His name is Mcnamara: The Autobiography of Jackie McNamara

By Jackie McNamara

His Name is McNamara is the riveting story of the life and career of football manager and former player Jackie McNamara. Jackie played for a series of clubs but is best known for the trophy-laden decade he spent at Celtic, culminating in a spell as club captain and a Scottish international career. His departure from Celtic in 2005 was controversial and abrupt, taking the football world by surprise when he signed for Wolves despite a last-minute attempt by the club to keep him in Glasgow. After spells at Aberdeen, Falkirk and Partick Thistle, he finished playing and moved into management with Thistle, Dundee United and York City. Jackie pulls no punches as he gives us the inside track on a career at the highest level of the game and the battling qualities he needed to succeed. It was those qualities that he drew on when his life was threatened by a brain aneurism in early 2020. His Name is McNamara is a story of success and survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781801500265

Book preview

Prologue

ME?

I’m a fighter.

Always have been.

Maybe it’s something to do with being a middle child, coming along as I did a year after my brother Steven and four before Donny to my parents, Jackie and Linda.

In a house with three boys, I was always going to have to punch above my weight just to be heard.

My career was the same. Always fighting to prove my worth, my value to a team whether it was school or district right up to senior professional level.

In ten years at Celtic, I had six managers and to every single one of them I had to fight to be a part of their plans.

Football is like life – you have to scrap for everything – but it’s not more important than life.

Nothing is.

* * *

Saturday, 8 February 2020 was just like any other Saturday in my world.

For the past two years, my wife Samantha and I have lived in Malton. It’s a beautiful, quiet market town in North Yorkshire, close to the breathtaking scenery of the scattered, lonely Moors and not too far from the great city of York itself.

We moved there in 2018 with our children, Erin, Sidney and Evie, just after I left my job as chief executive of York City Football Club where I had also been, in the first instance, manager from November 2015 to October 2016.

That first week in February, I had travelled through to Edinburgh on business with my company Consilium Sports Group, caught up with a friend or two and then grabbed the train back to Yorkshire on the Friday night.

Erin is actually living in Edinburgh with my mother-in-law as she is studying for a journalism degree while Sidney goes to school there as he is also an aspirant footballer with the Hibernian FC Academy.

Therefore, it was just ourselves and Evie back in Malton for the weekend. She attends St Peter’s School in York on a Saturday, so Sam dropped her off there in the morning.

It was a cold weekend but perfect for dog-walking so, just ahead of lunchtime, Sam and I took James and Gerry, two of our three dogs, for a walk. The surrounding countryside is gorgeous and we took our usual route through the fields and then down into town before picking up coffee to drink on the way home.

Nothing strenuous, just a normal walk on a lovely winter’s day.

Getting back to the house, Sam started working in the garden and she hollered out to me to come down and cut away a troublesome branch that jutted out of a large tree. I duly grabbed a saw and started hacking away at the wood when something happened. Something not right.

1

The Pressure Pot

I WILL never forget the sunshine.

The warmth that bathed you in heat, the feel of the sun on your face and yet, that freshness in the air as well that reminded you that it was still only late spring rather than a full-blown summer.

To me, there were two Celtic Parks.

European nights. Always a midweek fixture, invariably through autumn, winter and possibly, spring.

Floodlights fully on, trained down on the pitch but also a beacon in the night sky that could be seen for miles across Glasgow to let everybody know that Celtic were in continental competition at home.

The night-time match brought its own excitement. It was like a transformation at the ground with ‘CELTIC FOOTBALL CLUB’ lit up in huge green lettering across the top façade of the North Stand. Unmistakable, unavoidable – this was the home of the Celts. Coming out of the tunnel, into an arena beside foreign opposition and looking at their faces as they took in Celtic Park in full colour with a full-throated support roaring the team on to the pitch.

The scarves aloft and ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ playing out across the PA as we lined up for the official photograph and the atmosphere crackling with electricity.

