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Cesar Billy McNeill - Rest In Peace Cesar.

Discussion in 'The Lisbon Lions' started by HoopswithPride, Feb 25, 2017.

Discuss Billy McNeill - Rest In Peace Cesar. in the The Lisbon Lions area at TalkCeltic.net.

  1. Valhalla Thus spoke Batistuta.

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    Why the * are you even going on Hun forums to look for comments on Billy McNeill?
     
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  2. Henrik 07 Gold Member Gold Member

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    Prime Minister's Questions.

     
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  3. jocksteinupper

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    There's a time and a place mate!!! Wait till Lenny's lifting the Cup for the treble treble before you get the hazchem suit on and venture into that shitehole!!
     
  4. Henrik 07 Gold Member Gold Member

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  5. Drakhan Nac Mac Feegle Gold Member

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    :50:
     
  6. jake10

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    I've been in tears a few times these last days and I've been to family funerals where I haven't gret
     
  7. Marie Bookmaker

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    Please keep this thread for tributes, pics, videos and stories about Billy McNeill, it's no place for discussing the opinions of some scum.
     
  8. CountyDownFaithful

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    There’s a better idea.
     
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  9. Clint Eastwood The Good Bad and Ugly of TC

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    Love the new banner by the way.
     
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  10. Drakhan Nac Mac Feegle Gold Member

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    Sorry Marie.
     
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  11. noise

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    * bless him and his family. Hero, legend and gentleman.
     
  12. Conlon

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    Will be a funeral fit for a KING, the streets lined in green and white

    Sent from my F8331 using Tapatalk
     
  13. Henrik 07 Gold Member Gold Member

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    It was a call Billy McNeill probably never wanted to make but it was a measure of the man that he dialled the number all the same.


    Richard Gough was slightly stunned when one of the first calls to congratulate him for leading Rangers to nine in a row came from the man who achieved it first with his side’s great rivals.

    The Ibrox legend was blown away by the sentiment after emulating a man he looked up to, even if he did hail from the other side of the Old Firm divide, and it’s a memory the former centre-half cherishes years down the line.

    When he learned of McNeill’s passing the moment was brought back to his mind and Gough insisted the incident summed up Big Billy to a tee.


    He said: “At the moment, only Billy and I have captained Old Firm teams to nine in a row.

    “We both knew the pressures of that and I will never forget his reaction when Rangers did it in 1997.


    One of the first calls I got the next day was from Billy. He just said to me, ‘Richard, congratulations to you and Rangers. I didn’t think it would ever be achieved again’.



    That always stayed with me. It summed up Billy’s class. He showed true respect to Rangers.

    “As an Old Firm captain, I always looked at John Greig and Billy as an example of how to conduct myself. Billy was a top player and a fair player. He was a true man. I took a lot from him.”



    It wasn’t just the way McNeill carried himself that inspired Gough though.

    The Celtic great was renowned as a leader but was more than handy as a player as well – even long after he had hung up his boots.

    Gough said: “As a top centre-back Billy was always someone I looked to growing up.

    “I remember going away on my early Scotland trips and I’d always try to learn off the senior boys.

    “I would listen to stories from guys like Graeme Souness, Kenny Dalglish and soak it all up. Roy Aitken and Tommy Burns were also in the squad at that time and I used to ask them about Billy.


    Roy told me a great story about when Billy was manager of Celtic for the first time in early 1980s.

    “They were going through a spell of losing goals from corners. Big Packie Bonner and the defenders were all having a debate about how to solve it.

    “Some were saying they should go zonal and others were saying they should go man for man.


    But Roy said Billy came out on the training pitch, gave Davie Provan a bunch of balls and told him to put corners in.

    “Billy said to them, ‘Put the crosses in and I’ll defend it myself’.

    “Billy planted himself between the six-yard box and the penalty spot and cleared every single cross. He just went and attacked the ball in the air and nobody could get near him.

    “As a young defender, that was a great story for me because that’s what I wanted to do.

    “To * with marking anyone, I was just going to win the ball and clear it. Billy was right, the best thing to do as a defender is just go and head it.

    “He was remarkable in the air and that little anecdote always stayed with me. All the Celtic players were arguing about how to defend corners and Billy – as the leader – showed how it was done.

    “Roy said it was hilarious watching Billy clear all the corners as all the other Celtic players tried to score.”




    By the time Gough was in his pomp at Rangers, McNeill had swapped the
    dugout for the pundit’s chair which could have stuck in the Celtic man’s throat watching his big rivals sweeping their way to matching the Parkhead club’s glory run.

    But the Ibrox great insisted the Hoops hero was always a big enough man to rise above the petty rivalry.

    He said: “Billy was always very fair in his assessment of games and I was actually thinking about him the other day.

    “Someone sent me a YouTube clip of me scoring a goal against Celtic in September 1996.

