CELTIC’S Lisbon Lions were more than football heroes, they were working-class heroes, a group of young men from the West of Scotland who succeeded in transcending the limitations of their working-class roots without ever seeking to break free of them, dedicated to the cause of bringing joy to their own.
For this was a team imbued with the ethos of service to the very communities that raised them and of which they were a product, proving in the process that art, creativity and culture are not the exclusive preserve of the middle class.
From manager Jock Stein all the way through a roll call of now legendary names — Ronnie Simpson, Jim Craig, Tommy Gemmell, Bobby Murdoch, Billy McNeill, John Clark, Jimmy Johnstone, Willie Wallace, Stevie Chalmers, Bertie Auld and Bobby Lennox — the Celtic team that emerged from the tunnel on that sun-soaked day at the Estadio Nacional in Lisbon with their pale faces and lopsided features, a study in contrast to the tanned and tall and impressive Italians of Inter Milan, who’d won the European Cup twice in the previous three years, achieved the unthinkable.
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