I’d played against Jack Charlton a few times before for the Scottish league select and every time I played against him I always did well.
A lot of younger people remember him as the Ireland manager, but I see him as England’s centre-half. He played regularly for England, but for whatever reason, I always played well against him. He was a tall man and was great in the air, but he was fairly mobile and he could put it about.

He was a top-class centre back, but it was just one of these things, I was able to play well against him. I have met him a few times since then, but we have never spoken about that match, I don’t think it would be fair to bring back bad memories.

I loved the European nights. Half-an-hour before our games kicked off, there were 70,000 people in the stadium, all of them singing.
The atmosphere on European nights was phenomenal. Then, when we went away from home, it was an adventure. We were all just young boys from Coatbridge and Bellshill and we were all heading off together. The furthest we had been before then was Saltcoats for our holidays! We were just a big bunch of raw laddies. They were the games you looked forward to and loved to play in. Looking back, I enjoyed almost every one of them, especially the ones we won. But the Leeds game was my favourite.

Wee Jimmy Johnstone destroyed Terry Cooper over the two legs.
He was supposed to be one of England’s top full-backs at the time, but Jimmy didn’t just beat him, he completely destroyed him. There is footage of the game, but that doesn’t give you the complete picture of just how bad a beating wee Jimmy gave him. It’s remembered as one of Jimmy’s great performances, but it was a great performance from the team. All I can say is that if you look at the press cuttings from before the game, we were completely dismissed, not given any chance in the slightest, but we then went and beat them at their own ground, came back to Glasgow and beat them again.

It was probably one of Celtic’s best performances, although it’s hard for me to explain just how good it was. They were regarded by most people as the top team, not just in England, but in Europe at that time. Every player in their starting XI was an internationalist, but all of us played well. But that night at Hampden, Jimmy was incredible, like I said, he destroyed Cooper. Terry Cooper actually wanted to go off, he’d been turned inside out and beaten all ways, he was tremendous. That actually helps the team enormously, when someone beats a player that badly, but Terry Cooper shouldn’t feel that bad, Jimmy did that to a lot of players.

Once he got on a roll he could beat a player any way he liked and you could actually see players thinking, ‘what do I have to do here?’ Sometimes he was that good, people couldn’t even kick him, when he was in that form, you just couldn’t beat him. Every time he got the ball he was magical.

When the final whistle sounded that night the crowd were going off their heads.
The roar that went up was incredible. We went wild as well, because what a result it was, it was incredible. Sadly, it was over 40 years ago and some of the memories fade. I really can’t put my finger on certain things that happened, but I can still remember the noise, it was unbelievable. I didn’t swap shirts with anyone after the match, it wasn’t something we really did back then. Afterwards it is just a haze. We would certainly have gone somewhere, we usually did after big matches, but I am afraid I can’t remember where.

When I look back on the game today I am proud to have played a part in such a great team performance.
I was at Celtic Park the other week for a couple of games and was speaking to the lads about this and it’s amazing that people still talk about games like this after all this time. I don’t think that there is another group of players in Celtic’s history that get that special attention as well. It perhaps helps that most of us were Scots and were born and brought up so close to the stadium. I think, with the finances and the way the game has gone today, that it would take an absolute miracle for that to happen again. We loved the club and the supporters as well, we had a special rapport with the supporters, mainly because we were supporters ourselves.

European Cup Semi-Final Second Leg
Hampden Park, Glasgow
April 15, 1970

CELTIC… 2
(Hughes 47, Murdoch 51)

LEEDS UNITED… 1
(Bremner 14)

CELTIC Williams, Hay, Gemmell, Murdoch, McNeill, Brogan, Johnstone, Connelly, Hughes, Auld, Lennox.

LEEDS UNITED Sprake (Harvey 48), Madeley, Cooper, Bremner, Charlton, Hunter, Lorimer, Clarke, Jones (Bates 70), Giles, Gray.

Attendance: 136,505

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John 'Yogi' Hughes' favourite game as a Celt