| Match Pictures | Matches: 1972 – 1973 | 1972-73 Pictures |
Trivia
- Played at Sprigfield stadium St Helier Jersey attendance 200. This fixture had been arranged sometime before and though it occurred in the week of the League Cup Final, Jock Stein was unwilling to call off as a lot of tickets had been sold for the game. The plan was to play the exhibition match and then use the time in Jersey to relax and train away from Scotland. However the weather turned out to be rainy and inclement.
- Celtic played St Ouens the compliment of going for goals. Southampton players Terry Paine, Mike Channon, Hugh fisher, Paul Gilchrist, Jim Steele and Ron Davies turned out fror St Ouens as guests.
- Ex-Dundee player Jim Steele who had been booked 7 times against Celtic carried on his vendetta against them in Jersey and recently in an interview for the Herald in 2010 Steele talks about the St Ouens game before which he had a few drinks and when:“Celtic started taking the piss, George Connelly, in particular. I went right over the top of him and he got carried off.”
- Steele did play against Celtic one more time in November 1976 when he featured on loan from Southampton in a Jock Wallace Rangers side beaten 0-1 at Ibrox. The late Ian Archer wrote in his Herald report: “One will remember most about this match that Jim Steele was booked for the third consecutive game. His tackle on Doyle was late as a large drink just as it had been against Hibernian’s Alec Edwards on Saturday.”
- Jim Craig agreed to join Sheffield Wednesday for £10,000.
Report
George Connelly was injured in the first half and subbed by Wilson. Bobby Lennox came on for the second half and scored four goals.
Jacky McNamara was given a run out towards the end.
The big Danish goalkeeper trialist Geir Karlsen had been due to play but is unmentioned in any of the reports.
Teams
St. Ouens:
From: Breuilly, O’Connor, Nobes, Isham, Spink, Jones, Selkirk, Barton, McLaughlin, Cooper, Craydon, Sands and Rowan. Guests:Jim Steele, Terry Paine, Hugh Fisher, Mike Channon, Ron Davies and Paul Gilchrist (all Southampton FC)
Goal:- Gilchrist
Celtic:
Williams, McGrain, Brogan, McCluskey, McNeill, Hay, Johnstone, Connelly, Dalglish, Murdoch, Hood Subs: Lennox, Wilson, McNamara
Goals:- Hood 2, Dalglish 2, Lennox 4, McCluskey, Murdoch, Wilson.
Referee: J. Riseborough
Attendance: 2,000
Articles
- Match Report (see below)
Pictures
Articles
Celtic greeted by sun and song on arrival in Jersey
By IAN ARCHER
Jersey, Sunday
Celtic arrived here in the lap of France today and discovered that the clouds which have overhung Glasgow these last weeks have disappeared. The sun was actually shining.
On the tarmac at St Helier’s holiday airport the officials and autograph hunters, the kilted pipers, and the singing fans were all waiting. As usual this team could go nowhere without attracting attention.
The Channel Islands have heard about Scotland’s champions and tomorrow night they will judge their prowess for themselves in a match that will pull some 5000 people to Jersey’s only floodlit stadium.
It would be incorrect to say that this is a game of any real importance. Celtic will win it by whatever margin they choose, making their own decision where their own pride ends and where humiliation of innocent people begins.
It is the time and place that matter more than the actual fixture. This is League Cup final week and this island it a nice place to relax, and for a while at least forget that Hibernian and Hampden Park awaits on Saturday.
“We’ve been at it for four months now, Saturday and Wednesday, Saturday and Monday.” Jock Stein said in the course of another of those tedious days of travel. “Coming here to play this match and to relax should freshen up.
Remember this is not a mature Celtic side. There are a lot of young players in it and we have made heavy demands upon them in the last few weeks. They should get a lift from this break. It’s deliberately unusual.”
In fact, the match will have some effect on the side that he eventually selects to meet Hibs, because Bobby Murdoch and Lou Macari will both be used to continue their return to the first team that started at Dumbarton yesterday.
The test that awaits both of them will be real enough. St Ouens, the Jersey side that provides the opposition are not trusting their usual staff of plasterers, hotel staff, and clerks to do battle with the club that they recall only too well once won the European Cup.
They have co-opted the services of five Southampton players, including two Scots, who have learned the hard way in the English first division. Celtic will tomorrow face Ron Davies, Mike Channon, Terry Paine, all internationalists, along with Jim Steele, an £80,000 purchase from Dundee, and Hugh Fisher.
This is another of the world’s out-of-the-way places that is strangely addicted to football, and that is hardly surprising on an island that is said to have some 13,000 exiled Scots. The local teams often speak to each other in accents that owe more to Bridgeton Cross than the mainland of France.
