Saturday Interview: John Connolly, St Johnstone's all-time greatest, on League Cup heartache and his bust-up with ‘posh’ Sir Alf Ramsey

I think we can say with some certainty that Sir Alf Ramsey never visited what a generation of wannabe footballers in Barrhead, East Renfrewshire, called “the Big Field”. It was here that John Connolly hit upon the style which would take him right to the top of the game and ultimately a disillusioning encounter with the England World Cup-winning manager.

John Connolly in action for Everton against Liverpool's redoubtable Tommy Smith during a 1976 Merseyside derby. Picture: Colorsport/Shutterstock

Sir Alf had a famous antipathy to crossing Hadrian’s Wall, only coming here under sufferance, such as when it was our turn to host the annual international with the Auld Enemy, which on one occasion prompted this exchange: Pressman: “Welcome to Scotland, Alf.” Ramsey: “You must be f*****g joking!”

He also had a famous antipathy to wingers, and although this policy was no impediment to the lifting of the Jules Rimet trophy, St Johnstone legend Connolly will never be convinced it was a good one.

“The Big Field was a couple of hundred yards from my home,” he tells me. “After running home from school and throwing down my satchel I was there every day, cock or a hen, for a game with older boys. I could dribble and I was fast, which was just as well: if these lads thought I was making a fool of them they’d chase after me and try and kick me. Being a winger was kind of self-preservation.”

John Connolly during his Newcastle days.

After etching his name in old Muirton Park folklore Connolly moved to England where a roving career took him to Birmingham City. “My manager there was Willie Bell, a Scotsman, very religious, very soft manner, a lovely guy and probably too nice to be a boss, so Alf who was a director took over.

“He and I didn’t get on. Right away he summoned me to his office. I had to wait outside for him to say ‘Enter’. Didn’t he have elocution and posh himself up? He said: ‘One has thought about this, John, and one has decided you are not going to be playing.’ He didn’t give me a chance, not a couple of games or anything. You can imagine how hard I slammed the door on the way out. One was pretty pissed off!”

Connolly isn’t just a Saintees immortal, he’s the all-time greatest. Confirmation came in a recently-published book nominating the 60 key characters who’ve shaped the club’s history and Con, as he was known, when I catch up with him at his home in Irvine, Ayrshire, is still enjoying the moment. “I’m thrilled,” he says. “St Johnstone have been going for 137 years and 1,500 players have worn the shirt. When I see the list of names in the book - Sir Alex Ferguson, Ally McCoist and the guy who finished just behind me, Sergei Baltacha, our Russian international - I’m honoured. The whole family - my wife Anne, our sons Graeme and Stuart and five grandkids - are very proud.”

But Connolly, as well as revelling in tall tales of kenspeckle Saints such as manager Willie Ormond and team-mate John Lambie, wants to see the current team go one better than his side and hoist the Betfred Cup next Sunday. In the 1971 final of what was then the League Cup, St Johnstone lost by a single goal to Jock Stein’s Celtic. “And after a few drinks back in Perth at the Station Hotel I think most of us were kicking ourselves,” says our man, now 70. “We had a big chance to win it.”

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Connolly also has funny stories of George Best and how the great man’s aura, even at the fag-end of his career, rendered everyone else invisible. “When we were both at Hibs, playing in what’s now the Championship at places like Hamilton and Ayr, I actually stayed with him for a while at the Caley Hotel [Edinburgh’s Caledonian]. He was a quiet guy and I enjoyed his company but the buzz around him was never quiet. The number of young ladies who used to mill about the foyer was unbelievable and they all wanted to chat to him. I’d sometimes go: ‘By the way, I’m George’s pal!’”

But there were no such issues with recognition at St Johnstone when Connolly, Henry Hall and Jim Pearson were one of the sexiest front threes in the Scottish game. Can you be sexy in Perth? These guys were. Con, though, likes to pass the credit around. “Kenny Aird and Freddie Aitken were our wide players and we also had Lambie, Benny Rooney and Buck McGarry who, if any teams wanted to try and rough us up, could mix it with the best of them. I’ve missed out a few, obviously - and am sure they’ll tick me off about that the next time I see them.”

