A legend on a legend:
Driving heart of the Lions –
Football
Sunday Times, The (London, England)
May 20, 2001
Author: Hugh McIlvanney
Bobby Murdoch was as unassuming off the pitch as he was influential on it in Celtic's greatest victory.
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 on to 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.