Garner, Willie

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Fullname: William Garner
aka: Willie Garner
Born: 24 July 1955
Birthplace: Denny, Falkirk
Signed: 1 July 1981
Left: 30 November 1982 (to Alloa)
Position: Centre-Half
First game: St Mirren 1-3 home 8 August 1981 league cup
Last game: Hibernian 0-1 away 24 October 1981 league
Internationals: None

Biog

Signed from Aberdeen for £50,000 in July 1981, 26-year-old Willie Garner was brought to Parkhead as defensive cover after Billy McNeill had surprisingly allowed the experienced Roddy MacDonald to join Hearts in a £50,000 deal.

The no-nonsense defender made his first team debut in a 3-1 League Cup defeat at home to St Mirren on 8th August 1981 and had the severe misfortune to score two own goals in the defeat, which ranks his debut as possibly one of the poorest in the club’s history.

First team outings thereafter were to be a rare occurrence for Willie Garner. The problem was that the he was unfortunate to always end up on the wrong side of results. In addition to his debut, he played in a 2-0 defeat to St Johnstone in the league cup on 12th August 1981, and then a 1-0 league defeat at Easter Road on 24th October 1981. With the emergence of young centre half David Moyes, his days at Celtic were numbered.

There were brighter moments. Willie Garner won an unusual medal in November 1981 when he was part of the young Celtic side who won the Daily Express 5 a side tournament at Wembley arena by beating some stiff opposition in Ipswich, Manchester United and Southampton.

Willie Garner eventually signed for Alloa Athletic in November 1982 after an earlier loan spell at the club.

The Denny-born centre-half made three Celtic first team appearances, all defeats and so it wasn’t to be.

However, he did play for Celtic in the Glasgow Cup in season 1981/82, helping the side to defeat Rangers 2-1 in the final, granted it was reserves and juniors, but he deserved some compensation after some of the travails he suffered for the first team.

One of the ironies of his Celtic record is that his only senior honour as a player was at Aberdeen where he won the league cup with the club, so his poor league cup record at Celtic was a contrast to the glories he experienced in that cup at Aberdeen.

How was he to describe his Celtic career himself? (via his twitter feed):

“I played for my boyhood idols that day, thought I had a long career at club. Two own goals decided that 🙂 [Lived the dream] Running down that tunnel, 60,000 in the ground, wearing the hoops.”

Regardless, he still went to have a fair record in football, playing across a number of clubs, and returned to Aberdeen in 1984 to become assistant manager to Alex Ferguson for two years.

We wish him the best.

Playing Career

Honours with Celtic

none

Pictures

• Player Pics

Twitter

• @Willie_Garner5

Articles

http://celticunderground.net/debut-days-willie-garner/

8th August 1981 Celtic 1-3 St Mirren

In the summer of 1981 Roddy MacDonald surprisingly joined Hearts after giving eight fine years of service to Celtic. A few days later Billy McNeill travelled to Pittodrie to buy Aberdeen’s experienced centre half, Willie Garner, as Roddy’s direct replacement.

Garner was an experienced defender who McNeill knew well from his spell as Aberdeen manager in the late 1970’s and Willie was expected to battle it out for a place in the centre back positions with Roy Aitken and Tom McAdam.

In August Celtic travelled to Rotterdam to take part in the Feyenoord tournament with the host club, Dukla Prague and Anderlecht. In the first game Celtic beat Feyenoord 2-1 through goals by Dom Sullivan and Frank McGarvey and in the final they beat Dukla Prague 2-1 with both goals coming from Murdo MacLeod.

In both games Willie Garner had performed well and he would have been looking forward to the new season with great anticipation, especially with the prospect of playing Juventus in the European Cup in September. Celtic were now playing a great brand of attacking football with a team full of players geared to going forward and there was great optimism for the new season.

Celtic’s first competitive match was against St Mirren in the League Cup at Celtic Park and a decent crowd of 26,000 turned out to see them on a fine summer’s day. Celtic began brightly and attacked the Saints’ goal from the start with their flair players, Davie Provan, Tommy Burns and Charlie Nicholas all showing up well. Several good chances had gone begging before Frank McGarvey deservedly opened the scoring with a fine header after great work by Provan and Sullivan.

Just two minutes later St Mirren equalised when a Frank McDougall shot was heading wide before it struck the luckless Willie Garner and the ball was diverted past Pat Bonner in the Celtic goal.

In the second half Davie Provan was in fine form on Celtic’s right flank but his good work did not come to fruition. In 61 minutes disaster struck Willie Garner again when he rose to head away a Lex Richardson cross but only succeeded in heading into his own net.

Celtic attacked desperately only for Saints to score a third goal when their new signing, John McCormack, headed home a Richardson corner and at time up the Celtic support could not believe they had witnessed a 3-1 defeat after all the good play they had witnessed.

Sadly for Willie Garner, he was not to recover from his misfortune and a young Davie Moyes appeared a few weeks later to make his debut to send Willie further down the pecking order and he was ultimately given a free transfer in May 1982.

Few players can have endured more misfortune on their Celtic debut than the luckless Willie Garner.

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