Atmosphere – that was the thing.

And then there was Celtic Park on a bright Saturday afternoon around 2.55pm with the sun spilling into the ground and on to the pitch.

Supporters basking in the sunshine, clad in Celtic tops, T-shirts with heroes and slogans, the inevitable scarves hanging loosely around their shoulders waiting for the moment when they could raise them high as we took to the pitch.

Walking out into a different arena, squinting your eyes as they adjusted to the sunlight with the smell of the grass in your nostrils, Glen Daly chanting ‘The Celtic Song’ as your entrance soundtrack and the feel of the lush, green turf beneath your boots.

As I say, two Celtic Parks.

I hadn’t slept well that first week of May 1998, which was unusual for me.

As a professional footballer I looked after myself, subscribing to the regime of healthy diet, regular training exercise and sleep to rest my body in preparation for the battle ahead – but that week was different.

I knew what it was, of course.

Here, now, was a week unlike any other in the story of Celtic Football Club and on a personal basis, unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life before.

I had been at Celtic for a little over two and a half years by that point, a Tommy Burns signing and arriving with the belief that I could help the team to win trophies.

By the time I picked up my first cup in December 1997, the Coca-Cola Cup, Tommy had left the club and I was under the charge of Wim Jansen.

The relaxed Dutchman had arrived the previous summer as Tommy, despite having his team playing some of the best football seen at the club in almost a decade, paid the ultimate price for not halting a Rangers surge towards yet another league title – their ninth in a row.

Wim was an unknown quantity to us all but he had made his mark quickly by bringing in a raft of new players, including Craig Burley from the English Premier League outfit Chelsea, and UEFA Champions League winner Paul Lambert. He’d also gone back to his former club Feyenoord and picked up a striker he had worked with before, Henrik Larsson.

New managers have their own ideas, of course, and once again, I knuckled down to the job in hand of fighting to retain my place.

Tommy had me playing as an overlapping right-back as was traditional at Celtic. The brief was to defend but also get down the flank to link up play, provide crosses and get in around the action.

Wim dropped me after a couple of 2-1 defeats to Wacker Innsbruck and Dunfermline Athletic respectively and played David Hannah in my place.

I wasn’t happy and, to be honest, a little mystified as I didn’t feel I had played that badly in both matches.

The next game was a League Cup tie against St Johnstone in Perth, so I found myself in the unaccustomed position of watching that one from the stand at McDiarmid Park.

I asked to speak to Wim in private and he opened the floor to me.

It was simple enough. I wanted to know why I had fallen out of favour.

He responded casually but also with authority, ‘I do not like my full-backs to overlap.’

I stared at him, ‘But everybody’s used to seeing me do that out on the park. That’s my game.’

He remained resolute, ‘Well, I don’t want that. I want my full-backs to stay in position and defend.’

He was my manager, and we were trying to come to grips with each other in these early days, but I still had an answer.

‘Well, you need to tell me that,’ I replied.

Former Celt Murdo MacLeod was his assistant and Wim insisted that he had told me that but, in all honesty, I can’t recall it.

Anyway, I had knuckled down, reset myself to win him over and within a couple of weeks, I was back in his plans – as a right midfielder.

It was a new position to me, but I adapted and changed my game accordingly to the point that I was awarded the Players’ Player of the Year honour for the season by my fellow professionals.

So 1-0 to Wim Jansen, then!

The overall season had been one of nip and tuck with ourselves, Rangers and Hearts vying for top spot.

Of course, this wasn’t just any other campaign. This wasn’t just about Celtic winning the 46th title in their history.

Season 1997/98 was about only one thing – stopping the ten!

In clinching that ninth title in a row, our rivals had equalled Jock Stein’s proud record from 1966–74 and now they wanted to go one better.

It was simple – we had to stop them reaching double figures and for that alone, the pressure was immense!

The legacy of Stein’s Lisbon Lions was in our hands.

