1957-10-19: Celtic 7-1 Rangers, League Cup – Times 2007)

It is a twist of fate that only the Old Firm could provide. The eve of the first meeting of the season between Rangers and Celtic will see the 50th anniversary of the biggest beating ever handed out between Glasgow's eternal adversaries: Celtic 7, Rangers 1.

The scoreline would not have resonated for years had it just been in any "ordinary" league fixture, if such a thing exists in the Old Firm arena, but for it to occur in a cup final at Hampden Park, simply ensured lasting historical significance.

What made the 1957 League Cup final triumph all the more remarkable was that Rangers were not only Scottish league champions at the time and awaiting a European Cup tie with AC Milan, but Celtic were in a period best described as "transitional" with a side of ageing players and one young striker who enjoyed his greatest hour on October 19, 1957, before his career was cruelly cut short.

Billy McPhail secured sporting immortality by scoring a hat-trick. He was just 24 and had been bought from Clyde for just Pounds 2,500 in 1956. Less than a year after starring in the rout of Rangers, a knee injury forced him to hang up his boots. His strike partner, Sammy Wilson, whose goal opened the floodgates, had arrived at Celtic on a free transfer from St Mirren.

This pair of unlikely lads were in contrast to their venerable colleagues in a side that had served Celtic throughout the 1950s. This would be the last success achieved by Charlie Tully, Neil Mochan, Willie Fernie, Bobby Evans, Bertie Peacock, Sean Fallon and Bobby Collins. Celtic's domination in the first half was rewarded with goals from Wilson and Mochan, but there was a siege of the Rangers goal after the break – McPhail made it 3-0, Simpson pulled a consolation goal back, but then McPhail, Mochan, McPhail again, and finally Fernie sealed the success.
The Celtic team, managed by Jimmy McGrory, would break up soon after – they finished third in the league, 16 points behind Heart of Midlothian – but Fallon would be on the bench in Lisbon ten years later, as Jock Stein's assistant when they won the European Cup.

"Rarely does that happen," Fallon told the Celtic View this week, as he reflected on the record 7-1 scoreline. "Old Firm games are usually a tight scoreline. We turned it on that day and Rangers made some mistakes, and the longer the game went on, we got better and they got more demoralised, making mistakes they normally would not. Billy McPhail hit the woodwork three times that day. He could have had six or seven to himself."
Ironically, Celtic had another link to their greatest team – the European Cup winners of 1967 – on that day. Bertie Auld, one of the Lisbon Lions, had expected to play in the 1957 final, having contributed to every round, but the 19-year old was dropped.

"I did not even see the final," Auld said. "I went away with the reserves to play Queen of the South in Dumfries and heard the result on the radio on the bus back to Glasgow."

Auld was not the only person to miss out on the action. The BBC covered the match but the entire second half was never seen by the public because of a technical blunder. Pictures of the final were sent by the outside broadcast unit at Hampden to the BBC's Lime Grove studio in London, where a telerecording machine would record the action before editing would turn it into a highlights package for Sports Special.

The process involved filming the pictures as they appeared on a television screen – video recording was not introduced until 1958 – and the operator of the Lime Grove camera put the lens cap on at half-time and left it there during Celtic's second-half demolition. The then editor of Sports Special was Paul Fox, who later became controller of BBC1 and chairman of ITN, before being knighted.

Had the film existed, perhaps Billy McPhail might have been able to use it for his own good four decades later. McPhail was overtaken by a neurodegenerative disease which he believed to be from heading the heavy, leather footballs of the day. In 1999, McPhail launched a legal case claiming he was entitled to disability payments but an industrial tribunal ruled against him.

McPhail, severely impaired by dementia, died at the age of 75 in 2003. That was just 12 months after another great header of the ball, Jeff Astle, the former West Bromwich Albion and England striker, had died at the age of 59 from a degenerative brain disease – a verdict of "death by industrial injury" was recorded by the coroner because of repeated minor trauma.

The only comfort to McPhail's family is that at least some things cannot be erased. Memory and television footage can be lost, but football history has already inscribed McPhail's name in its own archive.

© Times Newspapers Ltd, 2007
© 2007 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved