And then there were three. The death of John Clark, announced today, leaves only three surviving members of Celtic’s Lisbon Lions, the greatest ever club team in the history of UK football. Those who witnessed their triumphs in the late 1960s will tell you that Mr Clark was perhaps the quietest and least flamboyant of them all. Yet, he was a vital member of this gallus football team which overpowered the best clubs in Europe with the force of their personality as well as by their formidable playing ability.

Yet, when you glimpse old footage from some of the matches in which he played, it was easy to imagine that he’d have excelled in the modern version of football, where attributes such as ‘game intelligence’, spatial awareness and building the play carefully from the back are much more prized than they were then.

Mr Clark’s death and the memories it evokes from that era also recall a period when Scotland could reasonably lay claim to being one of the top five leagues in world football for the quality of its players and their success in European competition.

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While Celtic were becoming the first British club to win the European Champions Cup, their great city rivals, Rangers were being narrowly defeated by Bayern Munich in the final of the European Cup Winners Cup. Bayern would provide the nucleus of the mighty West Germany squad who would win the European Championship in 1972 and the World Cup in 1974. Until 2018 when Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid lifted Europe’s two main trophies, Glasgow in 1967 had come closest.

In an 18-year period until 1974, Rangers also........

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