There was a moment of real incentive in mid-April when we had gone to Ibrox, three points clear of the home side and lost 2-0 to a couple of breakaway goals after playing really well.

Both teams were locked on points and although we had scored more, Rangers were ahead on goal difference.

On Sunday, 3 May we travelled through to East End Park, the home of my former club Dunfermline Athletic for the second-last fixture of the season.

A 1-0 defeat for Rangers to Kilmarnock the day before at Ibrox meant that we could be champions by winning through in Fife.

I had played with Dunfermline for five years, but I had never seen the old ground as full as that before and the majority of them were wearing green and white.

This was the day of deliverance.

The day when ten years of pain could be washed away by the capture of three points.

For my part, it was all a bit surreal to be back at East End, with the stadium rocking to Celtic songs and the expectation thick in the air on a beautiful day in Fife.

The game itself seemed to be a microcosm of the season.

We dominated the play, got the breakthrough goal when Simon Donnelly took a reverse pass from Henrik Larsson inside the box to finish with a nice first-time strike into the net, and then we had the chances to put the whole thing to bed.

We entered the last ten minutes still with that slender lead but with Dunfermline pushing forward, willed on by a support who would not have wanted a title-winning party in their own back yard.

I can’t say there was a fear factor although, looking back, Wim was urging us to push out a bit as the home side won a free kick in the middle of the pitch. A ball was floated into the box and out of nowhere, an on-loan substitute called Craig Faulconbridge (some names you can’t forget!) got above everybody else and sent a looping header beyond Jonathan Gould and into the back of the net.

It was a punch to the gut. Freakish. The first real glove that they had laid on us all day and now that expectancy of a title party was in real jeopardy.

The manager made a couple of late changes, and I gave way to Harald Brattbakk as we looked to grab a winner – to no avail.

It was sickening to trudge off the pitch knowing that we had let one go.

Wim came into his own in the dressing room. In a situation like that, when everything was on the line; when you could almost taste a victory that meant so much to so many people only to fail in the last moments, it would be easy to start finger-pointing and search for blame.

That, as we had come to learn and appreciate, wasn’t Wim’s style.

His was an inclusive dressing room – a collective of experienced professionals and his leadership was about getting you to think about your own performance and look ahead to the next game.

It was still there for us in six days’ time – at Celtic Park against St Johnstone in front of our own fans.

We needed to match any result Rangers got at Tannadice against Dundee United, but if we won?

If we won, Tannadice was immaterial.

One of my immediate concerns was that I had agreed to go to a supporters’ club in Paisley after the Dunfermline match, and I dreaded the prospect now of let-down among those who were coming to it – if indeed they still were coming.

I needn’t have worried. It was a superb night with singing and dancing which fairly lifted my spirits and made me realise that they still believed we were going to cross the line the following Saturday.

Now began one of the longest weeks of my life.

I was struggling a bit as I had been fighting an injury dating back to mid-season against Aberdeen when I’d taken a knock on my patella tendon after a rash tackle.

By this point in the campaign I wasn’t even training during the week and, frankly, was running on sheer adrenaline between treatments.

There was a confidence about the lads but, equally, a nervousness. By the same token, none of us could wait for Saturday.

On the day itself, there was a quietness in the camp as Wim had taken us away to a hotel the night before so that we could relax without press intrusion and focus on the job in hand.

There was a huge crowd waiting outside Celtic Park as we arrived at the ground and, equally, inside the stadium.

The fans were in buoyant mood but it wasn’t difficult to also feel the tension as we went through our paces, warming up out on the pitch.

Wim had announced his team an hour and a half before kick-off.

Again, he wasn’t a man to play his hand early so subsequently, no one was ever 100 per cent sure they would start a match.

The hands of the clock ticked away towards 2.55pm as we pulled on our green and white jerseys, then settled down for the final words from the manager.

He was the essence of calm. The message was simple. We ‘all knew our jobs – it had been a long season – had come this far and now we had the chance to go out on a high’.

