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Details
Title: Tears in Argentina: Celtic’s Quest for the World Club Championship
Author: Tom Cambell
Published: 6 Nov 2006
Synopsis
In Tears for Argentina leading Celtic historian Tom Campbell tells the whole story of that controversial series and asks whether the conventional view that the Argentine players and fans were the villains of the piece still holds true. In his quest for the truth he interviewed Celtic players, directors and coaching staff including Billy McNeill, Bertie Auld, Bobby Lennox, Jimmy Johnstone and John Fallon.
There is a special interview with Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, who provides a shrewd insight into the mindset of Jock Stein.
In 2005 Campbell also made the long journey to Buenos Aires, where he met many of the people who were involved in the matches with Celtic: the Racing players, directors and coaching staff. The result is a gripping account of the most important matches ever played by a Scottish club. With 16 pages of stunning photographs.
Review
(David Potter@Keep The Faith.net)
Fellow Celtic author and historian David Potter, Tom’s companion for trips to Celtic Park, reviews his mate’s latest offering to the world of Celtic books.
We Celtic supporters are not narrow-minded. No, sir! Insularity and bigotry may exist elsewhere, but we pride ourselves on our broad-mindedness, magnanimity and vision. We are interested in all sorts of things, aren’t we? Even painful ones?
Well, that is an excellent reason for buying Tom Campbell’s latest book ‘Tears In Argentina’, nominally about the three games that Celtic played against Racing Club in the autumn of 1967 for the World Club Championship, an expedition that did indeed end in tears.
This book, however, is about a great deal more than that. Tom uses this opportunity to tell us a great deal about South American football, and indeed his own adventures in places like Brazil , Argentina and El Salvador in the extensive research that he did for this book. There are many anecdotes and quirky asides. For example, on the day before the deciding game on November 4th 1967 , the President of Uruguay challenged his former foreign minister to a duel!
On that same day, the Uruguayan authorities warned the Celtic Directors and Jock Stein that prostitutes might be employed to lure the Celtic players into a scandal. So special measures were to be taken to protect the players – but not, of course the Directors or the Manager who could, er, indulge, if they wished to!
Tom met the great midfielder of Racing Club in 1967. This was Humberto Maschio who has a “warm smile and a strong handshake” and is upset to hear that Bobby Murdoch is no longer with us.
Tom was also commissioned to buy a tango skirt for his “partner’s son’s ex-girlfriend”, and the man in the shop seems to think that this is somewhat corny, and that the relationship between Tom and the would-be tango dancer is, er, somewhat closer. That is until Tom’s image as a “sophisticated roue” collapses when he asks if the skirt can be bought in any colour other than black!
Clearly Tom has spent too much of his life at places like Parkhead to the detriment of his knowledge of tango dancing. Everyone knows that you simply don’t get green and white tango skirts, Tom!
Stories like this abound in the book. The main purpose is of course the football, and what a catalogue of infamy Tom gives us in all three games! He does not shirk from blaming Celtic players if necessary. John Hughes, for example, justifiably sent off for kicking the goalkeeper, tried to tell Jock Stein that he didn’t think anyone would notice! Tommy Gemmell admits graphically that he did no good at all for that Argentinean’s prospects of a happily married life when he took what he thought was a little private vengeance – “private” as in “private parts”! But not private as distinct from public, because the BBC and Kenneth Wolstenholme enjoyed showing it in what seems to be a deliberate attempt to get at Celtic.
Tom has talked to quite a few Celtic and other sources – Jim Farrell, John Fallon, Bertie Auld, Sir Alex Ferguson (fortunately before Artur Boruc saved yon penalty!) and the result is a splendid book which anyone with any interest in Celtic FC really should possess.
The whole episode is a distressing one, and many of us would prefer to think that it didn’t happen. But it did, and Tom gives us a graphic and detailed account of these dreadful and shameful events.
The book is written with a lightness of touch, the photographs are original and interesting and Santa Claus would be well advised to lay in a stock for distribution into Timdom’s Christmas Stockings.
Product Details
- Author: Tom Cambell
- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Fort Publishing Ltd (6 Nov 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1905769024 ISBN-13: 978-1905769025