footballbh.net

Think of Dave Mackay and, as Tottenham themselves put it in 2014, reprinting an interview he had given the club in 2007, you probably see a grainy black-and-white photograph. Mackay has Billy Bremner by the scruff of the neck. The Leeds captain is shrugging, almost apologetic. A referee is rushing in, whistle in his mouth. Somewhere in the frame, Terry Venables is looking on. It is 1966, a First Division afternoon at the Lane, and it has become one of the most identifiable images in British football.

Mackay knew it, and he did not like it. “If I had a fiver for every time somebody asked me to sign a copy of that picture, I’d be a millionaire,” he said, in an interview first published in the club’s Opus in 2007 and reprinted by Spurs in 2014. “It makes me look like a bully, and I’ve always hated bullies. My whole life I’ve stood up against them.”

He had a reason for the snarl, and it was not a small one. He had broken the same leg twice, in 1963 and 1964, and had wondered, after the second break, whether he would play again. “It had started with a throw-in down the line. I’d pushed him over so we both went down on all fours. When we got back up he gave me a whack on my bad left leg — even coming across my right leg and going for it deliberately. I was so angry I thought I could throw him over the stand.” He did not hit him. He still did not know, decades later, how he had escaped a booking. “I would not like to repeat what I said to him but it was not complimentary.”

That is the version of the picture that belongs in a football paper: a man just back from the injury that used to end careers, protecting the leg he had already lost twice, and then spending the rest of his life explaining that the face in the photograph was not the one he wanted to be remembered by. “I’m not a bully and don’t like bullies,” he told Ewan Murray, in a line Murray printed the morning after Mackay died. “He was a brilliant little player but a dirty little bastard. He kicked me in the leg I’d just come back from breaking twice. If he’d kicked the other one, I could have accepted that.”

The rest of the life is what the picture leaves out. It is the better story.

Under the turnstile at Tynecastle

The date of birth, as it happens, is one of the few things about him that the records cannot quite agree on. The Scottish FA, and the Scotsman obituary, have David Craig Mackay born in Edinburgh on 14 November 1934, at Glendevon Park near Carrick Knowe, less than a mile from Tynecastle, the second of four brothers, Tommy, Frank, Ronnie and Dave, all of them footballers. Tottenham’s own records, and the Guardian’s obituary, put the date a day earlier and, in Spurs’ case, the place at Musselburgh. The man himself is not around to settle it. The geography that matters is the short walk to the ground.

His first memory, he told the Scotsman, was sneaking into an empty Tynecastle and standing on the terraces to gawk at the stadium. The love affair started there and never really ended. “Just to get near Tynecastle was a dream,” he said later. “I was a Hearts fan all my life; I used to walk the three miles to Tynecastle, go early to get under the turnstile because I couldn’t afford to get in. So when Hearts came along to sign me, I couldn’t believe it. For as long as I can remember all I wanted in my life, nothing else, was to play for Hearts, which is my dream team. And to play for Scotland.”

His father, Tom, was a linotype operator for the Scotsman. When Tom was called up in the war the boys ran a paper round to help, and invented football games on the deliveries; Mackay later credited those games with the close control that became his trademark. He went to Balgreen Primary and Carrickvale Secondary, captained the Scottish schoolboys, and won the national schools shield in 1949. Hibernian came calling first. His father tipped off Hearts, and Tommy Walker signed him for a £20 signing-on fee and £10 a week, leaving him to finish his joinery apprenticeship with Laurence McIntosh Ltd. It was, Martin Hannan wrote, the norm: two jobs, and the serious one was on a Saturday.

He was farmed out to Newtongrange Star, made a first-team debut against Clyde, played poorly in a 2–1 defeat and was dropped. He came back against Hamilton Academical, Hearts won 6–3, and, the Scotsman says, he was never dropped again. This was the era of the Terrible Trio, Alfie Conn, Willie Bauld and Jimmy Wardhaugh, and Mackay was the midfield they had been missing: a forceful tackler who could also pass, shout, gesture and, in Brian Glanville’s description, demand from everyone else the commitment he gave himself. He was not a big man — Spurs listed him at 5ft 8in and 11st 6lb — but size was never the point.

