Showing posts with label Davie Hay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Davie Hay. Show all posts

Sunday, March 15, 2020

The Quiet Assassin: The Davie Hay Story by Davie Hay with Alex Gordon (Black and White Publishing 2009)



Then, inexplicably. Big Jock dropped Geordie for the final and put him on the substitutes' bench. He went with the two in midfield - Murdy and Bertie - that had worked so wonderfully well in Lisbon in 1967. This was a different game, though. Feyenoord were exceptionally strong across the middle of the park where their main man was Wim van Hanagem, who was dismissed by Jock as being a 'poor man's Jim Baxter'. It was unlike our boss to misread a situation, but on this occasion he got it wrong; very wrong. Our line-up played right into their hands. We had Jinky, Willie Wallace, John Hughes and Bobby Lennox as a four-man frontline, but with the Dutch's stranglehold in the middle of the park, they were starved of any reasonable service. Normally, I could get forward when Jinky was buzzing, but the wee man was being suffocated by their defence. They double-banked and even treble-banked on him. They tried to force him inside into an already cluttered midfield where they had players waiting to pick him off.

Feyenoord played a pressing game all over the park and we were struggling to get into any sort of rhythm. They worked our defence well and didn't give us a moment's respite. Ove Kind vail, their Swedish striker, was keeping Billy McNeill occupied while Jim Brogan had picked up an early foot injury that curtailed his movement a bit. Tommy Gemmell was getting forward, as usual, but our cavalier fullback also had his work cut out deep in his own territory.