The 100 Greatest Scottish Sporting Icons day 11: Numbers 6-4 revealed

He had a nickname that suggested he was the purveyor of good and justice and a goal celebration so distinctive that you knew who
it was just from the silhouette.

Denis Law, “The Lawman” scored on his Manchester United debut and never stopped. In 404 games over 11 years, the Scottish striker scored 237 times, helping him and the club to titles and accolades galore.

And almost every one of those goals was celebrated in what became his customary pose; arm in the air, finger pointing to the heavens, his hand grasping the cuff of his shirt.

Visit Old Trafford now and you will still see it, captured for eternity alongside George Best and Bobby Charlton, forming the “The Holy Trinity”, – Charlton, Best, Law – the deadly trio amassing 665 goals collectively for United and, between 1964 and ’68, all won the coveted European Footballer of the Year Award. Law remains the only Scot to achieve that honour.

Given his club debut at Huddersfield as a teenager, Law (having first been wanted by United and then later by Bill Shankly after he had left Leeds Road to become Liverpool boss) moved to Manchester City for a then-record fee of £55,000. Averaging a goal every two games, Law was targeted and eventually signed by Torino, to play alongside another import with Scottish connections, Joe Baker.

His time in Italy was not a happy one, on and off the pitch. Following a dispute with his club –who wanted to sell him to city rivals Juventus – he moved to Old Trafford for a record £115,000 to team up with Matt Busby, who had also given him his first international cap, aged 18.

Law was prolific. The club won titles and trophies, while in his first five seasons he scored 29, 46 – a record that has never been surpassed – 39, 24 and 25 goals respectively. Sadly, injury deprived him of a place in the side for the 1968 European Cup Final.

Freed by Tommy Docherty in 1973, Law pitched across the city again, back to Maine Road.

In an ironic twist, Law netted a famous backheeled goal in the Manchester derby to effectively seal United’s relegation from the top flight (although even a draw wouldn’t have saved them). He did his job with professional integrity, but for once there was no customary goal celebration.

Scotland may have had some of the best and most instantly recognisable players in English club football, sharing success at every level. However, on the international stage, despite that wealth of riches, the Scots failed to qualify for a single World Cup between 1958 and 1974.

However, weeks after what would become his last goal – and indeed his final touch in English football – Law finally had the opportunity to play on the biggest stage of all, the World Cup finals, when he faced Zaire.

Before the new season came around, Law decided to retire; for someone who had achieved so much in the game, the possibility of becoming no more than a bit-part player and a reserve, was something best avoided.

He remains Scotland’s record top scorer at international level, a title he holds jointly with Kenny Dalglish. However, while Dalglish played 102 times for his country, Law required just 55 games to tally 30 goals, one of those coming at Wembley in 1967 when Scotland became the first team to beat England following their World Cup win.

People make the argument that Dalglish didn’t always play up front while on international duty. However, the fact is that, when he did,
his strike rate was nowhere near that of his fellow countryman.

After football, Law spent time on the box, given a regular slot on Granada TV’s Match Time and, in 2015, became a CBE for his services to football and charity.

Stewart Weir’s reflections

I’ll be honest, for me, there has never been a better Scottish player because, to my mind, Denis Law had everything. He had speed of thought, amazing athleticism and dexterity, bravery and he delivered goals time and time again. He didn’t need acres to work in, although he could run and dribble with the best. No, a foot, or even a few inches and a sight of goal was all he needed.

“The word electric sums up Denis Law,” said Bobby Charlton. “Sparks seemed to be flying everywhere when he was around, creating problems for defenders. If goalkeepers dropped the ball, even six inches, he was on it like greased lightening and he had it in the back of the net.”

Denis Law, the ultimate hit man, had everything you’d want from a player, everything you’d want from a team-mate and everything you’d fear as a defender. He appeared small, almost scrawny against the likes of centre-backs such as Jack Charlton, Brian Labone and Ron Yeats. But Law was a ferocious competitor and merely saw such apparently mismatched physical contests as part of the challenge.

“Denis was a dynamic person who caught the spectator’s eye, the long, blond flowing locks, the electrifying bursts, tremendous athleticism and he scored goals which everyone loved to see.” So said the late Bobby Moore, captain of England’s winning World Cup team in 1966, who a year later could only watch as Law joined in with Jim Baxter to taunt and tease the world champions at Wembley. Law even found time to throw in the odd backheel as the triumphant Scots showboated their way to victory.

I’m lucky, oh so lucky, to be able to say I saw Law play and score, for Scotland. Once, was against Peru; the second time, again at Hampden, was against Northern Ireland in the Home International Championship.

He was past his prime, but those razor-sharp instincts were still alive and kicking. With Pat Jennings stranded, the ball was centred across the face of goal where, showing his trademark acrobatic skills, he leapt to scissor-kick home a volley. It was typical Law.

As the song goes “when will we see your likes again?” For me, we haven’t, and we may never see anyone quite as prolific again as The Lawman . . .

