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www.celticfc.netJohnny Doyle: A True CeltBy: Paul Cuddihy on 19 Oct, 2011 07:22
TODAY, October 19, marks a very sad date in Celtic’s history, because it was on this day 30 years ago that Johnny Doyle died in a tragic accident. He was just 30-years-old.
Johnny Doyle was a Celtic supporter. He remained so throughout his all-too-short life, never forgetting this fact or that he felt proud and privileged to wear the green and white Hoops.
He was a player of undoubted quality, while his evident passion for the cause was there for all to see – sometimes he would see red because of it – and he was always a favourite with the Celtic fans for those reasons and, more importantly, because they recognised in him one of their own.
If he hadn’t been playing for the team, he would have been standing alongside them on the terraces. Indeed, Doyle would go to games, as a Celtic player, wearing a Celtic scarf, so that if he wasn’t selected, he could join his fellow fans in cheering on the team.
Davie Provan said of his friend and former team-mate: “Doyley played for the jersey and it genuinely meant so much to him to put on that jersey on a Saturday afternoon.
“There are none of these type of players left in the game today, and when you hear the phrase ‘he would have played for nothing’, Johnny Doyle was one of the few who probably would have played for nothing.”
Johnny Doyle was a Viewpark Bhoy, born on May 11, 1951, and like another famous Viewpark winger, Jimmy Johnstone, Doyle would also wear the green and white Hoops.
His route to Paradise was not a straight one, however. He joined Ayr United in 1968 and spent eight years at Somerset Park before he got his move to Celtic Park.
He joined his boyhood heroes on March 15, 1976, and made his debut just five days later at Dens Park in a 1-0 victory for Jock Stein’s side, the only goal of the game coming from Kenny Dalglish.
It would be the following season that he began to establish himself in the first-team, and he netted the first of 37 goals in a 3-0 League Cup sectional win over Dumbarton.
He was a regular in the side as Stein steered the club to an impressive league and Scottish Cup double, with Doyle and Tommy Burns the substitutes in the Cup final victory over Rangers.
Burns, another true Celtic great who was taken from us far too soon when he passed away in 2008 at the age of just 51, once said of Doyle that, “He always played for the team and he wanted the supporters to go home having seen Celtic win rather than him just being concerned with how he’d played.”
Between 1976 and 1981, Johnny Doyle made 143 appearances for Celtic, scoring 37 goals including, perhaps most memorably a header in the 2-0 victory over Real Madrid in the European Cup quarter-final in 1980.
He was only 30-years-old when he died, on October 19, 1981, the result of a tragic accident while he was working in his house.
He was mourned as a husband, father, brother, friend and team-mate by all who knew him, while the Celtic support mourned his loss as a fellow Celt.
On the 30th anniversary of his death, we remember a Celtic supporter who was lucky enough to wear the Hoops.
And the words of Tommy Burns, speaking to the Celtic View in 2005 about his friend, have a particular poignancy.
“It was a tragedy when Doyley died, and it makes you realise just how fortunate you are when there are people who come into this world and then leave it so suddenly.”
