The Best Team In The Land & All The World, Part Five: "No More Than an Unseemly and Sickening Brawl"

The 1967 Intercontinental Cup between Racing Club and Celtic would set the tone for the next few years of an increasingly troubled competition.

It’s time for the fifth part in this ongoing series about the trouble that football has had in determining a club world champion. The 1966 World Cup has just broken relations between European and South American football still wider, and Celtic were the first in line to feel the wrath of Rioplatense football. This is a split article, and there’s more about the aftermath of this match below the cut for paying subscribers.

While the dust was still settling after the 1966 World Cup finals, further trouble was brewing in South America and this had nothing to do with the treatment of their teams in Europe that summer. Brazil sent no entrants to the 1966, 1969 or 1970 Copa Libertadores, but what was the reason for this?

The answer seems to have been a conflation of different factors. It has been suggested that growing amounts of violence from Argentinian and Uruguayan teams was at least partly to blame, but it wasn’t only this. European tours were still considered more lucrative by Brazilian clubs, who chose to tour Africa and Europe instead.

It’s also been suggested that the 1964 military coup in Brazil pushed all domestic emphasis onto preparing the national team for the 1970 World Cup. The official reasons given were related to unhappiness in Brazil at the competition being expanded to the champions and runners-up from each country. Whatever the reasons were for this mass withdrawal, the implications for the Intercontinental Cup were pretty clear; no Brazilian club would take part in it again until 1976.

In May 1967, Celtic stood atop European club football after winning the European Cup against Internazionale in Lisbon. The Intercontinental Cup wasn’t to be played until the following October, and the club took the time to prepare. Manager Jock Stein flew out to Buenos Aires to see their opponents, Racing Club. Two Uruguayan sides, Penarol and Nacional, played friendlies against them in order for them to prepare.

Racing, it has been said, were doing the same. It has been claimed that their manager Juan José Pizzuti wrote to European-based Argentines for information about their opponents, and that he was afforded a stroke of luck by bumping into Sean Connery en route to Glasgow, availing himself of a bilingual air stewardess to find out more information about a team that he had barely seen play himself.

The crowd reported at Hampden Park for the first leg was over 100,000, and it was clear from early on that Racing had done some intel work. The Celtic winger Jimmy Johnstone seemed to be singled out for special attention in the form of tactical fouling, while Celtic players would later complain of the amount of fouling and spitting coming their way from their opponents.

The first leg was won for Celtic with a Billy McNeil header midway through the second half, but the toll on the players was evident as they left the pitch at the end of the match. McNeill himself had a black eye, Bertie Auld had been headbutted and Bobby Lennox sustained an ear injury which ruled him out of international duty playing for Scotland that weekend.

Celtic’s trip to Buenos Aires came off the back of a 5-3 win against Dundee to lift the Scottish League Cup, but it was clear from when they arrived in Argentina that things were going to be different when they were prevented from going anywhere without a police escort, while a ‘mix-up’ over hotel rooms left them sleeping in particularly basic accommodation.

Things didn’t improve much once they arrived for the match. With a crowd of over 120,000 inside the stadium, they found their dressing room door locked from the outside before the match until somebody could be found to unlock it. And things got worse when they took to the pitch. Goalkeeper Ronnie Simpson was struck by an object thrown from the crowd during the warm-up—it was claimed that this was an iron bar, though this was denied by Racing—and had to be replaced before a ball had even been kicked.

Despite this, Celtic took the lead midway through the first half with a penalty kick converted by Tommy Gemmell following a foul on Johnstone, but Norberto Raffo levelled things up for Racing seven minutes later and a winning goal from Juan Carlos Cardenas, scored three minutes into the second half, was enough to force the game to a third match, to be played three days later just over the Rio de la Plata in Montevideo.

Whether this could be considered a ‘neutral’ venue was at best debatable. Celtic gave serious consideration to just returning home without playing the match; speaking afterwards, Stein told the press that: “We don't want to go to Montevideo or anywhere else in South America for a third game. But we know we have to” and that they wanted to win, “not so much for ourselves but to prevent Racing from becoming champions”.

But Stein’s attitude changed over those three days. By the time the match was played, the directors of the club would have been quite satisfied for them to return home, but by this time both Stein and the players were determined to go out and finish the job off. The match was to be played in front of a crowd of over 70,000 at the Estadio Centenario in Montevideo, but there were further signs of things to come when their players only received at best a lukewarm reception after taking to taking to the pitch with the biggest Uruguayan flag they could find, when the Racing players had already been out there with an even bigger one.

With little having been done to cool the atmosphere down between the second leg and the playoff, it was little surprise that the match started with a procession of cynical fouls which led to the Paraguayan referee, with an interpreter, taking the two captains to one side midway through the half and instructing them to calm their players down.

His request fell on deaf ears. With eight minutes of the first half left to play, it all went off when Jimmy Johnstone was hacked down by Juan Rulli and retaliated. In the ensuing argumentRacing Club's Basile and Celtic's Bobby Lennox were sent off. Lennox’s dismissal was initially believed to have been a case of misidentification, though it later emerged that the referee had already advised that Basile and Lennox would be sent off the next time the players lost control, whether they’d committed the offence concerned or not. Lennox had to be led from the pitch by a policeman who was carrying a sword.

By the early stages of the second half, it was starting to look as though Celtic’s discipline had completely broken down. Johnstone was sent off three minutes in, and seven minutes later Cardenas, who’d scored the equalising goal in the second leg from distance. But by this point, the actual football itself was taking second place to the fighting. A refereeing display variously described as anything from “eccentric” to “bent” saw another three players sent off, making a total of six in total; two from Racing, and four from Celtic.

But the headloss by this time was pretty much irreparable. John Hughes was dismissed for punching the Racing goalkeeper Agustin Cejas in the kidneys. His later defence for it was that he’d thought no-one would see him do it. Rulli was sent off for Racing six minutes later for punching Celtic’s John Clark, and then the match ended in chaos when Bertie Auld was sent off for Celtic but refused to leave the pitch but was allowed to play the last few minutes anyway, while Tommy Gemmell, seeing the opportunity to settle a score from earlier in the match, kicked a Racing player in an extremely sensitive area indeed but stayed on the pitch because the referee didn’t see it. A few minutes later Racing Club were the ‘world champions’, to the extent that this even really mattered any more.