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109 pages

English

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First and Last: How I Made European History With Hibs is the fascinating autobiography of Jackie Plenderleith, the only surviving player from the first British side to compete in the European Cup. A graceful yet tough-tackling defender, Jackie takes us back to 1955 and describes what it was like for a 17-year-old coal miner's son to witness first-hand the awkward birth of the global phenomenon now known as the Champions League and his role in helping Hibernian reach the semi-finals. The former Scotland international relives his time playing alongside the Edinburgh club's legendary 'Famous Five' forward line, and reveals how it felt to line up against the incomparable Ferenc Puskas twice in the space of two days while in South Africa. Captain of the British Army team during his national service, a team-mate to Denis Law at Manchester City and the proud possessor of international caps from schoolboy to senior level, Jackie played an important part in football's past and, with typical good humour, he has plenty to say about its future.

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Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	06 septembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785319693
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Jackie Plenderleith with Tom Maxwell, 2021
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at theearliest opportunity by the publisher.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781785319891
eBook ISBN 9781785319693
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Contents
Foreword
Prologue
1. Jack the Lad
2. If the Boots Fit
3. The Great Unknown
4. Home from Home
5. Broken Reims
6. Curses
7. A Private Captain
8. End of the Easter Road
9. City Life
10. Southern Discomfort
11. A New Challenge
12. Pusk s
13. A Dream Come True
14. A Former Player
Epilogue
Favourite European Moments
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Photos
For Mum and Dad - Jackie Plenderleith
For Sabrina - Tom Maxwell
Foreword
I WAS a young player at Manchester City when Jackie Plenderleith signed in the summer of 1960, ostensibly to replace the mighty Dave Ewing at the heart of the City defence. The only similarities between the two of them, however, were that they were both from Scotland and they both played at centre-half, but in a completely different way.
Big Dave , from Perthshire, was rough, tough and seemingly hewn from granite. He was loud and ebullient, an old-fashioned stopper who was loved by all City fans for his enthusiasm and his commitment to the cause. In came Jackie, signed from Hibernian, a Scotland Under-23 and future full international. He was smooth, cool and a picture of urbanity who preferred to defend with anticipation instead of decapitation. A tidy and accurate passer of the ball with good control, but the polar opposite of what City fans had become accustomed to. This included Jackie s pre-match, ball-juggling routine on the pitch, which wouldn t have looked out of place in a travelling circus.
It was something totally different. The fans loved to see a player performing a few tricks with the ball because, in those days, before the game defenders would simply stand 30 yards apart and belt the ball to each other, while the forwards would gather around the edge of the penalty area firing shots past their own goalkeeper into the net. So Jackie was ahead of his time, really, but his ball-juggling exploits weren t confined to the football pitch. The snooker room, upstairs at Maine Road and after training, was the place to see Jackie perfecting his favourite party trick of tossing a billiard ball high into the air before catching it neatly on the back of his neck. It was a dangerous thing to do but he never failed to catch it - don t try this at home!
I made my reserve team debut at Stoke City, playing alongside Jackie. He had been absent from the first team for quite a long spell and his future at the club at this point seemed a little uncertain. As we got back into the dressing room at Stoke s old Victoria Ground after the game, however, he still went out of his way to tell me how well he thought I had played in what I am sure for him was a meaningless 4-1 win but for me was just the opposite.
As fate would decree, Jackie and I both left Manchester City on the same day in 1963 and, a few weeks later, I bumped into him on Oxford Road. I was pleased to see him. He was always great to me and showed a genuine interest in the youngsters. Are you joining Lincoln City? he asked. I said that I was. I want to wish you the very best of luck. And then he was gone, back to Scotland and the next phase of his life.
As someone who spent most of his football career in the reserves, I can only imagine what it was like for Jackie - when he was barely 17 - to be playing regularly in the Hibs first team alongside such club legends as Gordon Smith, Lawrie Reilly and Eddie Turnbull, let alone to play in the very first staging of the European Cup. Jackie is a good man with a great story.
Fred Eyre , author of Kicked into Touch
Prologue