The middle child of Jean and John, a foundry worker at Shanks & Co who put Barrhead on the map with their ubiquitous cludgies, Connolly talks some more about the unwritten rules of the Big Field: “Nowadays kids are schooled: ‘You stand here, son, and wait for him over there to pass it to you.’ The reality in my day was that when you got the ball you ran with it.”

At youth team Glasgow United the front two were briefly Connolly and Kenny Dalglish. Whatever happened to him? There was plenty of interest in Con from bigger clubs but at 16 St Johnstone were quickest with an offer. He went on to play for Everton and Newcastle United but those five years at Muirton, the ground’s wide-open spaces suiting a player who liked to take the ball on an adventure, were his happiest.

Connolly had been given his start in football by Willie Ormond then capped for Scotland by him. In 1980 the old boss took him to Hibs for a promotion bid

Mention of Ormond brings another comparison with football then and now: “Willie was great and the most important figure in my career. Nearly every week all he would say to us was: ‘Just go out and play.’ These days managers have lots of assistants and they have lots of big notepads and tablets. Substitutes are shown them and at the same time the assistants are pointing all over the park and issuing a hundred instructions. When I was going through my coaching badges I was told that footballers in the space of 30 seconds will have forgotten everything they’ve been told! If there are only ten minutes left subs just want to get on the pitch. They don’t want a full tutorial.

“Maybe only half a dozen times did Willie produce a tactics board. Even then, talking about the opposition, he’d throw counters on the floor going: ‘He’s rubbish, he’s rubbish, he’s rubbish. If we can’t beat this lot with their eight and a half men then we must be crap.’” St Johnstone weren’t, and the season after that cup final defeat, 1970-71, would finish third in the old First Division, ahead of Rangers, having won three of the four games against the Old Firm.

That qualified them for the Uefa Cup, the highlight of the run being the vanquishing of Hamburg, the German cracks (all more-than-decent foreign sides were thus described). “I think that was my best-ever game for Saints,” says Connolly, who’s other Euro memories seem to be dominated by the comedy, intentional or otherwise, of the incorrigible Lambie: “I remember John after the away leg against Hamburg, leading the charge to the Reeperbahn [the city’s red-light district] and in a bierkeller marching up to the stage, removing the hat from the leader of the oompah band and taking over conducting.

“In Sarajevo [vs Zeljeznicar] it was so cold that the wings froze on the plane bringing us home. It couldn’t climb high enough to clear some mountains so banked round and went back to the airport, landing with full tanks which planes are not supposed to do. As we waited for the wings to be defrosted I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking about Man United and Munich. John certainly was. ‘Let me off,’ he shouted, ‘I’m taking the train!’

Connolly at St Johnstone in 1971. This was the year of his greatest game, the win over mighty Hamburg.

“We also played Real Madrid in the Bernabeu [again in ’71 when the Spanish cracks were readying themselves for their Cup-Winners’ Cup final against Chelsea]. Gordon Whitelaw scored a terrific goal but then we wilted in the heat. Afterwards everyone wanted a Real strip. John approached Gento but was told: ‘You kick me whole game. It is friendly. You not get shirt.’”

In his youth Connolly had been a Rangers fan and indeed a ballboy. Willie Waddell was keen to sign him in the long-standing Ibrox tradition of wanting to disarm clubs who’ve been a threat but in ’72 only bid £40,000. Everton topped that with £75,000 and the striker joined a club rebuilding after a title triumph two years previously.

