That final 15 minutes in Bratislava will remain long in my mind, as I sat shell-shocked in front of the television. I recalled a similar evening, some 14 years earlier, as Liam Brady faced his second European tie as Celtic manager, a comfortable looking match-up with mid-table Swiss outfit Neuchatel Xamax in the UEFA Cup, the Hoops having disposed of Belgian side Germinal Ekeren in the previous round.
That night, an Egyptian striker called Hossam Hassan had helped himself to four of the best as the Celts lost 5-1, our worst-ever result in Europe. Somehow, Gordon Strachan’s team had managed to outdo even that calamity and had done so in his first real game as manager.
It was undoubtedly Gordon’s worst nightmare and it was difficult to see even at that early stage how he could possibly recover from such a horrific start. The new Celtic boss himself was badly shaken by the scale of the defeat, Strachan recollecting the events surrounding that traumatic night in his autobiography, My Life in Football.
“For some strange reason, disappointing starts have been par for the course for me over my managerial career. But the one I made at Celtic was by far the most traumatic. Throughout all my time in professional football, no one result or performance has shocked me more, and put a darker cloud over my club, than the 5-0 European Cup defeat by Artmedia Bratislava in my first competitive Celtic match in July 2005 – the heaviest European defeat in the club’s history and their biggest in any competition for some 42 years. It is still horrible to have to acknowledge those facts.”
The significance and enormity of this defeat is perhaps best illustrated by the game he refers to in the above statement, a 6-0 defeat by Kilmarnock at Rugby Park in March 1963. That night, a Hoops side decimated by injuries had been forced to make no fewer than eight changes to the weekend line-up against Willie Waddell’s high-flying Killie, with no fewer than three youngsters making their debuts. Goalkeeper Dick Madden played two games for Celtic that evening, his first and his last. Third-choice stopper behind Frank Haffey and John Fallon, the unfortunate Madden would later be the butt of the Hoops supporters’ joke as “the only thing Haffey ever kept out.”
Centre-half John Cushley made the first of what would be 41 appearances for Celtic in the thankless role of understudy to Billy McNeill. A fluent Spanish speaker, he had accompanied manager Jimmy McGrory in the bold but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to lure Alfredo Di Stefano to Celtic Park in 1964, John playing in a losing League Cup final team later that year before winning a Championship medal in 1966, as Celtic won the first of nine-in-a-row.
Cushley played his last game for Celtic in May 1967, then joined West Ham United in the aftermath of Lisbon, swapping one legendary captain for another as he teamed up with England hero Bobby Moore. He returned to Scotland with Dunfermline Athletic in 1970, before finishing his playing career at Dumbarton six years later. John did come back to his beloved Celtic Park as a coach then, latterly, as Education & Welfare Officer before sadly passing away from Motor Neurone Disease in March 2008.
Exactly two years earlier, that same horrific illness had taken the life of the third Rugby Park debutant from March 1963, the incomparable Jimmy Johnstone. Unlike the others, the heavy defeat that night would still lead to a long and glorious career in the Hoops for the incredible Jinky, voted by the club’s supporters as the ‘Greatest-Ever Celt’ in 2002, the ultimate accolade amongst a litany of fabulous players who graced the Celtic Park turf, spanning well over a century, even at that time.
The Celtic manager for that Kilmarnock defeat had been Jimmy McGrory, in the closing years of a two-decade spell in the Parkhead dugout and back at the ground where he had commenced his managerial career in December 1937.
Ironically, his first match in charge of Kilmarnock had been a Christmas Day 8-0 humiliation at Celtic Park, just five days after his appointment, on the field where he had broken so many goalscoring records from his own Hoops debut in January 1923 until retiring just a few weeks previously.
Despite facing some of the greatest attacking sides on the planet, none of McGrory’s predecessors – from trophy-winning managers Jock Stein, Billy McNeill, David Hay, Tommy Burns, Wim Jansen and Martin O’Neill to the less successful tenures of Liam Brady, Lou Macari, Jozef Venglos and John Barnes – had faced such an indignity as that Bratislava defeat during their spells in charge.
At least Brady’s sorry bunch had managed to get on the scoresheet in Neuchatel. That unwelcome fact and unwanted record would not be lost on the proud Strachan. Not then and I suspect not ever.
