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Note: Some articles have spelt his name as "Gallacher" (Scottish spelling) others as "Gallagher" (Irish Spelling). He himself is said to have signed his document as "Gallagher".

Personal

Fullname: Charles Gallagher
aka: Charlie Gallagher, Charlie Gallacher
Born: 3 November 1940
Birthplace: Gorbals
Signed: 20 September 1958
Left: 1 May 1970 (free to Dumbarton)
Position: Inside-Forward
Debut: Celtic 1-0 Raith Rovers, League Cup, 22 Aug 1959
Internationals: Republic of Ireland
International Caps: 2
International Goals: ?

Biog

Gorbals Bhoy Charlie Gallagher signed for his beloved Celtic from Yoker Athletic in September 1958.

The inside-forward made his Hoops debut in a 1-0 League Cup victory at home to Raith Rovers in August 1959 and he went on to make 171 appearances and net 32 goals in a 12 year Parkhead career.

An assured if unspectacular player Charlie - the cousin of Paddy Crerand they both attended Holyrood Secondary in the South Side of Glasgow - Charlie may have lacked pace and aggression but he was a wonderful passer of the ball and possessed a thunderous shot. He was also always willing to work for his team-mates and throughout his Celtic career he remained a popular figure with fans and players alike.

He was unfortunate that during his time at Celtic he had to compete with the magnificent Bertie Auld for a starting berth but when he did turn out for the first team Charlie often showed his ample ability. Gallagher's first notable game for the club was probably the 3-1 Parkhead win over Rangers in September 1964 when a much unfancied Celtic triumphed by 3-1 in heavy conditions.

Charlie suffered from inconsistency in his early years and was tried in several positions when Jimmy McGrory was manager without really settling into a set role. However the arrival of Jock Stein as manager brought out the best in him and Stein always played him in a modern 2 man midfiield system. He had a fine game in the 1965 Scottish Cup final victory against Dunfermline when McNeill scored the winner from a glorious corner from Gallagher. Ironically he also took the corner from which McNeill again scored the winner against Vojvodina in the European Cup quarter final tie of March 1967 and Charlie could count himself unlucky not to have played in Lisbon.

He had a wonderful shot with both feet and put it to good effect in January 1966 against Rangers with a magnificent effort in Celtic's stunning 5-1 victory. Charlie was capable of playing on both sides of the field as he was also comfortable playing on the left which made him the ideal replacement for Bertie Auld on occasions.

After an injury to Auld in February 1968, Charlie had a fine run of form in the tight championship race between Celtic and Rangers which Celtic won narrowly and he was instrumental in this success with some great performances. Basically season 1967-78 was "Gallagher's season" where he helped to control the midfield, win the ball and supply ball to the more attacking players.

Charlie was a real footballer, appreciated by the purists amongst the Celtic support but was not a keen tackler preferring to leave those chores to the likes of Brogan and Murdoch. He moved to Dumbarton in 1970 and gave great service to the Sons, especially in the 1970 League Cup semi final and replay when Dumbarton, inspired by Charlie ran Celtic close, narrowly losing 4-3. The Celtic fans gave him a rapturous reception in both matches.

The son of Donegal parents Charlie was a Republic of Ireland international, and was the first Scots born player to play for the Republic of Ireland when he travelled to Ankara on 22 February 1967 to represent Ireland against Turkey.

He retired from playing in April 1973.

He worked as a scout for Celtic from April 1976 to April 1978 and latter as a taxi driver in Glasgow. Not for him the earnings of today's football players, where wages are talked of in millions. His wages were £45 per week at the beginning of his professional career.

Although Charlie Gallagher was not always a regular in the Celtic line up he was a reliable man to call upon and he played a great part in Celtic's early success during Stein's reign and was enormously popular with the Celtic fans.

Playing Career

Honours with Celtic [to be completed]

European Cup

• 1966-67

Scottish League Titles

• (3 titles - which ones?)
  

Scottish Cup

• 1965

Scottish League Cup

• (1 medal - which season?)
  