    “Jorg Albertz put a corner in and I scored with a header into the top corner. Billy is co-commentating on the clip and he is full of praise for the goal.

    “He says something along the lines of, ‘We all know how good Richard Gough is in the air so I don’t understand why Celtic have let him go free’.

    “But Billy was a class act on and off the pitch. He was a great man.”



    Gough reckons McNeill was the kind of character who commanded respect regardless of the Glasgow divide.

    He said: “I was aware Billy wasn’t in good health but I was really sad to learn of his passing. Billy was a great player but more importantly he was a good person.

    “I always had huge respect for him and a good relationship, even when he was the Celtic manager and I was at Rangers.

    “Billy was the kind of football figure that everyone on both sides had massive respect for.

    “I met Billy and his wife Liz many times and my condolences go to the McNeill family.”
     
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  14. Henrik 07 Gold Member Gold Member

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    Few played with Billy McNeill then served under him when he subsequently entered management. Danny McGrain was among that select band. It provides one former Celtic captain and all-time club great with an exceptional vantage point to assess the status of another in that bracket, whose transcendence is entwined with becoming the first man to lift the European Cup for a British club.

    McGrain doesn’t just mourn McNeill, who died this week at the age of 79 after a decade-long struggle with dementia, as one of Celtic’s supreme standard bearers. He sees the legend whose loss has precipitated a national outpouring of love and respect as a man whose flag flutters only below the coaching architect of that 1967 triumph on the continent, one Jock Stein. Or, as McGrain has referred to him since he broke into the Celtic senior ranks in 1970 to inhabit the domain of the Lisbon Lions in which McNeill roared, Mr Stein.



    McGrain won 11 of his 14 major honours either with McNeill by his side on the pitch, or on the trackside as the coach guiding him. That transition, which came when McNeill replaced Stein in 1978 – three years after he retired as a player – wasn’t a straightforward one for McGrain, made club captain the previous year following the departure of Kenny Dalglish to Liverpool.


    “I remember the first day he came in I was the captain. No one else would take it…” the mischievous McGrain joked. “Big Billy had been a player at the club recently and when he told us what we were doing I either said to him, ‘OK, big man’ or ‘OK Billy’. I think I said Billy. I never called him Cesar. And he wanted me to call him ‘boss.’ I would have been quite comfortable calling him Billy. I felt I had earned the right. Not in public, maybe. But he gave me no inkling before then. And then he said, ‘I want you to call me boss.’ I then apologised for calling him Billy and he said, ‘that’s alright it was my fault.’ From then on he was ‘boss’. That was it, done and dusted. And we got on fine after that because we kept winning everything….”




    Despite McGrain’s comic overstatement about that early 1980s period in which Aberdeen and Dundee United vied with Celtic for silverware, such dominance did belong to the Celtic side in which the Stein-McNeill axis was monumental. And such was the place that the Celtic manager reserved for his on-field general that young players were directed to McNeill by Stein for a pep talk when introduced into the first-team ranks. The words of wisdom that centre-half colossus McNeill reserved for teenage right-back McGrain didn’t prove as profound as he had geared himself up to expect. “He didn’t really come out with any great pearls about ‘train well, eat well, get sleep or that kind of stuff’” said McGrain, who was speaking at the launch of Six Foot Two Eyes of Blue, a new biography of Jim Holton. “I don’t actually remember him telling me anything that did me any real good. There was just one piece of advice I remember; ‘don’t eat yellow snow.’”

    With McGrain’s 69th birthday only weeks away, the passing of McNeill, and the dreadful toll that his illness took on his mind, can’t but cause McGrain to consider the price extracted by ageing. McGrain had a stent operation following a heart attack five years ago that leaves him flummoxed because neither event was accompanied by any pain.


    “All of 20 years ago I was aware of getting older,” said McGrain. “I see people of my age who look old and I ask myself, ‘do I look old? The answer is ‘yes’ I am old. But you don’t see yourself getting old. You never think of yourself as an old person. I’m still reasonably fit for someone of my age.

    “Big Billy was fit as well and looked fit. It was simply the case that his mind went and when that happens you’ve had it. I’m so sorry he’s gone but glad he is away from that terrible illness. I’m glad he is at peace and his family have some time to grieve now. I hope he will be happy now because he is gone and free of all of that and we should remember now what he did. He had 13 years as a captain of a great Celtic team. It’s almost unimaginable.
     
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  15. Henrik 07 Gold Member Gold Member

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  16. Henrik 07 Gold Member Gold Member

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  17. Henrik 07 Gold Member Gold Member

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  18. CydonianWaffle

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    * me what a guy
     
  19. Henrik 07 Gold Member Gold Member

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    Stephen McManus talking about Cesar
     
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  20. Henrik 07 Gold Member Gold Member

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