(An article impossible without Alec O'Henley's book "Forgotten Star")
Alec O'Henley's paean of praise of Malky "Calum" Macdonald, Forgotten Star, is worth the read. Understandably it concentrates on the player's background in Glasgow and on South Uist, city boy and Gaelic islander, his Celtic career as a player and with Killy, Brentford and briefly with Scotland as a manager but there were amongst the insights a phrase and four paragraphs that en passant caught my particular attention. The phrase came from a description a schoolboy football game that a young Glenn Daly, later entertainer and singer, notably of The Celtic Song, had seen and in recollecting describes the young Malcolm, Malky, Calum as "like a dancing master". That simple phrase makes the young Macdonald a player I would have liked to have seen at any stage in his career but there was more. In the first of the paragraphs John Cairney, later television and film actor, who as young boy also saw him play and has since said,
For me any reference to John White is more than enough for complete affirmation but then there was a second, the following paragraph from the man, Malky Macdonald, himself."He played football with a silk shirt and silk slippers and the pitch was his velvet stage. He was an artist not an artisan. The great John White ( "The Ghost" of Falkirk and Spurs) is the only other player I remember who played with that kind of haughtiness that suggested he was above mere mortals. Malcolm played as if he owned the ball."
Which Alec further re- and de-fines with,"I was really the last of the old era at Parkhead before Willie Lyon came. You didn't mark a man; you marked an area and were called a pivote because everything worked around you."
"Think about the pivote role Xavi Hernandez performs for Barcelona and you have an idea of the kind of player Malcolm was in his heyday although those who saw him play are quick to tell you he was even better because he could play in so many positions expertly. Not a.....centre-half, rather a playmaker who was willing to receive the ball in all kind of positions, take care of it as if his life depended on it and supply the killer passes..."
To which can also be added a second observation again from the man himself,
What is clear, something that Alec perhaps does not fully comprehend but has nevertheless crystallised, is that Calum was not just a centre-half but a Scottish centre-half, proof of the existence of which, if proof were needed, Calum himself and Alec in writing about him provide in their own words. Furthermore, in referring to Xavi Hernandez and Barcelona Alec implicitly seems to have understood as others have not the connection between indeed the implantation of the Scottish centre-half in the Spanish game via
Peter McWilliam,
Ajax, Buckingham and Cruyff
on the one hand and
John Cameron and
Fred Pentland on the other and its continuation therein. Moreover there is the clear suggestion that Calum recognised himself as the last of line at Celtic at least and therefore more or less in Scotland,. he saw his style of play replaced by the "stopper" centre-back, of whom
Willie Lyon, imported from Queen's Park in 1935, was Parkhead's first as Scottish clubs one-by-one abandoned native ways and followed the Arsenal example. And it is not by chance either that Macdonald centre-half did not then, as many would, fade away redundant. Just as James Kelly, the first Scottish centre-half of all, who at the Renton of the late 1880s had dropped back taking his inside-forward skills with him, so Malky Macdonald with those same skills moved forward to inside-right for three seasons before the war brought his career in East Glasgow but not in Scotland to an end. He was then twenty-five, just coming into his prime, ready for perhaps five years of caps, replacing or as an alternative to Hearts' Tommy Walker. But it was not to be. There was to be no national recognition beyond a single schoolboy cap at the age of fifteen in 1928 and three more at senior level but wartime only. And when the war ended Malky Macdonald was thirty-one. His best playing years were gone. Celtic certainly thought so. Yet Calum still was able to play on. There was a year at Kilmarnock and three more in England, if, admittedly down the league, at Brentford. And that might have been it, except, again at Kilmarnock, he was drawn into management.
"Accuracy of passing counted for everything."
He stayed seven years at Rugby Park. The club had finished seventh in 1950 but in the Scottish Second Division. In first year under his stewardship it was
twelfth. Then it was fifth, fourth, second and promoted, eighth in the First Division, then third, two placed above Celtic respectively. And in the Cup it went from First Round defeat to runners-up after a replay and a defeat of Celtic in the semi-final in 1957, at which point Brentford reappeared on the scene and Macdonald would spend eight years managing the London club. It had finished
eighth in the Third Division South. The following season, his first, it missed out on promotion by a place and two points. In 1959 it again missed out by a place and now four points but, with the league reorganised, from the Third Division. Then is went on a dip, was relegated in 1962, promoted immediately, rising to fifth in 1965.
It was a good, if not a perfect record, albeit not at the highest level. But what is more pertinent is his openly expressed view as follows of what was a good footballer,
"What I want to see is every individual a finished footballer, not just a unit in his team. Once every player is really expert at his job it doesn't matter whether his club's policy is defence or attack. For the finished player can play anywhere, but he is playing good football all the time, whether in attack and defence."
What he is talking about in this extract from a 1956 article is in essence Total Football, a style of play that became recognised world-wide in the 1970s but he and others had seen already in embryonic form in Belgium and Holland in the mid-1950s. Moreover, the crux of that same article was a call for National Performance Coaching, specifically in Scotland a single person to be responsible for the the development of football throughout the country and more specifically still the "fostering" of a distinct Scottish style of play. Now "fostering" is a curious word. Does it mean "creation from nothing" or rather does it imply recognition by Malky that in Scotland there was or recently had been a way of playing the game differently and by implication better? It is for you to judge but the existence of just such a "way" is a theme throughout articles on this site with Macdonald doing no more than calling for what he recognised, no doubt in himself, particularly prior to 1936 and that he perhaps also saw in others, notably his Scots managerial peers, not least a certain Matt Busby, Bill Shankly and even Jock Stein.
Which takes us to the final twist. When Jock Stein stepped back in 1966 on failing as Scotland manager to reach the World Cup and John Prentice came, was overwhelmed and went, it was Malcolm"Calum" Macdonald, who, before returning to scouting, for Spurs, stepped as caretaker into the breach for a final flourish centre-stage; two games played before Bobby Brown, one drawn away, one won at home, none lost.