On this day, 11 July 2012, Joe McBride tragically passed away after suffering a stroke.
Joe signed for Celtic in 1965, fulfilling a boyhood dream as he left Motherwell for £22,000. He was unlucky to miss out on the European Cup Final in Lisbon due to injury, and for that reason he is sadly not better known in the wider world. However, his exploits are still revered by many Celtic fans today, and rightly so. So good was the striker that James McGrory once said the following: “I have been asked to name the best Celtic centre-forward I’ve ever seen play and the man I choose may surprise you. He’s Joe McBride… He was a tremendous header of the ball and could take a half-chance on the ground. And his heart was in the right place!”
Jock Stein even described him as “The quintessential striker, a man who stuck the ball in the back of the net when he couldn’t think of anything else better to do it.”
McBride was Stein’s first signing and arguably one of his very best. He notched up 86 goals in 94 games, yet remarkable was only given two Scotland caps.
In the 1966/67 season, McBride had scored 36 goals by Christmas, before he was sidelined with a knee injury for the rest of the season. He later said: “Gerd Muller won the Golden Boot that season and he admitted at a function that the trophy would have gone to me but for the damage I did to my knee. The pain of being denied the opportunity to see what kind of goalscoring figure I could have achieved will live with me until the day I die. But 60 goals would have to have been a possibility. The doctors thought I needed a cartilage operation but the problem was caused by flaking bone behind my knee and it took a year out of my playing life.” Of McBride’s goals that season, 33 were scored in the league and he finished top scorer in the country despite missing the second half of the season.
He should always be remembered for the great player and fantastic man that he was. Joe McBride is a Celtic great. May he rest in peace.