Snub still stinks fifty years later
HAND in hand with the celebrations goes a lingering sense of grievance. Ignoring the anger still simmering among so many admirers of Celtic’s greatest team would be as wrong as letting this week’s momentous anniversary pass without ceremony.
We’re 50 years on from the European Cup triumph that shook the entire Continent, rattling football’s still-emerging hierarchy to its foundations.
But the Lisbon Lions — those who survive and the families of those sadly no longer with us — continue to be denied full recognition by an Honours System looking as irrelevant and out-of-touch as at any stage since David Lloyd George was flogging gongs for cash.
It is an outrage. It is a scandal. And the refusal of a complacent, self-protecting, stagnating Establishment to bend the knee on this instance tells us everything about their disdain for the people’s game.
The Celtic team of 1967 deserve to be remembered as the most exhilarating Scottish club side of all time. Whenever this is disputed, their supporters can simply point to the ‘cup with the big ears’ and drop the mic.
Yet the grand sum of official Honours handed down to this gathering of locally-sourced wonders would see them lose any game of ‘show’s yer medals’ with a handful of time-served Whitehall mandarins.
Yes, Jock Stein was gifted a CBE in 1970, while Billy McNeill and Bobby Lennox have both been recipients of the MBE.
That’s it? Take your wee baubles, be grateful and toddle off home like good subjects?
No way. Not because the men who played crave any further individual recognition from an ancient system of dubious priorities. But because righting this wrong would — or should, at least — matter to anyone who loves football.
Our game’s been consistently ignored, the examples of Sir Matt, Sir Alf, Sir Alex and a few others notwithstanding.
While Ramsey and Sir Geoff Hurst were recognised, the former immediately but the latter waiting just the 32 years for his World Cup-winning achievement to be rewarded with a ‘K’, it remains ridiculous that Bobby Moore passed away with only an OBE to his name.
Looking through the list of men denied this highest award — Brian Clough and Bill Shankly just two of the more deserving cases — it’s impossible not to compare soccer’s lot with that of more ‘acceptable’ sports.
Why should this be? Well, there were years, too many of them, when football was dismissed by the Establishment as merely an excuse — or a cover — for hooliganism. There were years, too many, when they had a point.
But citing Celtic’s infamous Battle of River Plate in 1967 — the Intercontinental Club Cup double header with Racing Club marred by multiple red cards and riot police galore — as an excuse for denying Stein a knighthood was utterly pitiful. If only to be expected, in that age.
Even the famous Scottish Office letter acknowledging the reason for Stein being snubbed, penned just before Celtic’s 1970 European Cup final against Feyenoord, argued only: ‘If Celtic win for the second time, I really don’t see how we can avoid an award to Stein. A CBE would be appropriate.’
So let’s get this straight. If he won a second European Cup, he still wouldn’t be afforded the same honour as Sir Matt Busby, who had followed Celtic’s triumph by leading Manchester United to glory in 1968? The whole tone of the missive, the offhand acceptance that they could no longer ‘avoid’ giving the great man his due, reeks of disdain.
They were probably thrilled when Celtic lost, allowing them to get away with a minor honour for a coach who inspired so many. The game has been rehabilitated in the eyes of the political classes during the past half century, of course. Yet still those in power have ignored repeated bids to have Celtic’s finest recognised.
During the post-Fever Pitch years, neatly leading up to the whole Cool Britannia era, both a thrice-elected PM and his less successful successor shied away.
Tony Blair preferred to revel in the company of Ashes heroes who had, after all, won an entire series. That’s a best-of-five competition. Played for every two years. And Gordon Brown? Too damned busy trying to convince Middle England that his favourite footballing memory was Gazza’s goal against Scotland at Wembley. That’s right, me old china. Just popping up the apples and, erm, apricots …
The Honours System is supposed to say something about the kind of people our country holds in high esteem.
Among the deserving cases rewarded over the years have been dancers, singers, game-show hosts, a host of the horsey set, dodgy bankers, dodgier and even more venal asset strippers, plus the obligatory rank of senior civil servants who know that a bouillon spoon is not the same as soup spoon. And the Lisbon Lions continue to be overlooked? Come on.
The official excuse for continuing to ignore Stein, of course, is that these things aren’t done once the personage in question has passed on to the next realm. See the current arguments about a posthumous knighthood for Roald Dahl. Rules, you see.
Asking the Honours cabal to suddenly bend the regulation clearly terrifies them.
After all, if we start pulling at one particular thread, the entire lattice of unspoken assumptions and etiquette may be left in an untidy guddle at the feet of some minor earl whose great, great, great grandfather spread pig manure for His Lord High Herald of Wessex and Pumpherston.
If the idea of an upgrade for those no longer with us is their only defence, the least the men in grey suits can do is fill in the blanks.
The surviving Lions should have their day at the Palace.
As long overdue thanks for the day when they became Kings of all Europe.