Pictures

• Player pictures

Articles

• Charlie Gallacher - "The Nearly Man"
  

Charlie Gallagher: a bhoy's own story

Joe Sullivan (CelticFC.net)
AS part of a series taken from the Celtic View, we have been taking a trip down memory lane with a host of past Celtic favourites to get their own personal take on what it was like to pull on the Hoops. Next up is Charlie Gallagher.

HE’S the man who kick-started a decade of dominance for the Hoops that led to the creation of the modern-day Celtic Football Club we all know and love today.

It was Charlie Gallagher who delivered the corner met by the head of Billy McNeill to score the crucial winner in the 1965 Scottish Cup final 3-2 win over Dunfermline and from then on in – the club simply didn’t look back.

Two years later, another vital corner kick played a major part in the club’s history as, in the dying seconds of the European Cup quarter-final against Vojvodina with the tie heading for a play-off in Rotterdam, Gallagher again swung over a dead-eye ball that Cesar met once more to propel the Celts to Lisbon glory.

A year after Lisbon, Charlie also took delight in watching his cousin and former Celtic team-mate, Paddy Crerand, also lift the European Cup with Manchester United.

Today we take a walk down memory lane with a man who played a remarkable part in Celtic’s history.

My earliest substantial memory of Celtic is a very easy one. I was actually playing schools football with Holyrood at the time and the guy who did the announcements at Celtic was John Murphy and he was one of our schoolteachers. He always had me kind of lined up to go to Celtic and when Celtic played Manchester United in a benefit game for Cheshire Homes in April of 1956, I was a ballboy. I was 15-years-old at the time and the game finished 2-2 in what was the early days of the Busby Babes. That was the first time I really remember going to Celtic Park as I had always played football on a Saturday and the ground was a bit of a trek from the Gorbals. If there was time, I would go to Clyde or Third Lanark games as they were a lot nearer home. So that was my first real experience of Celtic Park and it was such a buzz being a ballboy behind the goals and watching my heroes, as well as Man United players like Duncan Edwards, just yards away.

There have been a few highlights in my career and I realise an obvious one would be just being part of the squad that won the European up in 1967 but that possibly a kind of trite answer that most of the Lions would give you. But I think there is no bigger highlight than making your debut for Celtic – high points just don’t come any better than that. Mine’s was actually a League Cup game on August 22, 1959 against Raith Rovers and it’s a game that I’ll always remember to my dying day. There wasn’t a big crowd there (24,000) and we won 1-0 thanks to an own goal. There was a poor crowd because the team was having a bad, bad time. In fact in the late ‘50s we were having a terrible time but I remember that Celtic heroes like Bobby Evans and Bertie Peacock were playing alongside me and wee Bertie Auld in his first period with Celtic so that, I think, would be one of my highlights.

As I said earlier, making my debut for Celtic was a memorable highlight of my time at the club but the highlight of my career apart from the Celtic was being capped for the Republic of Ireland. Because I was brought up in an Irish household, my mum and dad were Irish as were all my relatives so, although I was born in Glasgow and brought up as a Glaswegian, most of my summers were spent in Ireland. It was a source of immense pride that I was the first Scots-born player to play for the Republic. I was actually the second player born outwith Ireland to play for the country. The first was a guy called John Dempsey who played with Chelsea but I was the first Scot. The first game was out in Turkey and it was a nightmare while the second was in Dublin against Czechoslovakia and it was tremendous. We lost both games, though, as Irish football at that time was only starting out compared to recent years although all the players were well-known names from English clubs. Czechoslovakia were one of the top teams in the world at the time with players like Masopust and other top names in their ranks and the Irish set-up was a bit haphazard. We would just meet up a couple of days before the game, not like now when there is about a week’s training, but I played two games for Ireland and I’m always going to be remembered for that. And Big Jock made me captain for the next Celtic game in celebration.

