Joyless Sport and the Death of a Prince — A story about tragedy and how, with power, comes a great responsibility to be careful with one’s words.
Goalkeeping is a dangerous profession. All you need to do is look at the former Chelsea, Arsenal and Czech Republic international Petr Cech.
His career and life were almost ended by an accident against Reading when playing for The Blues on October 14th 2006, when a collision with Reading’s Stephen Hunt left him with a fractured skull that almost killed him due to his skull’s bone structure being thinner, owing to Cech being a triplet.
Inevitably, Hunt bore the brunt of the anger directed at him by Mourinho and the club’s fans at the time, but the two men have made peace since.
After the incident at Reading’s Madejski Stadium, Cech played with a protective helmet upon his return to the field for the remainder of his career until his retirement as a player.
These days, Cech enjoys a second career as a goaltender in the UK’s domestic Ice Hockey League, where he turns out occasionally for the Belfast Giants on a loan basis from the Oxford City Stars.
But a similar incident nigh on a century ago ended somewhat differently, and much more tragically, when Celtic played Rangers in the always-heated Old Firm Derby at Ibrox on September 5th, 1931.
Some 80,000 spectators were packed into the Govan ground to watch Willie Maley and Bill Struth’s sides battle in the first big league clash of the 1931–32 season.
Two points separated the Glasgow giants at the end of the 1930–31 season, with Struth’s Rangers coming out on top.
Keen to retain their title and keep it from the clutches of their great rivals and an upstart Motherwell side who had been steadily improving for a decade under John Hunter, Rangers, as most clubs did, turned to the junior ranks for talent.
Plucked from Yoker Athletic was the 22-year-old (Northern) Irishman Sam English.
From the Hamlet of Crevolea near Aghadowey in what is now County Antrim in Northern Ireland, English impressed immediately and would go on to have a record-breaking season, scoring 44 times in 35 league matches for the Light Blues — a record that remains unsurpassed by any Rangers striker since.
Celtic, keen to wrest the title back from their rivals and remain the more successful Scottish club (at the time), had a prodigy of their own in goalkeeper John Thomson.
Thomson was born in Kirkcaldy on January 28th, 1909, but grew up in the mining village of Cardenden.
From a young age, his talent as a goalkeeper was there for all to see, collecting the Lochgelly Times Cup while a pupil at the Auchterderran Higher Grade School.
However, like so many in that period, football was not his sole occupation, as he was an on-cost worker in the Bowhill Colliery, where his father, also John, worked.
After joining Wellesley Juniors from Bowhill Rovers for the 1926–27 season, a game against Denbeth Star changed everything for Thomson and Celtic.
Legendary Celtic manager Willie Maley had sent his scout, Steve Callaghan, to scout Star’s goalkeeper, but the scout was instead captivated by a virtuoso performance by Thomson.
With Thomson participating in the ongoing General Strike, becoming a professional footballer for a fee of £10 was a great boon to the young man. However, his mother, Jean, had her reservations. She was adamant that football was a dangerous game.
Her misgivings about her son’s choice of career were to be prophetic.
Replacing Peter Shevlin, who had conceded three sloppy goals in Maley’s mind in a 6–3 victory over Brechin City in February 1927, he made his Celtic debut against Dundee United in the following match. There was no turning back after that as Thomson became the first-choice Celtic goalkeeper, playing in The Hoops’ 1927 Scottish Cup final triumph over East Fife.
International recognition followed, and by the time of the crunch clash at Ibrox on September 5th, he had four caps for Scotland — he was still only 22 years old.
Coming into the clash with their Glasgow rivals, Celtic had drawn 3–3 at Third Lanark, while Rangers had won 2–1 at Falkirk. Tensions were high as both sides’ young talents looked to continue shining in Thomson’s case and begin shining in the case of the prolific Irishman named English playing in Scotland.
As always with clashes between Celtic and Rangers, it was more akin to a chess match, yet the game remained goalless at the interval.
The sides re-emerged for the second 45, eager to break the deadlock.
Then it happened. English sensed an opportunity to score and seized upon it — as did Thomson, who had been seriously injured before in a challenge, so the danger was nothing new to him.
The two men collided, English’s knee smashing into Thomson’s skull, rupturing an artery in his temple.
Though the crowd had assumed the prodigious goalkeeper had “only” suffered a concussion, one medical student who was also playing for Rangers on the day knew from looking at the stricken Thomson that this was no concussion and a more serious matter.
One source tells of a piercing shriek from the almost silent crowd, attributed to a young woman attending the match with Thomson’s brother.
The collision with English’s knee left a two-inch depression in his skull, and doctors at the Victoria Infirmary frantically worked to ease the swelling in his brain.
But at 5 PM, Thomson suffered a Major Convulsion, and despite the best efforts of the hospital personnel, the Prince of Goalkeepers died at 9:25 PM.
The final score of 0–0 mattered not to Celtic, Scotland as a footballing nation, or anyone else involved.
While English did go on to have a record-breaking season with Rangers, it was not enough to bring them the league title for a second consecutive year, as they were beaten to the league flag by Motherwell, fulfilling their steady improvement over the years since the resumption of football after the First World War.
While the story of Thomson and his death in action for his club have remained in the conscience of many, mainly through stories handed down both in writing and song by generation after generation of Celtic supporters, the effect that the tragedy had in Sam English needs telling as it’s a tragedy in itself.
Although absolved of any blame by Thomson’s family — and all of his teammates and opponents on the day — English’s survivor guilt deepened because of cruel jibes, including from Celtic fans who travelled to Liverpool after he left Rangers.
Even rival players were taking potshots at the traumatised English, being called a murderer by a Sheffield United player when he was turning out for Liverpool.
The vendetta felt by the Celtic supporters in contrast to the widespread sympathy shown to English by the Celtic players comes from a rather unfortunate, if you can call it that, remark by Willie Maley.
The Irishman, who hadn’t seen the incident between English and Thomson, had said that he hoped it was an accidental collision, the tone of voice used turning the Parkhead faithful against English, who couldn’t be any more sorry for what had unfolded.
In a conversation with a colleague in 1938 — by which time he had returned very briefly to Scotland to play for Dumfriesshire side Queen of the South — and was then playing for Hartlepool United, he called his career seven years of joyless sport.
Even at Hartlepool and QOS, the barbs flew at him for a complete accident. He retired from football and took up a job as a sheet metal worker before succumbing to the devastating Motor Neurone Disease at the age of just 58.
Ultimately, the lesson from this incident almost a century ago is one must be mindful that how you say something is as important as what you say. Especially in today’s age of social media, where the race to get something out in the world becomes more important than establishing facts.
Like Sam English before him, Stephen Hunt never intended to harm his opponent, but how one projects oneself to their faithful following must be mindful of semantics and rhetoric, lest they cause more harm than good.