The medals came quickly. He was outstanding, Hearts’ own Hall of Fame records, in the side that won the Scottish League Cup in October 1954, the club’s first major honour in 48 years. In 1956, home on weekends from national service with the Royal Engineers, he helped beat Celtic 3–1 in the Scottish Cup final. In 1957-58 he captained one of the great Scottish club sides, the Hearts team that won the league by scoring 132 goals and conceding 29 in 34 matches, a goal difference of +103 that still looks like a misprint. He was Scotland’s player of the year. In October 1958 he added another League Cup. The set was complete. So, almost, was his time at the club.

Bill Nicholson paid £32,000 to take him to Tottenham in March 1959, a record for a wing-half. Mackay did not want to go. The image that stayed with him, Murray wrote, was a young man on the platform at Edinburgh Waverley, in tears at the news that his idol had boarded a train to London. In seven years at Tynecastle he had started 179 games, scored 29 times and been booked once. “He was a Hearts fan all my life” is a sentence that usually ends in disappointment. In his case it ended in everything the club could give him, and then a departure he never quite stopped sounding sorry about.

The other half of Blanchflower

He arrived on 16 March 1959 and made his debut five days later, against Manchester City. He did not, Glanville noted, settle immediately. Once he did, he became the other half of Danny Blanchflower: the “more elegant and academic” wing-half, as Glanville put it, beside a man whose approach was “virile” and whose skill on the ball was the part people forgot when they had only seen the photograph. Cliff Jones, who played on the other side of that midfield, was blunter. “He turned a good side into a great one.”

The great one arrived in 1960-61, when Tottenham became the first club in the twentieth century to win the league and the FA Cup in the same season. Mackay played 37 of the 42 league games and, Glanville wrote, figured prominently in the final against a Leicester City side largely reduced to ten men. He added another Cup winners’ medal the following year, against Burnley. Spurs later called him “the heartbeat” of the Double side, in the tribute they published the day after he died, and the phrase has stuck because it is more precise than most club language. Blanchflower conducted. Mackay made the thing beat.

Jimmy Greaves, who came to play in front of him and knew a thing or two about the highest grade of teammate, called him “the most complete professional footballer I have ever known”. George Best, who met him in a Scotland shirt in Belfast in 1965, in what turned out to be Mackay’s 22nd and last cap, went further. Mackay was “the hardest man I have ever played against”. Bill Nicholson, who had bought him, reached for a different register. “If he had served in a war, he would have been the first man into action,” he said. “He would have won the Victoria Cross.”

He was also, Julie Welch recorded, the teammate you did not want to meet in the gym. “You’d have to go into the gym with body armour,” Bobby Smith said. “He’d smash you against the wall.” Even so, Welch added, nothing he did on the pitch was mean. “I was a hard player,” Mackay maintained, “but I was never dirty.” The distinction mattered to him more than almost anything else, which is why the Bremner picture stung.

The leg, twice

The European Cup Winners’ Cup should have been the next line on the list. In May 1963 Tottenham beat Atlético Madrid 5–1 in Rotterdam and became the first British side to win a European trophy, a night that belongs, in these pages, to Terry Dyson. Mackay was not there. An injury to his stomach muscles, Glanville wrote, kept him out of a final he had done so much to reach. Spurs, in their obituary, were careful to say that he had “played a vital role in getting us there”. It was, as luck goes, only the beginning.

On a December afternoon in 1963, in a Cup Winners’ Cup tie at Old Trafford against Manchester United, he broke his left leg. Spurs date it to that month; nine months later, on his return, in a reserve match against Shrewsbury Town at White Hart Lane, he broke the same leg again. Welch, writing in the Guardian, left a picture of the first of those afternoons that is hard to forget. Mackay sat up on the stretcher as he was carried off, “as if signalling to his teammates that he would get patched up and be back on the pitch with them in another 10 minutes”. That, she wrote, was the essence of the man. “No way was he going to go off as a fallen hero.”

