Sunday Times

Driving heart of the Lions
Hugh McIlvanney


Celtic's pride: Bobby Murdoch was at home whether a game was physical or
cerebral in nature, but it was his fluent passing that marked him out from
his contemporaries


THOSE OF US with fresh memories of Bobby Murdoch's career feel a duty to
celebrate his greatness as a football player. Sport rarely gives posterity
much of a basis for sound judgments. An artist or a bricklayer leaves
lasting, assessable evidence of his abilities but expressing high talent
through the playing of games can be like trying to carve a mark on running
water.
That is particularly true of football, where even the most ordinary match
amounts to a complex ebb and flow of influences, and a permanent record of a
performer's effectiveness is obviously far more elusive than it is, say,
amid the teeming statistics of track and field or cricket or golf. Clearly,
technical advances in camerawork make the growing film archive increasingly
helpful in preserving a sense of how special footballers of earlier eras
were. Diego Maradona's surge through the England defence for the goal of
goals at the 1986 World Cup finals is nearly as breathtaking for a
television audience now as it was for all of us who were in the Aztec
Stadium on the day - nearly but not quite.

The game is live theatre and, grateful though we are for television's
admirable substitute, much is lost when we have to settle for images on a
screen. To be fully savoured, football's supreme moments must be first-hand
experiences, and its greatest players can be truly understood and
appreciated only as flesh-and-blood presences. They are best appreciated, of
course, by the men who were closest to them while they were operating at the
height of their powers, by their fellow players and the managers who sent
them onto the field.

To gauge Bobby Murdoch's status in the crowded ranks of the outstanding
midfielders Scotland has produced in the century and more since football
became professional, don't look at the insulting total of 12 caps gained.
Listen, instead, to the voices of those who were his comrades, and his
opponents, in his prime. Jock Stein's opinion of him would be enough on its
own to remove any doubt about his right to be considered genuinely great.
Whenever the Big Man, as inspired a manager as ever worked in the game,
talked to me about Celtic's historic success in the European Cup of 1967, he
was eager to acknowledge that Murdoch was the most comprehensively gifted
player in the lavishly talented team assembled from Glasgow and its environs
(Bobby Lennox came from Saltcoats, 30 miles away on the Ayrshire coast,
which hardly rendered the overall proximity of origins less miraculous).

Stein did not dispense such distinctions lightly and the tribute retained
all of its significance after his death in 1985 at the age of 62, six years
older than Murdoch was when he succumbed last Tuesday to the effects of a
massive stroke. There was an impressive range of qualities to justify the
praise. Most of the strengths had been sufficiently discernible at Our
Lady's High School in Motherwell (also responsible for nurturing Billy
McNeill, the inspirational captain of the European Cup-winners who went into
legend as the Lisbon Lions) to persuade Celtic to sign Murdoch almost as
soon as he turned 15. He confirmed his promise with a scoring debut in the
first team six days short of his 18th birthday in August 1962, but it was
when Stein launched his unparalleled reign as manager in March 1965 that the
young prospect raised in Rutherglen, a few miles from Parkhead, began to
accelerate towards the standards which contributed so much to the glories of
1967 and beyond.

Crucial to that swift development was Stein's characteristically astute
decision to alter Murdoch's function, switching him, in the terminology of
the day, from inside-right to right-half. Having withdrawn Bertie Auld from
outside-left to a deeper role in midfield, the manager was doubly
guaranteeing himself verve, combativeness and rich creativity in the vital
central areas of the pitch. There was balance, too, with Auld's inventive
and precise application of a marvellous left foot frequently prompting
Celtic's most dazzling attackers, Jimmy Johnstone and Lennox, to torture the
opposition. But Murdoch was the driving heart of a magnificent team.

Everybody around him recognised that reality, and thrived on it. The warmth
and profound modesty of his nature made it easy for his teammates to accept
him wholeheartedly as first among equals, the best footballer in their
midst. Jim Craig, right-back of the Lions, spoke for all of them when he
said last week: "When Bobby Murdoch played the whole Celtic team played."

Murdoch had all the equipment needed to exert such an influence. Broad and
powerful in build, he was unfazed by any physical confrontation. Whether
relying on jarringly effective tackles or deft dispossessing techniques
based on his alert, intelligent reading of the play, he was a prodigious
winner of the ball. But it was his use of it that set him apart. Assured
control, superb passing and fierce shooting were attributes he had in
abundance. He was wonderfully two-footed, and what he did with either weapon
had the stamp of class. That versatility was a godsend throughout a career
complicated by the chronic problems inflicted on his right ankle by a
serious injury suffered in his teens. The depth of his unostentatious
courage is demonstrated by the story of how he made his heroic contribution
against Internazionale of Milan in Lisbon while nursing the ravaged ankle
and depending almost entirely on his left foot - and even more by the fact
that he didn't bother to mention his adversity in public until years later,
and then only in casual conversation.

Of all the formidable components of his game, however, the most telling, and
certainly the one Stein cherished above all others, was his capacity to
deliver the ball over long or short distances, with speed and accuracy and
unfailing economy, into the places where it could do maximum damage to the
opposition. It is hard to think of a midfielder who identified the points of
vulnerability more perceptively or exploited them more ruthlessly than he
did. In football terms, he was the delivery-man from heaven.

His haul of trophies - with Celtic he figured in the winning of eight
Scottish League championships, four Scottish Cups, five League cups and the
European Cup, and in his twilight phase at Middlesbrough he helped the
Teesside club to the English Second Division title - is all the more
extraordinary when we remember that, in addition to his injuries, he was
constantly plagued by weight troubles associated with a slow metabolic rate.
It was a dire affliction for a professional sportsman but, like everything
connected with Stein's Celtic, it could be material for banter. "We send
Murdoch down to the health farm at Tring to lose some weight," the manager
once said to me, "and the main result is that we are polluted with bad tips
from the wee jockeys he meets there."

As Bobby Murdoch was buried on Friday, the grieving of the wife, children
and grand-children with whom he was so lovingly close was respectfully
echoed by the mourning of a football club who still like to think of
themselves as an extended family. Celtic never lost a more distinguished
son.