The biggest disappointment for me, and I would it would probably be the same for the majority of players that played in the game, was our European Cup-Winners’ Cup semi-final in 1964 against MTK Budapest. It was in April and we beat them 3-0 at Celtic Park so to score three goals at home and go away to Budapest and get beat 4-0 was ridiculous. When you go away from home you’re supposed to play defensively but our chairman at the time wasn’t interested in us playing defensively. So we played all-out attack and you know the rest. When you look at the team from that game, the vast majority of them were still there in 1967. So we had the makings of a good side ready to come through and that side, obviously with one or two additions to it, made it to Lisbon. So 1964 could well have witnessed our first European trophy (Sporting Lisbon beat MTK 1-0 after a 3-3 draw) when you think about it so I think that was a real major disappointment.

My other favourite ground, away from Celtic Park, was, believe it or not, Kilmarnock. It may be a strange choice but Rugby Park always had a great playing surface. I played there with Kilmarnock Amateurs for two or three years and I actually trained on that ground and it has been well quoted as the best playing surface in Scotland. While games were being called off all over the place, the match always seemed to go ahead there because it was a good sandy surface. It was also a big wide open pitch and I absolutely loved that park. Even though I was training with Celtic, I was also training with Kilmarnock amateurs when Celtic legend Malky MacDonald was the manager just before Willie Waddell and we trained with the part-timers on a Tuesday night so I got used to that pitch. It was a magnificent surface for playing on as it held the rain and the water disappeared from it. Joe McBride played with Kilmarnock Amateurs a year ahead of me and we always talked about how brilliant the training was and how fabulous the surface was. That’s all you want as a footballer, a good ground to play on.

Although I got to know him in later years, when I started out playing Bobby Shearer of Rangers was my toughest opponent. When I made my derby debut against Rangers at Ibrox away back in 1962 he came up to me and said, ‘All the best Charlie, have a good game – but the first time you run by me I’ll break your legs!’ I said, ‘Ya wee fat so-and-so, you’ll have to catch me first!’ Later on in life when I got to know him a wee bit better through meeting at Old Crock games, I reminded him about that and he said that he used to say that to all the young right-wingers to try and frighten them but I don’t know if it worked or not.

Although I never played very much in the same Celtic team as my cousin Paddy Crerand, we used to always be on holiday in the same part of Ireland at the same time and we were always playing football there together so playing at Celtic Park was just a continuation of what we did on our holidays in Ireland together. We played a lot of football over in Ireland when we shouldn’t have been playing! There were a lot of summer cup competitions and we shouldn’t have been playing in them because, of course, we were registered over here but we were none the wiser and didn’t realise we were doing anything wrong. In fact, I remember playing in the semi-final of a summer cup competition one year for the local team and we had about eight Scottish professionals against a side from Coleraine – their captain was none other than Celtic team-mate Bertie Peacock who had all his Irish pals playing for them. But Paddy was a very good player, in fact we used to go to training together every day form the Gorbals because he lived in Crown Street and I lived in Cumberland Street just around the corner so we’d walk down and get a lift from Alec Byrne or jump in the tramcar. So I didn’t play alongside Paddy that much but when I first went to see Celtic I was watching guys like Bobby Evans, Bertie Peacock and Neilly Mochan and I felt immense pride that I was able to play in the same team alongside such Hoops legends. In recent years it would be like a youngster coming in to play with the likes of Neil Lennon after watching them from the sidelines.

I have to admit that it’s a bit of a sore point and quite sad that people only seem to remember those two corners against Dunfermline and Vojvodina. I remember scoring a couple of good goals myself but people always bring this up whenever Big Billy and I are together but, I suppose, it is nice to be remembered for that. It’s something that will never fade from people’s memories as long as they live as, for people who were at the games, they were like ‘Kennedy moments’. I still watch them on television. I think the cup final goal was the most important as it was probably the most important game for the club because Lisbon may never have happened if we had lost the cup final. Everything changed all round after that with nine-in-a-row and all that went with it. That was the thing that set us off.

I honestly do not know what career I would have taken up if I hadn’t been involved in football. I was actually reasonably clever at school but I surmised that I was going to be a footballer from an early age. When I left school I went for an interview and got an apprenticeship as an electrical engineer up in London Road near Celtic Park – but come the Monday morning I thought ‘No’ and never turned up for it. I had no inclinations to be anything at all other than a footballer. Even at school, I felt at an early age that I was being pushed towards football. In fact Alex Ferguson mentioned this at the Joe McBride Dinner the other week. I played against Alex when I was at Holyrood and we were both 15-years-old playing with the Under-18s so at an early age when you are being pushed into an older team, you feel as if you’ve got something. I was training with Kilmarnock on a Tuesday night and Celtic on a Thursday so at that time I was hoping to be a professional.