A double break of that sort, in that era, was supposed to be the end. The National Football Museum, which inducted him in 2002, puts it plainly: breaking the leg twice “was viewed as the end of a player’s career”. It took him until August 1965 to get back into the first team. Spurs made him captain, Blanchflower having gone, and he held the job until he left. He dropped back, at times, to play as a centre-half, and still, the club said, “moved forward when the opportunity arose, still went into those thundering, bone-shaking challenges, still bossed the game and lifted his team”. In May 1967 he lifted the FA Cup again, this time as captain, after a final against Chelsea.

The photograph with Bremner sits in the middle of that comeback, in 1966, at the Lane, and is only legible if you know what had happened to the left leg. Take the injury out and it is a bully’s picture. Put the injury back in and it is a man drawing a line. Mackay drew it, regretted the way it looked, and then got on with winning another cup.

A sweeper in the Second Division

His last appearance for Tottenham was against Wolves on 11 May 1968. On 24 July the club let him go to Derby County for £5,000. He was 33. He had scored 42 league goals in 268 appearances for Spurs, plus five in 17 European games and four in 33 FA Cup ties, and he had, briefly, thought about going home.

The exact story of how Brian Clough got him has been told more than once, and the versions in Clough, Peter Taylor and Mackay’s own books do not quite agree. What can be agreed is simpler, and still remarkable. Mackay was close to going back to Hearts as a manager. Clough, hearing that he was not settled on the move, phoned him at the tie shop he ran, then went down to White Hart Lane on impulse, was met by Bill Nicholson, and walked Mackay around the pitch until the Spurs captain agreed to come to the Baseball Ground. Anton Rippon later wrote that Clough called the signing “the best day’s work of my life”.

What Clough did with him was the other half of the intelligence. He converted Mackay into a sweeper in a 4-2-4, used his voice and his passing to turn defence into attack, and gave a young dressing room a captain it did not yet have. Mackay’s first game was a pre-season friendly at Muirton Park on 1 August 1968, a 1–0 defeat by St Johnstone. He wore the number 6 shirt and, the Derby Evening Telegraph reported, “had plenty of advice for his new colleagues directing operations with a quick word of command”. His league debut came nine days later, a 1–1 draw at Blackburn Rovers on 10 August, in front of 13,000 at Ewood Park.

“Our first game was at St Johnstone,” Mackay remembered, talking later to Rippon. “Going up on the coach I was looking at John Robson and thinking that he was so slight, he had to be a winger. I didn’t like to ask him where he played but I was looking around, trying to build a picture in my mind so that when the team was picked I’d have an idea of who everyone was.”

Roy McFarland was 20, and he has never been shy about what the signing meant. “The young players were there and the willingness to do the work, but what we didn’t have was a leader and someone to shake things up,” he told the club years later. “Dave Mackay joined in the summer and what a signing he was; he was all of those things. The impact he had on all of us, not just as players but also Brian and Peter, was massive. I learnt so much from him. They were great days and great times.”

The season did not start like a title. Derby failed to win any of their first five league matches, losing two, before Clough bought Willie Carlin from Sheffield United. From there they lost only three more league games, and they won the last nine in a row, a club record. Along the way there was a League Cup night the club’s own end-of-season publication later called one of the finest ever seen at the Baseball Ground: a third-round replay against First Division Chelsea on 2 October. Chelsea led through Alan Birchenall. In the 77th minute Carlin backheeled to Mackay, who hit a 30-yard shot that dipped inside the far post. Durban and Kevin Hector finished it, 3–1.

They were already as good as up by the time Bristol City arrived on 19 April 1969. The visitors ran out while Derby were still on a lap of honour with the Second Division trophy, and then they were beaten 5–0, Durban with a first-half hat-trick. The goal of the game, in the 64th minute, started with Mackay, who sent Carlin away on the left; the backheel found Alan Hinton, and Hinton scored. At the final whistle the crowd came on to the pitch. Brian Glanville later put the margin at seven points.

Mackay was named joint Footballer of the Year with Manchester City’s Tony Book, a result the Football Writers’ Association still records for 1969. He had now won the honour in Scotland and in England. The boy who had crawled under the turnstile at Tynecastle had, at 34, been voted the best player in both countries, the second time in a division he had just helped to leave.

