Davie Hay revelled in Celtic's clashes against the
great Ajax team of the early 1970s
DUTCH
OF CLASS
exclusive inte
Martin Dalziel
CELTIC legend Davie Hay has the rare claim to
fame of being part of one football dynasty while
witnessing the birth of another.
The Hoops great blossomed into a young professional
as a member of the Quality Street Gang at the Bhoys in
the late 1960s before he graduated into Celtic's starting XI
alongside many of the Lisbon Lions,
That squad of players achieved levels of unparalleled
greatness in top-flight European football when they won
nine league titles in a row from 1965 to 1974 alongside a
raft of domestic cups and also a string of European Cup
semi-final and final appearances,
Celtic deserved their reputation as one of Europe's top
teams but they knew their days as kings of the continent
were under threat when they fell to Feyenoord in the
European Cup final in 1970 before exiting the same
competition at the quarter-final stage a year later at the
hands of fellow Dutch side Ajax, led by the inspirational
Johan Cruyff
The playmaker was the architect of Celtic's demise in
the last eight when he scored one and set up another in a
3-0 victory over Jock Stein's side in Amsterdam's Olympic
Stadium in their first-leg meeting in March 1970 before
going on to help his team lift Europe's top club trophy for
the next three years in a row.
Hay remembers what it was like to be part of a duel
featuring two of the best teams in the world but told the
official match programme that there was a sense of a
changing of the guard after their matches against Ajax
that year, which soon turned into the advent of Dutch
dominance in European football,
"The first game was played at the old Olympic Stadium.
We had been beaten by Feyenoord the year before and
that was almost the start of the Dutch revolution in
football," he told the official match programme.
"We then played Ajax in 1971 and they had won the
league that year, even though Feyenoord had won the
European Cup. The first game was quite tight in the
first half and then they scored their three goals,
"I was marking Cruyff and I think I did an okay job but he
scored their first goal and then set up their last one, which
came in the last minute, and that was the one which
strengthened their hold in the two legs.
"We won 1-0 at Hampden in the second-leg but they
then went on to win the European Cup. We had done well,
to a point, but what happens in Europe sometimes is that
a couple of bits of magic from guys like Cruyff can change
a game. We won the return leg 1-0 and we thought we
could have done better but three goals was too much of a
mountain to climb,
"Ajax went on to win the European Cup three times in
a row after that so that was the start of it all." B
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