He lined up alongside Joe Royle, Brian Labone, Howard Kendall and Colin Harvey. Against him were the unshy and non-retiring Tommy Smith (in Merseyside derbies), Norman “Bites Yes Legs” Hunter (Leeds) and Ron “Chopper” Harris (Chelsea). “One time after knocking the ball past Ron and crossing for Joe to score he stopped me as I was jogging back: ‘Son, I think it would be a very good idea if you went over to the other side of the park.’ I’m not daft, so I said to Jimmy Husband: ‘Quick, give us a swap.’”

Connolly’s wing-play, on whichever flank, excited the Goodison faithful and soon brought him his own song, adapted from the TV jingle for John Collier menswear: “John Connolly, John Connolly, John Connolly - the winger to watch.” But in an FA Cup tie against non-league Altrincham, in a tackle fans remember as being especially vicious, he suffered a double leg-break. “We were leading the league at that stage and I like to tell my old team-mates, as we ended up fourth, that that was the day the title was lost. Seriously, the guy went right over the top. It takes some force to break both bones. But I came back too quickly and on a pre-season tour of Holland broke the leg again.”

Impetuousness. Connolly admits he’s always suffered from it. “Throughout my career I always thought the grass was greener someplace else. I didn’t want to wait to get back in the Everton team so I went to Birmingham. In hindsight I shouldn’t have left. I’m sure I drove Anne mad, always rushing about. Signing for Everton I’d been in such a hurry that I locked her out of our house. We lived in nice areas - Formby at Everton and Solihull at Birmingham - but I’d soon get wanderlust. Then, despite playing alongside great players like Trevor Francis and Kenny Burns - although those two hated each other - I decided Brum was too far from Scotland so I went to Newcastle. Thankfully Anne kept coming with me.”

Injuries continued to dog him on Tyneside and in 1980 he got a call from Ormond. Connolly had been capped by his old boss when the latter was in charge of Scotland and now he was being asked: would he help get newly-relegated Hibs back into the top flight? This he duly did - “I wasn’t able to win much in the game so was grateful for that medal” - and he enjoyed his spell at Easter Road, continuing to wander as much on the park as off it. “I always wanted the ball and would get upset if it didn’t come my way. Then I’d have to go and find it. I’d cross wings and say to Ralphy Callachan: ‘I’ll have a go at your guy.’ I wasn’t like the modern player passing back, back, back all the time. When I was in the last third I’d be looking to go past folk.’”

Connolly return to first love Saints in 2004 as their manager.

Regime change brought Bertie Auld to Easter Road. As a Celt, he’d done down St Johnstone with the only goal of that ’69 cup final, and he didn’t make Connolly’s life any less comfortable as a Hibee. “I was surprised by Bertie’s methods. He’d been a very skilful player but as a manager made us run in straight lines. That wasn’t me at all. And training on Monday was always horrendous: jogging round the pitch with a medicine ball under each arm. Too slow and you did it again.”

After hanging up his boots Connolly bossed Queen of the South, bringing the club the Second Division title and the Challenge Cup. Appreciative Dumfries named a street after him. Anne liked the town just as much as all the other stopovers but there would be yet another flitting, the approach from Saints probably being unturndownable for the old hero. Unfortunately a land deal which would have raised funds for new players fell though and he was dismissed after ten months - “Probably a decent amount of time by today’s standards.”

A week tomorrow, current boss Callum Davidson has the chance of silverware after just eight months in the job. “That would be fantastic for him,” says Connolly, whose mind again drifts back to St Johnstone’s near-miss.

In the official record of that season, The Scottish Football Book No 16 edited by Hugh Taylor, Saints are described as having shed their “easy-going air” and the tag of “sturdy provincials” and were “setting the football world alight”. Connolly laughs when I read the extracts but points out they’d won all six League Cup section games, including an 8-1 thrashing of Partick Thistle at Firhill. “Before the final we stayed in Crieff and I’ve got a vague memory that at the time it was a non-drinking town. Anyway, we were in good fettle - at least until the second minute when Bertie scored. We could have folded but didn’t. There was a great spirit in our team and we really gave Celtic a fright. Unfortunately it just wasn’t our day. Hopefully this time, though, it will be.”

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