In 1970 he was in the Derby side that won the Watney Cup. In his last season as a Derby player, 1970-71, he played all 42 league games, the first time in his career he had managed a full league set. He was in his 37th year.

He left in November 1971, a year before Clough’s side won the First Division, to become player-manager of Swindon Town. He hung up his boots in 1972, spent a season in charge of Nottingham Forest, and then, in October 1973, went back to the Baseball Ground to do the job Clough had just vacated.

It was not a gentle inheritance. When Clough and Taylor resigned in October 1973, after a public quarrel with the chairman, Sam Longson, the players wanted them back. There was a sit-in at the ground, a letter demanding reinstatement, a threat to strike, and, for a time, a refusal to train under the new manager. McFarland, who was away with England when the news broke, recalled phoning him, with other players present, and asking him not to take the job. “He informed me in response that he had taken the job and was now the manager of Derby County. That’s how it happened and the way he spoke to me, he was determined to see it through.”

Mackay’s public response, which Ewan Murray later preserved, does not sound like a man interested in a soft landing. “They are a schoolboys’ XI, not men. I am a man and I like dealing with men, not misguided children. I will fight them to the death.”

He was assisted by Des Anderson. The start was grim: six league games and two cup ties without a win, before a 2–0 victory at Newcastle United got them moving. They finished third and qualified for the UEFA Cup. “It wasn’t that we didn’t want Dave Mackay as the replacement, it was just that we wanted Brian and Peter to stay,” McFarland said. “Dave handled it better than anyone and saw it through.”

Clough, who was not in the habit of praising the people who replaced him, later made an exception. “Mackay came striding in as only a man of his courage and reputation could and was eventually to win Derby another championship,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Rob Smyth later argued against the lazy idea that Mackay simply inherited Clough’s team and wrote the same eleven names down. Taking over a dressing room that has just lost a successful manager is, as Clough himself found out at Leeds, one of the harder jobs in the game. Michael Carey, writing in the Guardian in April 1975, just after the title was won, put it this way: “He was one man, maybe the only man, who could have ridden the storm out at Derby.” Mackay did not try to be Clough. He encouraged an attacking side — they were the division’s top scorers in both his full seasons — and, instead of ripping the squad up, he made the signings that turned it into his own.

Francis Lee arrived from Manchester City in August 1974 for £100,000, aged 30, and scored 12 times in 34 league appearances in the title season. Bruce Rioch came from Aston Villa, Rod Thomas as well. Carey, in that same April 1975 piece, wrote that Mackay had “awakened to find a crock of gold at the foot of his bed”, and that Lee, Rioch and Thomas had “made more of an impact than anyone dared hope.” He also sold John O’Hare and John McGovern back to Clough, who had taken over at Leeds.

For McFarland the season was bittersweet. He had snapped his Achilles playing for England against Northern Ireland in May 1974 and did not return until the last four games, in all of which Derby kept clean sheets. “If it wasn’t for Dave, I don’t think I’d have got another contract,” he said. “He stood by me and I am grateful for that.”

Thirty points from forty

The championship came in 1974-75, Mackay’s first full season in the job, and it is the part of his life that is easiest to under-sell. They did not make it look simple. Derby County’s own account of the season is a reminder that even the title years start badly. One win in the first seven, tenth at Christmas, and then a run that decided it: three defeats in the last 20 games, 30 points from a possible 40. They scored 67 league goals. Rioch, a midfielder, got 15 of them and was the club’s top scorer in the league; Hector, Lee and Roger Davies all reached 12 or more, and Hector finished with 21 in all competitions. Rioch and the goalkeeper Colin Boulton were the only ever-presents.

Smyth later noted that they did not go top until the 39th game of the season. The sprint is the part that stays. Davies scored five against Luton on 29 March, and two days later Derby won 5–2 at Burnley. Between the start of March and the last week of April they won eight and lost one. A 0–0 draw at Leicester in the penultimate match left them needing Ipswich Town to drop points at Manchester City. The news came through that night, at the club’s player of the year awards in a local nightclub, and the title was confirmed with a game to spare. Gerry Harrison, in The Times, wrote that “the mood was right, the setting conducive, the champagne well chilled.” The last game, a goalless draw at home to Carlisle United, was incidental. They celebrated in front of the Baseball Ground, two points ahead of Liverpool, champions for the second time in four years.

