And for David Potter’s selection for the Celtic Star of the club’s fifth decade running from 1930-1939, is the Celtic trainer or manager in all but name, JIMMY ‘NAPOLEON’ McMENEMY…
5. The Celtic Star of the Decade – 1930-1939 – the Celtic trainer Jimmy ‘Napoleon’ McMenemy…
For the man of the decade of the 1930s. I have chosen a man who was not a player – at least he was not a player in the 1930s. There were many good players – John Thomson, Jimmy Delaney, Willie Lyon and Malky MacDonald spring to mind, but The Celtic Star of the decade was the trainer, Jimmy McMenemy.
Jimmy “Napoleon” McMenemy had already played an outstanding part in Celtic’s history, winning 6 Scottish Cup medals and 10 Scottish League medals in the years before the Great War and during the conflict as well. He had been an inside forward with a tremendous creative ability and penchant for scoring goals.
He was a very complete player, but the feature of the teams in which he played was that the forwards could all “interchange” i.e. change positions at will, and confuse the opposition.
He was appointed trainer in 1934, at a time when the club were going nowhere. The self-effacing McMenemy (one of the many great Celts about whom it was said that he just looked “like an ordinary man”) brought a great deal to this job – commitment, tactical knowledge, ability to motivate players, ability to act as a pastoral counsellor, and crucially to act as a conduit or channel to the increasingly curmudgeonly and cantankerous Willie Maley.
McMenemy may have been self-effacing, but he was also shrewd enough to work out that it would be possible for him to run the team, while appearing not to i.e to make it seem that Maley was making the decisions whereas it fact it was he, McMenemy, who was ever so subtly, calling the shots.
And the players all loved and respected him in a way that they did not feel likewise for the brusque, dictatorial and occasionally out of touch “Boss”.
In particular, he resurrected the idea of “interchanging”, the policy which had been so successful in the 1900s and 1910s. The Scottish League was won in 1936 and 1938, the Scottish Cup in 1937 and the Empire Exhibition Trophy of 1938.
Maley claimed the credit (and not entirely without cause) but the man who did it all was Jimmy “Napoleon” McMenemy.
David Potter
Some additional reading about Jimmy ‘Napoleon’ McMenemy on The Celtic Star…
‘Let’s talk about Napoleon!’ David Potter…see HERE.
‘No pillow talk for Celtic Stars, a word about Jimmy McMenemy,’ Jim Craig on The Celtic Star…see HERE.
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