The knock on the door from the referee alerted us that it was time to go and so, with the familiar ‘tick-tack’ of studs on the floor, we stepped out of the dressing room and lined up with St Johnstone before pressing through the tunnel and out into the light where the Celtic support awaited us – where expectation awaited us.

Every stand in the ground erupted as we entered the fray.

The stakes were incredibly high. Whatever happened on that day, 9 May 1998, it would be historic in Scottish football – but you have to be on the right side of history.

2

Beginnings

The first sensation was my arm going limp as all the power seemed to drain away from it.

Then my head started to thump, and I felt myself pitching forward as if I was going to pass out.

Somehow I managed to shout to Sam, and she came running down the garden. One of the dogs had started to jump on me as if he was aware that I was in distress and then I started to vomit, retching from my gut up through my larynx in pain. I could feel myself losing consciousness and then came the hard smacks from Sam’s hand as she tried to bring me round, but it was no good and I slumped forward on to the ground, completely out of it.

Sam immediately called an ambulance from her mobile.

Thankfully, Christ, miraculously as it would turn out to be, there happened to be a couple of paramedics in Malton there and then, close to our home and they responded within five minutes, racing down to the house and working on me before carrying me away on a stretcher out into the ambulance and on to York Hospital.

* * *

I remember the tackle. It’s not the sort of thing you forget.

In those days I think I was viewed as a winger. That probably had a lot to do with my height back then as I was pretty diminutive.

Anyway, I was playing for a team called Edina Hibs. Monday, 13 March 1989; I even remember the date. Fifteen years of age and loving my football.

I had taken a pass and pushed into the opponents’ half. The defender came towards me and I knocked the ball past him, confident in my pace, so I felt I could get beyond him and latch on to it before playing a telling cross into the box.

All that was going through my mind in the instant I moved the ball on and started sprinting beyond him when – WHACK!

This guy came out of nowhere and took me right out of the game. And not just that game!

It was clear, even at that early stage, the injury was serious.

Listen, football is full of that sort of thing. Mistimed tackles, full-blooded tackles, reckless tackles; you are only ever one lunge away from an ended career.

I probably wouldn’t have expected it at 15, though. I certainly wouldn’t have expected it from a man of 30!

This guy was a mate of one of the club’s coaches and he had come along to play in a bounce match. He was twice my age! A fully grown individual. A man, kicking a ball around with and against boys.

I have no idea what was going through his mind when he committed to that tackle. All I knew was that I was lying prone on the pitch, in agony, fearing the worst.

The vital moments in an injury like that are the ones that occur immediately after it. I knew it was bad but wasn’t sure how bad. A few years later I would find out that the worst thing to do in a situation like that is to move the victim, but that’s exactly what happened.

A group of no doubt, well-meaning individuals raced on to the pitch and lifted me. I will never forget that moment when they hoisted me up and my damaged leg fell limply underneath me, unable to support itself without the strength of a solid bone. It dangled below me, and the pain was excruciating. I remember the gas and air that was suddenly available to me as my teenage body went into shock.

A little over a decade later, I would be out on the pitch of the Stade de Gerland, home of Olympique Lyonnais, watching my team-mate Henrik Larsson suffer a similar break – which instantly brought speculation that his career may be cut prematurely short.

Back in 1989, what lay ahead for me was seven long months of rehabilitation. Seven months of trying to mend a leg broken in two places above the shin. Seven months of comprehending that the dream I had always wanted, of becoming a professional football player, may not be available to me. Seven months of reconciling myself to the possibility that the dream had been taken away from me by a man playing in a boys’ football match.

A ‘bounce’ match with nothing at stake and yet he had tackled this boy, half his age, with all the intensity of a man whose life had depended on it.

* * *

I guess football was all I really wanted to do when I was a kid.

As I mentioned earlier, I was the middle child of Jackie and Linda McNamara, born on 24 October 1973 in Rottenrow Hospital, Glasgow.

When I arrived, the world was in turmoil.