Glanville later noted that it was a low-scoring season in the table as well as on the pitch: Derby’s 53 points were two more than Liverpool’s 51. A side that had been tenth in December, managed by a man who had been told he was following the unfollowable, had won the league from Easter onwards in the old way, by not losing. McFarland, who had captained Derby under both men, told BBC Radio Derby after Mackay died that the pictures of him were always the same. “The majority of pictures you see of Dave Mackay, he had his chest stuck out. That is how he played and that is how he lived his life.” Taking over from Clough, McFarland said, he “calmed and settled everyone down”. The schoolboys, in the end, became a team.

A night against Real Madrid

The year after the title ended with nothing in the cabinet except the 1975 Charity Shield. Mackay signed Charlie George from Arsenal. And on 22 October 1975, in a European Cup second-round first leg at the Baseball Ground, Derby beat Real Madrid 4–1. The club still calls it one of the greatest nights in its history. George scored a hat-trick, two of them from the penalty spot; David Nish hit a long-range third; 34,839 were there. The return, in front of 120,000 at the Bernabéu, the largest crowd ever to watch a Derby first-team match, was a 5–1 defeat after extra time. They were out 6–5 on aggregate.

They finished fourth in the league, and they reached the FA Cup semi-finals, where Manchester United beat them 2–0 at Hillsborough. “We didn’t turn up on the day,” McFarland said. “It was probably the biggest disappointment that we didn’t get to the FA Cup Final.”

The start of 1976-77 was poor. In November, Mackay asked the board for a vote of confidence, and was sacked. Three years after walking into the job nobody wanted, and 19 months after winning the league, Derby had let him go.

After Derby

He went to Walsall, then spent years in Kuwait and Dubai, with Al-Arabi and Shabab among the clubs. He came back for spells at Doncaster Rovers and Birmingham City, and then went to Cairo, where, in a Herald interview conducted when he was 58 and had just signed a further two-year contract, he was already the manager who had made Sporting Club Zamalek “the Egyptian champions two years in a row.” He liked the life, he said. The derbies with Al Ahly drew 60,000 and “make Old Firm matches seem like a picnic.” He had had 20 years as a player “and have now had the same period as a coach or manager. I would not change my life for anyone.” He later had a spell with Qatar’s youth team, and retired from football in 1997.

The last time Moz Curtin saw him was 28 May 2007, walking up Wembley Way before Derby’s play-off final against West Bromwich Albion, in the cold and the rain. “The sight of our captain lifted my spirits. The great Dave Mackay was here to support the Rams.”

The picture, and the rest

He died on the evening of 2 March 2015, at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, aged 80, and is survived by his wife Isobel and their four children. The tributes came from all three of his homes, which is the point. Hearts called him a fearless defender and, in the club’s own estimation, their greatest-ever player. Spurs called him one of their greatest, “a man who never failed to inspire those around him”, and the heartbeat of their finest side. Derby called him a legend whose name would be etched into the club. David Pleat, on the radio, reached for a simpler register. “He was a great man, inspirational. He was as tough as teak, led by example and was a wonderful leader of men. He represented everything that was wonderful about football in those days. He was a very polite, decent, humble and down-to-earth guy.”

That last sentence is the one the photograph cannot contain. The snarl at Bremner is real, and so is the reason for it, and so is Mackay’s lifelong discomfort with the way it made him look. “I’ve always hated bullies,” he said, and then, because he was who he was, he went back to signing the print anyway, for a fiver he never actually took, for anyone who asked. The career underneath the picture is the one that should have made him a millionaire: a boy who walked three miles and slid under a turnstile, a captain who won the lot in Scotland, a midfielder who turned Tottenham from a good side into a great one, a patient who sat up on a stretcher and came back twice, and a manager who walked into a dressing room full of men still loyal to somebody else and, two seasons later, handed them the league.

He was not a bully. He was the heartbeat. The picture just happened to be louder.