SENTINELCELTS

Morning,all. Hot on the heels of getting kicked off the park at home,JIMBO67 shares with us the story of the second leg in Buenos Aires.

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1967-11-01: Racing Club 2-1 Celtic, Intercontinental Club Cup ( Avellaneda Field, Buenos Aries, Argentina) 2nd Leg

Racing Club (Argentina) 2-1 Celtic (Scotland) 
(aggregate 2-2)

Racing Club: 
Cejas, Perfumo, Chabay, Martín (c), Rulli, Basile, Raffo, Cardoso, Cárdenas, Rodríguez, Maschio.
Goals: Raffo (33), Cárdenas (48)

Celtic: Fallon*, Craig, Gemmell, Murdoch, McNeill, Clark, Johnstone, Wallace, Chalmers, O’Neill, Lennox.

* = Simpson injured by a missile before kick-off
Goals: Gemmell (21′ pen)

2nd. leg:Venue: Avellaneda. Field: Racing Club (“El Cilindro”)
Referee Esteban Marinho (Uruguay)
Att : 100,000

The return in Buenos Aires two weeks later had become a more ominous prospect than a day earlier.  Neighbours of ours, the Kings, who owned shops and Rover cars were going to South America to watch the game and we were no longer envious

Argentina was viewed, in Britain at least and at best, with some bemusement. The official language was Spanish but everybody was either an Indigenous native, of Italian extraction or a post-war immigrant from Germany with a shady past it seemed. It was, usually, eccentrically and not benignly governed. The people were considered passionate but badly overexcitable. A mad place but an exhilarating one.

The football of the country presented something of a paradox. It regularly produced players of sublime ability and the best player my dad had seen was the Argentinean star of Real Madrid Alfredo di Stefano but Argentina did not have a good record at international level. Since the inaugural 1930 World Cup when it was runner up Argentina had a poor record in the competition when it bothered to compete. It’s reluctance to compete in the tournament was based on a fear that European clubs would immediately sign its best players and, if a player was of Italian origin, he’d be playing for the Azzurri in the next world cup as a result of his transfer- and this reality had helped Italy to win 2 World Cups. Across the estuary of the River Plate Uruguay had won both the World Cup and Intercontinental Trophy twice to Argentina’s none. Brazil, with which Argentina shared some border was as successful as Uruguay and already loved as the home of beautiful football.  Nobody loved Argentinean football who was not Argentinean it seemed.

Argentina had played well in the 1966 World Cup in England until losing to the host in bitter circumstances after their captain, Rattin, was mysteriously sent off in a game the visitors had been dominating. Alf Ramsey, England’s rather pompous, little manager had personally prevented his players from swapping jerseys at the end of the game and described the losing team as ‘animals’- and there were plenty who agreed with him.  But even though Racing had been ‘filthy’ in Glasgow there had also been glimpses of a team that could play really good football

It was a quirk of the World Club Championship that away goals did not count double although I believe that by that stage the format had at least been altered from its earliest incarnations where if you won 1 game but lost the other you got a play-off match even if the aggregate score had been 1-10 against you. When I woke up on the morning of 2nd November 1967, I was not too despondent to learn we had lost the game in Buenos 2-1- we’d win the play-off match because it would be held in a neutral venue. I was quite clever but I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. I learned later in the day that the match itself had been in some ways worse than the first one and not just because Celtic had lost.

This second match is possibly the least discussed of the three matches and although the SFA report – printed verbatim in Kelly’ book- is pretty critical of the Uruguayan referee, Senor Esteban Marino, and the conduct of the home team other reports I have read suggest that, on the park, this was the nearest this series of matches came to normality – Celtic scoring first with a penalty and then Racing roaring back to score 2 goals. But that same SFA report mentions that the game should have been declared null and void. The reason for that line of thought was also the big talking point in the playground that Thursday morning. Ronnie Simpson, Celtic’s goalie, had been felled by a metal object in the warmup and could take no part in the game- or, as it turned out, the one three days later. The extent of Faither’s injuries was not known but by the time we were saying our Grace Before Meals we all pretty much had him on the critical list. More relevantly as Celtic  had not been able to field it’s chosen team the result should not have stood.  It seems that this point was raised by Kelly post-match with his equivalent at Racing countering that because John Fallon, who stood in, played well it did not matter.

. [By the time I was reading grown up football magazines and not just Shootthe accepted version in  Buenos Aires , repeated by sympathetic English journalists, most notably Brian Glanville, was that Ronnie had not been injured at all and could have played.]Celtic was by this stage having severe doubts about going ahead with a third match and the significance of the match not being played under the authority of FIFA dawned. We were on our own.

That second match may well be the least known of the three games but it was clearly the most uncomfortable for Celtic and those who followed them- the small number of travelling fans , perhaps 100 in total, watched in fear and physical discomfort (caused in part by the showers of urine poured on them by those in the tier above) whilst even the Celtic board and other members of the official party had no access to the team or coaching staff within the stadium. It was chaotic.

There was – and not just in my band of Celtic supporting children- a belief that Celtic would prevail in the replay which would be in a neutral venue which happened to be one of the world’s great stadia- and more relevantly , one which would have required an Olympic class discus thrower to even reach the pitch with a missile thrown from its terraces. However, Bob Kelly wanted to come home, Jock Stein wanted to stay believing the team and Desmond White thought it a lot of money to have paid to travel and not get a final outcome. Celtic stayed. More sober reports on the match in Buenos Aires suggested that as the game had progressed Celtic’s own discipline had begun to fray. My mum and dad’s thinking seemed, for once it must be said,  to have been on the same line Kelly’s. ‘A bad idea.’ But I would be allowed to stay up to watch the highlights.  So, I was not bothered.

The match in Montevideo was to prove catastrophic.

Part 3/3 to follow …

Jimbo67