The Conservative government under Ted Heath were considering a three-day week to conserve electricity.

A fire brigade strike in Glasgow meant that army troops were brought in to provide cover and, in America, President Nixon was embroiled in the ever-increasing Watergate scandal.

None of that would have meant anything to me, of course, but my dad, Jackie, was a keen follower of politics and would have taken an interest in the times in which he was living.

A professional footballer, Dad was on Celtic’s books at that time. He’d signed from Cumbernauld United in October 1970 at the age of 18 and actually made his debut for the club exactly three weeks before I arrived when he was sent on as a substitute for no less than Kenny Dalglish in a home European Cup tie against Finnish champions TPS Turku.

Celtic had been 6-1 winners out in Finland so the return leg was seen as a bit of a formality. Dad was introduced at half-time and, according to the papers, showed some clever touches with the Evening Times calling him a ‘prospect’.

That was the start of a decent professional career which would take him to Hibernian, where he would really make his name, and then Greenock Morton where he saw out his final football days as a player.

He and Mum were the epitome of childhood sweethearts as they started dating at 14 in high school. They were young parents as well with Mum being only 17 when she had my older brother Steven and 19 when I popped up on the scene.

Dad had always taken an interest in politics and reportedly was the guy who went around all the Celtic players collecting their union dues on a weekly basis while trying to break into Jock Stein’s first-team squad. His left-wing views were well documented and to some in the Celtic dressing room he was known as ‘Jack, the Red’, while Kenny Dalglish always called him ‘Trotsky’ after the famous Russian Marxist politician.

Politics was certainly in his blood as his own dad, my grandfather Jimmy McNamara, was a passionate union man in the shipyards. He would also go on to have a politically active role in newspaper unions when he graduated to working on Fleet Street in London.

I remember seeing him in programmes about notorious publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, and Grandpa McNamara would be a big influence on me as well. From those genes you can glean fighting qualities.

Mum’s parents, Sam and Sadie Houston, lived in Baillieston and they ran a mobile shop which predominantly serviced Easterhouse. As a young boy I loved going over to their place and maybe getting the chance to go out on a ‘round’ with one of them. That van seemed to sell everything in it. Cakes, biscuits, elastoplasts, magazines, painkillers – you name it, they sold it!

In those early days we lived on Duke Street in Glasgow, which was almost a roll-out-of-bed-and-into-Celtic-Park location.

Dad would leave Celtic in late 1976 to go to Hibernian in a deal that saw Easter Road legend and former club captain Pat Stanton move to Glasgow in exchange.

Although my dad was earning his living in the capital, we still lived in Glasgow as a family and had moved to Oak Road in Cumbernauld.

It was a pretty innocuous place that became a bit more famous in 1980 when film producer Bill Forsyth decided to set his coming-of-age picture, Gregory’s Girl, in the new town.

The story of a boy’s teenage crush built around the revolutionary idea of a girl playing in a school football team was set in Abronhill High, which was close to where we lived.

In fact, the famous red blaes football pitch where they shot some of the action was a popular haunt for me and my mates.

We would kick a ball endlessly around the bone-hard park where even a well-timed slide tackle could rip away half your thigh!

Schools football was tough in those days. It was just about all I had time for though when it came to formal education. I started in the local Cumbernauld primary, Glenhead, before moving to Parsons Green in 1982 when my parents decided to relocate to Edinburgh.

That was a tough shift. I didn’t appreciate the rivalry between east and west in Scotland and at just eight years of age I was suddenly in a completely different environment.

There was the daft stuff that other kids would alight on to mark you out. Stuff like the fact that my first name could also be a girl’s name or that my accent was clearly different to the soft-spoken kids in the capital. There was also the more serious business like the fact my dad played for Hibs.

In some ways that could be a good thing when things were going well but if the Hibees were going through a lean spell, I would expect to bear a bit of the brunt for that in the playground.

I had my fair share of scrapes and fights, as