If I had to give some advice to a youngster who wants to be a Celtic player I would have to say that it is a lot harder to be footballer that it was in my day. I don’t know if they are fitter but they appear to be fitter and the game is played at a much faster pace. So kids would have to look to the likes of Aiden McGeady, who has got himself super-fit to the level that you need to be nowadays. I think we played a bit slower in our day and moved the ball about a bit more but it’s a lot quicker now. In our day, players tended to get apprenticeships over and done with, like Jim Craig did, but when you want to be a professional footballer you’ve just got to get down to it and fitness is of utmost importance these days. That’s something that was only introduced at Celtic when Jock Stein arrived, as before that the training was a joke at Celtic Park as we were never as fit as the other teams. So get your head down, get fit as fiddle and if you’re a good player you’ll get there.

(Official site)

Mark Henderson
IT was 70 years ago today (Wednesday) that Charlie Gallagher was born into the Irish stronghold of the Gorbals. Like many brought up in that area of Glasgow, he dreamed of one day wearing the Hoops.

When the chance came, not even the persuasive powers of Willie Waddell at Kilmarnock could change his mind, and he was soon being put through his paces at night under the dim Paradise lights.

Supporters who watched him performthere for the next 12 years would be thankful for his single-mindedness.

“When I first joined Celtic, I actually started training with them when I was 16 or 17,” he told this week's Celtic View. “I was training with Kilmarnock as well, as I played with Kilmarnock Amateurs too.

So I was training two nights a week, once at Celtic and once at Kilmarnock. But I think Celtic heard about me through John Murphy, who was the announcer at the start of the game and also my PE teacher at Holyrood.

“He realised I was down at Kilmarnock as there were a couple of other Holyrood boys down there as well and he was desperate to get me up to Celtic, so he got me up training.

“Although I was at Celtic, I was still at Kilmarnock and they were trying to sign me as well. Willie Waddell was the manager there at the time, and I told him I had an offer from Celtic and he couldn’t make me change my mind.

“He realised it himself and said he was the same himself when he was a young guy when Rangers were after him and to be fair he never pursued it. He just said on you go and all the best to you.And that's what I remember.

“I went up to Celtic and we just trained at night. I'm sure you've heard the story often that there was only a wee light at each corner of the stand and we were training in that. And when I went full-time, I signed on my 18th birthday in 1958, and that’s when it really started.”

Gallagher would remain at Celtic for over a decade as the club was transformed from perennial underachievers into one of best teams in the world under Jock Stein.

During that era, the silky midfielder would make a massive contribution to those achievements, making over 200 appearances in the greatest Hoops side ever assembled, and narrowly missing out on a place in the European Cup final in Lisbon.

He also scored 32 goals for Celtic, including one on his birthday in 1962. Although unable to remember that particular strike, summoning up the memory of his most prized Hoops goal is certainly an easier matter. Supporters who were there when it happened, though, may have greater difficulty in their recollections.

“My favourite was obviously the one against Rangers, in the 5-1 victory in 1965,” said Gallagher.

“They scored first and then we hammered them. It was a bad, foggy day and I don’t think half the supporters saw the goals. They all went into the Celtic End, so they would have seen them but I am not sure about those who were in The Jungle.”

His outstanding performances for Celtic also saw him being the first Scottish-born player to represent Ireland, a record he remains proud of.

“It wasn’t the highlight of my life but it was one the top moments in my life, particularly my second cap which was in Dublin against the team that was running riot in Europe, Czechoslovakia,” he said.

“They were one of the top teams in the world at the time. To do that and be reminded every time I get introduced that I was the first Scots-born player to play for the Republic is something I am quite happy with. Both my parents were Irish and everyone in my family were Irish, so I was quite happy with that."