IT S JUST a joke. That s how Alan Hardaker, secretary of the Football League, had apparently described this new competition - the European Champions Clubs Cup - to the men in charge at Chelsea. Why would you want to send your boys overseas when there are perfectly good trophies up for grabs at home? In the end, the forward-thinking Yorkshireman persuaded the 1955 English champions to send their apologies to the organisers, despite having initially accepted the invitation. They d leave that continental nonsense to those Real Madrid and AC Milan fellows, thank you very much.
Maybe Mr Hardaker was erring on the side of caution after what had happened to England s national team five years earlier. After scoffing from afar at the first three World Cups, England finally entered the tournament in Brazil in 1950, only to be sent packing by a bunch of part-timers from the United States. Not that the men in charge of the Scottish FA were shining beacons of globalism. Ahead of the same tournament, they threw their toys out of the international football pram and refused to travel to South America for what would have been Scotland s first appearance at the World Cup. Why? Because England had beaten them to top spot in the Home Nations Championship. But hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Hibernian weren t champions of Scotland when we were invited to take part in the very first staging of the European Cup - a competition now known to millions around the world as the Champions League. To paraphrase that old joke about Ringo Starr not even being the best drummer in The Beatles, we weren t even the best team in Scotland. In fact, we weren t even the runners-up, having finished the 1954/55 season behind Aberdeen, Celtic, Rangers and Hearts. We d actually finished up closer on points to Motherwell in 15th place than we had to the Dons in first.
From what I could understand at the time, our invitation had less to do with our performances, or even the championship wins in the glory days of the Famous Five a few seasons earlier, and more to do with the fact we d recently installed top-of-the-range floodlights at our home ground of Easter Road. So that s how we found ourselves, the fifth best team in Scotland, playing a midweek game in a half-empty stadium nearly 800 miles from home in the pissing rain. I wiped the mud from my face for the umpteenth time and found it hard to argue with Mr Hardaker s assessment. Maybe we would ve been better off staying at home and concentrating on the domestic trophies.
We were in the city of Essen, West Germany. I d never heard of it. But then, I wasn t what you d call worldly. I was just a 17-year-old boy from a small mining town in Lanarkshire. Although I d been in the first team for nearly a year, I was still the youngest player in the Hibs ranks and - prior to this match - I d rarely set foot in England, let alone Germany. I d boarded an aeroplane for the first time and flown there alongside legendary figures like Eddie Turnbull, Lawrie Reilly and Gordon Smith - still one of the greatest footballers to play the game. But while I appreciated being in a team of such huge names, the fact I would be playing against a side boasting players such as Helmut Der Boss Rahn - scorer of two goals in the World Cup Final a year earlier - was something that was lost on me.
Like the majority of people in Scotland at that time, I d never even watched a World Cup match. My family didn t own a television and I certainly had no idea of the significance of the Miracle of Bern, where Rahn helped the underdogs defeat the mighty Hungary and announce the Germans as an international football force to be reckoned with. All I knew about the country was that it was a hell of a long way to go to play in the mud and pouring rain in front of 5,000 spectators - I could ve done that back in Holytown.
I know this might sound like I m trying to play things down, but did it dawn on me at the time that I was making history as a member of the first British side to compete in the European Cup? Not a chance. Like so many firsts, the significance of the occasion has only grown as the years have passed. A man in his 80s views things a little differently to a boy who s not yet 18. If the European Cup, the Champions League, or whatever they re calling it, is still going in 100 years time, long after I m gone, nothing will ever change the fact that I was there when it all began.
In the 66 years since that inaugural season, when Real Madrid won the first of their 13 titles to date, I ve sat back and watched some truly spectacular players grace the competition, including Cruyff, Zidane, Ronaldo (both the Brazilian and the Portuguese), Messi, Gerrard, van Basten and Bale, not to mention giants of defence such as Maldini, Baresi and Beckenbauer. They all made their marks in the competition for different reasons but, even if it was only because they were born too late, none of them were there at the start. Would I swap that distinction for scoring a spectacular overhead winner in the final? I m not sure I would go that far.
But when I talk about the importance of that first season growing with time, it s now more significant to me than ever. After the death of Tommy Preston in 2015, the 17-year-old who lined up in the rain all those years ago is the last of those historic Hibbies standing. Whatever el