BILLY McPHAIL is one of Celtic's venerated heroes and yet his contribution at first sight seems modest quantitatively. He played only two seasons with the Parkhead club and in those seasons he missed every other game. He had wretched luck with injuries and, to compound the problem, he was a notoriously slow healer. These were debits which were more than offset by his grace and power when at full fitness.

He started senior football with Queen's Park, having gone to Hampden from that noted Glasgow school nursery, St Mungo's Academy. Competition for places in the Queen's Park side was intense at the end of the Second World War and players as good as Tommy Gallagher (later with Dundee) and Johnny Aikenhead (later with Motherwell) stood in his way. At Shawfield he learned his trade from those international masters, Harry Haddock, Tommy Ring, and Archie Robertson.

The injury jinx soon struck McPhail and as a Clyde player he missed out on the Scottish Cup final of 1955 against Celtic because of it. Having dropped a winner's medal, he was later forced by injury to withdraw from an international match against Wales so that, incredibly, he finished his career uncapped.

When he joined Celtic in 1956 he missed the chance of partnering his brother, John, in the hoops by a mere five days, the older brother having been given a free transfer. Billy moved from Shawfield to Parkhead for an extremely modest (pounds) 2500, but this was a statement about a fitness risk rather than about his ability, of which there could be no reservations.

He joined Celtic at a time when the Parkhead side were seriously underperforming with the exception of the team which won the double of league and cup in 1954. The players were there all right - Fernie, Evans, Peacock, Tully, Collins, and Mochan - but all this individual ability did not begin to make a consistent side.

McPhail was not particularly pacey but he had a great

facility for losing his marker over a short distance. Against all the laws of physics he appeared to have the ability to hover in the air and either direct a header straight at goal or skim it on towards goal where a player hitherto unregarded, Sammy Wilson, would collect the ball and high tail it for the opponents' goal. Of the other players this writer has seen, only the great English centre-forward, Tommy Lawton, possessed a similar ability.

Curiously enough, McPhail's brother, John, although more generally regarded as a midfield player, had on occasion been capped by Scotland at centre-forward and had by no means been a failure. The McPhail brothers possessed in common a highly refined football intelligence, with John

perhaps the more busy and bustling of the two.

The one match with which Billy will always be associated was the League Cup final of 1957 when Rangers were crushed 7-1. In those days individual duels highlighted the game and in the battle between centre-forward and centre-half McPhail sowed devastation all around him. Not only did he effectively terminate the Ibrox career of John Valentine, recently recruited from Queen's Park, but he also illustrated the lack of pace of the Ibrox wing-halfs, Ian McColl and Harold Davis. It was a famous victory but of no great long-term effect as Celtic had to wait several years for their next success. And before even one of those years had passed Billy McPhail had gone, forced out of top class football by recurring injuries.

For a while he did commentary for television with Scottish TV but although fairly perceptive and always charitable, he was not a natural broadcaster. For a while there was the hope that the prince in exile might yet return miraculously cured but the years suddenly slipped by until this was no longer an option. The final years of his life were clouded by illness. In a law case, his legal representative argued that a failure to remember people and places could be directly attributed to the persistent heading of the heavy leather ball which was standard issue for most of his career. He was unsuccessful in this contention but time may show that he has opened the door for others.

As long as Scottish football is played his all too brief place in it is assured. His play in that League Cup final was as dazzling as the sunshine on that day. Not many players have scored a League Cup final hat-trick and still fewer have scored a second-half hat-trick inside half an hour. The balance of power in Scottish football

did not shift permanently or indeed in the medium term, but the October 1957 display by this most elegant of centre-

forwards, if it did nothing else, provided a fire with which to warm Celtic supporters during the eight grim years which were to follow.

Billy McPhail, footballer;

born February 2, 1928, died April 4, 2003.