5

Kenny Dalglish

He is the lone Scot to have won more than 100 caps; was the first to go to three World Cup finals, just missing out on a fourth due to injury; and shares the Scotland goal-scoring record with another of his country’s greatest players, yet it is still often claimed that we did not seem him at his best at international level.

As a manager, there are doubts over his record, too, despite – in a career spanning four clubs and an admittedly much interrupted 27 years – accruing four English titles, two FA Cups, a European Super Cup and League Cup wins on either side of the Border, a haul that surpasses those of all bar a handful of the most successful in the history of football.

That is how good he was as a player with Celtic and Liverpool. Expectations of King Kenny were of a ridiculous order because of the way he performed in a career that saw him score 167 goals in 322 games for Celtic and 172 in 515 for Liverpool, while he was simultaneously the principal supplier of opportunities for the likes of Joe Jordan, Dixie Deans and Ian Rush.

Facts and figures are never quite enough when assessing the very best. though. The assessment of peers offers superior insight.

In the words of George Best: “The most complete player I ever saw was Di Stefano, the centre forward who seemed to me could do everything. He scored goals, he could defend, he was good in the air, both feet, exciting to watch and I was going to say Kenny is close to him, but he’s probably on a par with him as far as I’m concerned. For me that’s the highest compliment I can pay Kenny.”

As for Franz Beckenbauer, captain of the West German side that beat Johan Cruyff’s Holland in the final of the 1974 World Cup from which Dalglish and his Scotland colleagues returned home unbeaten: “Kenny is one of the best and the finest players I ever saw and one of the best in the history of football.”

Dalglish’s career was also the greatest possible reward for a family that did not allow itself to be dragged down by the worst aspects of his home city’s tribalism.

He had grown up living in a multistorey that overlooked the Rangers training ground and his dream was to be signed by them. However, just as Liverpool manager Bill Shankly would be enraged when he discovered, years later, that a 15-year-old Dalglish had visited them on trial then been allowed to return to Glasgow unsigned, Rangers missed their chance, while Jock Stein seized his.

Dalglish was subsequently to say of his father’s reaction to the approach: “Although he was a Rangers supporter, he wasn’t bigoted in any way shape or form. So, when Celtic came up they had just won the European Cup. They were going great and he said, ‘Well if you want to learn football that’s the best place to go’.”

This year, then, sees the golden jubilee of not one but two of the greatest moments in Celtic’s history. Winning the European Cup with his homegrown Lisbon Lions may have been Stein’s greatest achievement, but identifying, that same year, the talent of Dalglish and persuading him to sign for his boyhood favourites’ greatest rivals was probably the key moment in ensuring they maintained momentum in the years that followed and ultimately brought a record setting sequence of nine successive Scottish titles.

Yet Dalglish is, if anything, held in even greater esteem by the supporters of the other club with which he is most closely associated. Arriving to replace Kop favourite Kevin Keegan, immediately after the club won its first European Cup, he helped them successfully defend it, then win two more over the next seven years, while there would be 11 domestic trophy wins, six league titles, four League Cups and an FA Cup.

As a player, he was the consummate professional. To quote yet another of those who were better placed than most to assess his qualities, long-time Scotland and Liverpool team-mate Graeme Souness observed that others have been more flamboyant but: “In his best days at Liverpool I would say Kenny was the best player in the world without any shadow of a doubt.”

Kevin Ferrie’s reflections

As a seven-year-old living in Dundee’s Dalgleish Road, my eye was drawn to the name of one of those wearing a second team strip in a large squad photograph in the 1969 version of the old Hugh Taylor edited Scottish Football Annual that was a Christmas staple. He may not even have played in Celtic’s first team at the time, but I had a special affection for Kenny Dalglish from that point.

Among the hundreds of goals, many were classics, but few warmed the heart more than that scored a year after Scotland’s 5-1 humiliation at Wembley. The winning mis-hit, scored through the legs of future Liverpool clubmate Ray Clemence a year later, inspired the memorable banner, unwrapped on Scotland’s next visit to England’s national stadium, that read: “Scots Wha’ Hae – spread them Ray.”

In a long career in sports writing I have never had direct dealings with him in a professional capacity, however, and it was perhaps my good fortune not to. Never meet your heroes they say and many in the press corps feel that the most complete footballer Scotland has ever produced let himself down badly, most particularly, but not only, when calling a press conference in Celtic supporters’ pub Baird’s Bar during his brief stint as the club’s manager in millennium year.

While I have huge respect for many of those who took issue, admiration and detachment generate mitigation. As his old ally Graeme Souness once said of him, Dalglish always tended to be awkward with anyone other than those to whom he was closest, even before having to deal with the consequences of being closely identified with some of the most devastating happenings in sporting history.

Coping with having to play a European Cup final in the wake of the Heysel disaster then, just a few months later, the death of beloved Scotland manager Jock Stein during a match he would have been playing in but for injury and with the questions that followed, would have been more than enough tragedy for any one sportsman to contend with in the course of his career. However, Hillsborough and all that surrounded it, were of another order, as was the magnificent way Dalglish handled himself as Liverpool manager in the aftermath.

