Six big Old Firm games: McPhail's day in the sun became more of a Valentine's massacre

Johnny Valentine gets a mention in a couple of the lesser-aired verses. Of course, the joke everyone remembers - and some old dodderers continue to tell - from the aftermath of the 1957 League Cup final involved one Celtic fan asking another the time and receiving the reply: "Seven past Niven", poking fun at the Rangers goalkeeper, George.

Niven went on to spend a further three years at Ibrox before heading off to Partick Thistle, though.

It was the centre-half, Valentine, who would be held up as the scapegoat, the man responsible for the record scoreline in any major cup final in British football, the record margin of victory in an Old Firm encounter in peacetime and Rangers' worst-ever defeat.

Valentine had only recently arrived from Queen's Park. The events of October 19 in front of a crowd of 82,293 at the National Stadium would ensure he was out the door to St Johnstone before long, career in Govan over before it had properly begun.

As Sir Alex Ferguson will testify, making a pig's ear of it in an Old Firm final comes at a price and Valentine paid dearly.

Within a matter of minutes of kick-off, he'd been smacked full in the chops by a cross from Neilly Mochan. His head never had time to stop spinning.

He gave away an early free-kick from which Bobby Collins hit the crossbar. Next up, he had put a header just past his own post with Niven helpless and had been left for dead as Charlie Tully hit the junction of post and bar.

It would only get worse. A defensive mix-up saw Sammy Wilson open the scoring on 26 minutes and both Valentine and Bobby Shearer were left in Mochan's wake before the Celtic outside left lashed a powerful shot into the net from an acute angle in the seconds leading up to the interval.

Eight minutes into the second period, Billy McPhail scored the first of his hat-trick. Who did he beat in the air to get on the end of Collins' cross? You needn't ask.

Sean Fallon, who played left-back for Celtic that afternoon, always regarded that 1957 final as his favourite game. Until his death in January 2013, aged 90, he kept a statue on top of the television in his living room that he had been given at an awards dinner to mark his role in what the club's supporters had voted 'The Greatest Ever Old Firm Derby'.

For all that, though, part of him always felt the deepest sympathy for Valentine. Yes, the inexperienced Rangers defender had a dreadful day, but he was far from the only one.

"I felt sorry for the boy," said Fallon. "Usually, the centre-half got a bit of cover from the full-backs. You had no sweeper, but the full-backs would come inside.

"However, the two backs for Rangers were Eric Caldow and Bobby Shearer and they played wide, played square. That meant the poor boy Valentine had no cover at all and what really killed him was that Sammy Wilson played up alongside Billy McPhail.

"There were two centre-forwards going through on the center-half. With his backs wide, he had no chance at all.

"I don't think he ever played another game for Rangers."

After Collins had hit the bar again and Billy Simpson had given Rangers the faintest hope with a crisp header, McPhail killed the game stone dead when pouncing on more chaotic defending to score from close-range. Mochan made it 5-1 before McPhail completed Valentine's misery 10 minutes from time.

The Celtic goalkeeper Dick Beattie, famously photographed holding up seven fingers after the final whistle and later to serve time in jail after being found guilty of involvement in a betting scam in England, launched a long kick-out towards McPhail and Valentine.

The Celtic forward won the header, rounded his man and ran on to send a low shot into the net. According to newspaper reports of the time, that sparked disorder in the Rangers end with bottles flying.

"Billy was supreme in the air and destroyed Valentine," recalled Fallon. "The boy went from bad to worse and the whole middle of their defensive area was wide open. That was possibly one of the reasons we were able to score seven goals.

"The longer the game went, the more we felt we were going to keep scoring goals. God, you could have got a train through the middle of their defence."

Celtic, despite being the holders of the League Cup, had entered this first final between the Old Firm in 30 years as very distinct underdogs. This was widely regarded as a period of mismanagement in the club's history, with strong suggestions that the team was actually being picked by Sir Robert Kelly, the chairman, rather than the manager, Jimmy McGrory.

Rangers were league champions, although Hearts were, in fairness, already well on the way to knocking them off their perch. They had finished the previous campaign 17 points clear of their oldest rivals, a massive gulf in those days of two points for a win.

The Celtic camp had even been unsettled by a fight between two of its most respected players just a matter of days before the game. Tully, an international player for Northern Ireland, had written a column in the 'Evening Citizen', which stated that only two Scotland internationalist would merit inclusion in a British Select.

His Celtic team-mate Bobby Evans was not one of them. He was clearly one of the others that Tully insisted "lack class". It ended with Evans being held back after starting a fight with Tully. Fallon claimed others had to get involved because Tully "would have been killed" otherwise.

In between the battling, it has emerged that targeting Valentine as a potential weak spot had been discussed widely within the camp, though. Bertie Auld had played in every round of the League Cup only to be dropped for the final and remembers overhearing McPhail insist that he was desperate to get his teeth into the Rangers centre-half.

"Billy had played for Queen's Park and knew Valentine," recalled Auld, who would spend the day of the game playing for the reserves against Queen of the South in Dumfries. "All week, you could hear them talking and McPhail was so confident.

"That was all you heard: get the ball to me. Honestly, that went right through the whole team."

Celtic completed the scoring in the final minute. McPhail was brought crashing by Shearer in the area and Tully urged him to take the penalty and give himself the chance to become the first man to score four goals in an Old Firm encounter.

He didn't. Willie Fernie had been the true architect of the victory and McPhail invited him to beat Niven from the spot.

Those who had failed to make the game, of course, saw none of this. On BBC that night, around seven minutes of the first half were shown on 'Sports Special' before the corporation's Glasgow operation opted-out and put on its own programme 'Talking Sport'. The presenter, Peter Thomson, insisted no footage of the second half could be shown because of a production fault in London.

It sparked fury among Celtic supporters, convinced the coverage had been sabotaged by Rangers-supporting executives. The truth is that old-fashioned broadcasting techniques were to blame.

Pictures being sent from Hampden Park to the BBC's headquarters in Lime Grove had to be filmed from a TV screen before being broadcast. At half-time, the technician in London put a cap over the lens of his camera to prevent dust from settling on it and forgot to take it off. Simple as that.

Amateur footage surfaced around 30 years later and can now be watched at your leisure on the internet. In terms of how historically significant the game actually was, it is best left to Auld, who went on to feature in a particularly noteworthy 2-1 win over Internazionale in Lisbon a little under a decade later, to sum it up.

"It was a fabulous achievement," said Auld. "When you look at us winning the European Cup, beating Rangers 7-1 was every bit as big to me."