. Jimmy ‘Jinky’ Johnstone — voted the club’s greatest player ahead of the likes of McNeill, Kenny Dalglish and Danny McGrain — succumbed to Motor Neuron Disease in 2006, and Gemmell passed away in 2017.
We lost McNeill a year ago today, and Chalmers passed on a week later. Both had dementia, which makes you think of McNeill’s prowess at heading the football — they were more like medicine balls back then — in an entirely different light. As a young man, Chalmers had been one of the first to survive tubercular meningitis. How many could talk of going from being given three weeks to live, to scoring the winning goal in a European final?
Stein preceded all of them. Apart from the loss of my paternal grandparents within months of each other, I can think of no childhood memory more traumatic than the sight of Stein collapsing in the dugout as Scotland were edging close to a World Cup place at Wales’s expense. At the time, I had little idea about his Celtic connections, or his matchless achievements. He was just the man who had taken my beloved Scotland — Dalglish, Graeme Souness and Alan Hansen were the Liverpool legends in the squad — to the brink of World Cup qualification.
The adoption of Celtic as my second team was largely because of two people. My father’s friend, who followed most sports passionately and indulged my interest in them, had worked in both Glasgow and Liverpool, and supported the two non-blue clubs. But the key factor was undoubtedly a school friend’s mother, one of the great characters I’ve come across in my life.
A Glaswegian who had settled in England’s northwest, she was barely five feet tall. What I recall most, more than the references to mighty Celtic, were the afternoons when she schooled us at darts. To say that it was humiliating would be an understatement. She’d often have a drink and a fag, or both, in her hand, and throw doubles, triples and bullseyes with nonchalant ease. I used to think of her as a female Jocky Wilson, though I never dared tell her that.
Time hasn’t been kind to Scotland or Celtic. The glory years are now as blurry as the Lisbon footage. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that Andy Robertson, cornerstone of Liverpool’s transformation into a trophy-winning side, is the only world-class talent Scotland has produced this century. Certainly the only one whose name comes up for discussion when a World XI is debated. The well of talent that produced Alex James, Denis Law, McNeill, Johnstone, John Greig, Jim Baxter, Dalglish, Souness and so many others has run dry. In a country of just five million, that was perhaps to be expected.
But those Lions will never be forgotten. This documentary tells their story quite beautifully, and it’s worth listening to Sir Alex Ferguson and Dalglish talk about Stein to understand just why he’s so venerated. The last time I was in Glasgow, in 2014, I went to Paradise to see the Stein statue that had been unveiled three years earlier. The McNeill bronze would first be glimpsed only 18 months later. Both figures tell a story, a tale so fantastic that it makes most fairy tales look prosaic.
Just think about this for a while, let the thought marinate in your head. An area of land smaller than many Indian districts gave the world four managers who did so much more than just win trophies — Sir Matt Busby, Shankly, Stein and Ferguson. Each is guaranteed a place at the top table, but it’s Big Jock, the Immortal One who inspired a pride of homegrown lions, that will sit at its head.