Deeply unfair though it would be, it also seems understandable that he may have seen the vast majority of journalists, not just those at one particular newspaper, as something of a sub-species after all he was subjected to in the eighties.

So much so that his defence of the indefensible in more recent years, in terms of the behaviour of Luis Suarez, can also be put down to something of an instinctive reversion to a siege mentality in the face of media hostility. Yet, in overall terms, as footballing geniuses go, he was less flawed than most and, in terms of what we expect of him, those of us who once saw him as something of a god have to be sufficiently grown up to acknowledge that even Kenny Dalglish was only human.

4

Jock Stein

Jock Stein was so utterly ahead of all his peers and so influential to all who worked with him that he could even make Graeme Souness cry. Twice.

On that awful September night at Ninian Park in 1985 when, at the age of 62, a heart attack took his life, his Scotland captain, who was injured, couldn’t hide his emotions when he had to tell the dressing room that the big man “had gone”.

On the 30th anniversary of Stein’s death, journalist Alex Mooney revealed for the first time a conversation he had with Souness when he was at Rangers and taking on the world.

“I still miss him so much,” admitted Souness. “There wasn’t a day we didn’t speak, if not face to face then by phone. He was like a second father.”

Mooney, who knew Stein, then decided to tell Souness that his second father rated him the best team player he had ever had and, considering the players he’d been fortunate enough to work with, that was saying something.

“I hadn’t told anyone about Stein’s insight as he insisted it was a private matter,” said Mooney “He also said Souness’s team-mates didn’t know he was helping them on the field and felt that’s the way his captain wanted it to remain.

“But now I thought Souness should know. I told him the story and he was lost for words, gobsmacked that Stein had revealed this. That he was even aware of it.

“His eyes welled up and his voice softened as he said, ‘I didn’t know he knew that . . . Oh, that is really something’. He paused then added, ‘But I should have. His knowledge of the game was unbelievable. What a loss he is’.”

What a loss, indeed. How can you sum up a giant? This football visionary who led a team from Glasgow, Lanarkshire and Saltcoats (Bobby Lennox was that sole “foreigner” from Ayrshire) to the European Cup and transformed the game at the same time.

“We did it by playing football. Pure, beautiful, inventive football.” That they did, that they did.

Born in 1922 into a mining community in Burnbank, the young Stein’s start in life offered little hint at what was to come. He left school with nothing, worked briefly in a carpet factory and then, against his family’s wishes, went down the pit like everyone else.

He always played football. A centre-half who was good in the air and a leader, but he was no star. “I was average, nothing more.” But the big guy was good enough to play for Albion Rovers for eight years.

In 1950 he signed his first professional contract, with Welsh non-league side Llanelli Town for the small fortune of £12 a week. It beat working in the mines, although those long days labouring in the dark stayed with him. Stein remained true to his roots. He was left-wing, a supporter of the trade union movement and once chided Alex Ferguson for not putting money into a striking miner’s collection tin.

“I didn’t think you would forget those lads, Alex,” said Stein as his younger protégé, who had genuinely not seen the guy, embarrassedly fished in his pocket for a ten pound note.

The move to Celtic in 1951 came out of nowhere. The club paid £1200 for him. This is the greatest transfer in history. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.

A knee injury cut short his career “perhaps the best thing that ever happened to me” and a job was created for him to coach the Celtic reserves. A revolution had started.

Stein moved to Dunfermline, where he won the Scottish Cup. They beat Celtic. He was then at Hibernian before Celtic came calling again in 1965. The choice of manager was obvious. His background, Stein came from a protestant family, meant some found it hard to accept.

“I lost some friends when I made the move, but if that’s what matters to them, then they’re not really friends at all.”

His crowning glory was, of course, the 1966/67 season; perhaps the greatest achievement in British sport. Within two years Stein had taken a mid-table Scottish team to a treble and the European Cup. Typing these words now, almost 50 years on, is still remarkable.

How did Stein do it? He was a genius. That’s how. The greatest football manager of them all.

Neil Cameron’s reflections

It is doubtful whether Jock Stein gave two hoots about not receiving a knighthood but perhaps the rest of us should. None of the Lisbon Lions did, not even Billy McNeill, with chairman Robert Kelly the only person at Celtic in the wake of 1967 to be knighted.

The story goes that Stein’s working-class background counted against him, as did the riot the World Club Championship decider against Racing Club became, which could hardly be seen by any reasonable observer to be his or even Celtic’s fault, even if four of their players ended up being sent off.

Then again, when you look at some in sport, and from elsewhere, who have been knighted then maybe it’s best this great man is not categorised with mere mortals. After all, he is immortal – Bill Shankly said so.

If you’ll indulge me for a moment; Stein, in my opinion, has actually never been given the full recognition he deserves outside of Celtic Park. Why no statue outside Hampden? Why no competition named after him? If Burnbank had an airport I know what I’d call it.

As a football manager, Stein was way out on his own. Icon, in this instance, is arguably not a strong enough word.