The officials here do their best to see that the locals are able to watch football of a quality they cannot hope to provide themselves, and Celtic are this week the centrepiece of the club’s annual celebration.
Last season Manchester United fulfilled the same obligation and duly won 4-0. Two years ago Southampton made the journey across the English Channel and won 15-3. Asked about the scoreline Southampton’s manager Ted Bates, replied, somewhat gruffly—”I pay my lads to get goals.”
In the past, Stanley Mathews also has been flown in from Malta, where he is fortunate enough to live, to provide something special, but local opinion believe that tomorrow night, Celtic will show the islanders some of the best football they have seen. That remains reason enough to make the journey, for football has a place for missionaries.
But it was some business reaching Jersey. Glasgow Airport was closed in the dark and unearthly hour that we were asked to assemble. It was still before breakfast time when we took to the air at Edinburgh. Heathrow is a place that can give you jet lag standing still, and so Jersey with the sun shining seemed like a haven by mid-afternoon.
But the journey was not without humour. At London, a duty announcer made a small and unintentional contribution to the cause of unity. “Would members of Rangers and Celtic football teams please go to Channel 13,” she said. About 15 pairs of eyes looked nervously round for John Greig.
Glasgow Herald Tuesday 5 December 1972
Flu victim Macari will be sent home early from Jersey
From IAN ARCHER: Jersey, Monday
Celtic today decided to banish Lou Macari from this island. He will return to Glasgow in the morning and that may eventually be the most important move made in this league cup final week.
Macari has flu and spent today in bed, eating only sparingly and living under strict orders not to approach his team-mates too closely. He will stay in this splendid isolation until the taxi comes to collect him for the journey home.
He remained tucked up in bed when Celtic went out on a treacherous dreadful night and defeated their cosmopolitan opponents by the cricket score of 11-1 on a water ski-ing pitch in the centre of St Helier.
There, Billy McNeill played his first match of any description for four weeks, and ended as strongly as he had started, so Jock Stein might be said to have finished level on the day’s injury and illness proceedings.
FRUSTRATED
Macari who played his first match after an even longer absence on Saturday, was expected to prove that he was ready to meet Hibernian on Saturday by playing, again tonight. But those plans were frustrated.
He was unwell yesterday during the tiring long journey here, and although it is only a 24-hour virus that he has contracted, athletes occasionally take longer to recover from these ailments than those of us who are decidedly less well tuned.
Macari will be accompanied home tomorrow by George Connelly acting as a nursemaid and clearly he must improve quickly if he is to play at Hampden Park. In last season’s Scottish Cup final he helped to destroy Hibs, and Stein remains optimistic he will be able to do so again.
“I hope and expect that Macari will be able to play. His wife caught flu last week and he first complained about feeling under the weather after Saturday’s match at Dumbarton he said.”
“He wasn’t feeling too well on Sunday, but today he has eaten some food and is taking more interest in things. But it is obviously better that he should be at home rather than in a hotel.”
McNeill’s comeback will have made up for any disappointments he might have felt over Macari. He was asked to play on a pitch covered in parts with surface water, and even if the opposition was hardly severe, it took effort merely to cover the ground.
“I feel great. It was awful to be inactive and any game is better than none at all” the captain said afterwards showing high enthusiasm for a senior professional.
It could be that McNeill will now play on Saturday, for in the course of the game George Connelly, his deputy in recent weeks, received a rather severe muscle injury.
That was done in a collision with Jim Steele, the former Dundee defender and one of five Southampton players who were included in the St Ouens side.
Steele, in fact, was the villain of an otherwise pleasant night. He was booked seven times in games against Celtic during his league career in Scotland, and here it looked as if he had some old scores to settle.
At one stage the local referee went to the team’s dug-out and unsuccessfully asked if they would kindly remove him from the match. Understandably he did not want to be unkind to a guest in the island, otherwise he might have sent Steele off himself.
Celtic played in this missionary match as if it had all the importance of Saturday’s affair. This is part of their secret, and local opinion insisted that they were the strongest running team they had seen. The goals were shared around – four for Lennox, two for Dalglish and Hood, and one apiece for McCluskey, Wilson, and Murdoch.
NASTY NIGHT
This was all done on a nasty night. Fortunately we discovered a good vantage point at a window overlooking the ground in a social club. The Celtic fans on the island – and there are many of them – found it also, so all those mindless supporters’ songs were being belted out at the bar long before the end.
Celtic move on to more important places, but a few hearts have been captured.
