The original magnificent seven | OneFootball

Today, it’s hard to comprehend that two of the greatest occasions in the history of Celtic Football Club were only 10 years apart.

The latter of these arrived in the midst of the technicolour 1960s as the Summer of Love kicked off and, just to prove it, the videotape is there for all to see in glorious Greenorama and, standing out like beacons in the Lisbon sun, the green and white hoops have never looked quite so resplendent.

Flash back just 10 years previously and there is a feeling that you have been transported to another world – where a grimy, monochrome existence envelops all who inhabit these times.

The Beatles and the rest of 1967’s Swingin’ London set would have been earmarked as aliens by your average 1950s punter when the ration book was still a must-read in the first part of the decade and, for many, the term ‘Post War’ only meant that the bombs had stopped dropping while everything else stayed pretty much the same.

Amid all this relative degradation, for battle-weary Celtic supporters, there were rays of hope that pierced the grey skies now and then and on October 19, 1957, the clouds rolled back to unleash a surge of radiance so bright it blinded one half of Glasgow – or at least the defence representing one half of Glasgow.

Unlike 10 years later though when everything was beamed live into the home and was also captured in colour, the technology of the time failed, aided and abetted by supposed human error, to truthfully capture the moment and it’s only recently that grainy black and white images of the day have been unearthed.

And, thank God for that as there were those of us who were beginning to wonder if a certain 7-1 game ever happened at all

Still, the grey and white hoops have never looked quite so resplendent…

Flash forward to today and both of those games are still revered by the Celtic faithful but, sadly, both of the only two Celts directly involved in both matches have departed.

The two men in question are Celtic legends Neilly Mochan and Sean Fallon who both played in the historic 7-1 League Cup final win over Rangers in 1957 and, 10 years later, took their places on the bench as Jock Stein’s Celts changed the entire course of the club’s history when the Bhoys beat Inter Milan 2-1 to become the first British team to lift the European Cup.

All that seemed an eternity away as season 1957/58 kicked off and the new-fangled European Cup seemed the sole property of Real Madrid who already won the first two tournaments.

The previous season, Celtic’s hopes of winning the slightly older but still reasonably new-fangled League Cup seemed just as distant, indeed, lowly East Fife were proving to be Los Galacticos of the competition with three wins to the two wins of both Dundee and Rangers while Motherwell, Hearts and Aberdeen had also chipped in with a win each.

It took until the 11th tournament for Celtic to win the trophy – they had previously struggled to even qualify from the section in the early years of the competition.

That win came against Partick Thistle as the Celts beat the Maryhill Magyars 3-0 after a 0-0 draw and they defied the odds the following season by reaching the final once more…

There was more than a little trepidation though as this time the opponents were a rampant Rangers side featuring such Ibrox luminaries as Bobby Shearer, and Eric Caldow.

The reigning champions though had already been beaten the Celts 3-2 on the Southside in the league just a month before the League Cup final and many wondered if that game would be as good a barometer of the outcome as any.

On the other side of the coin though, Celtic hadn’t beaten Rangers in the league since a 2-0 win in the first home game of season 1954/55.

As it turned out, that league encounter turned out to be a pretty faulty gauge in predicting the outcome of the final as Celtic completely overturned their Glasgow rivals in an astonishing 7-1 roasting that has quite rightly gone down in history.

At the time, Rangers were the dominant force in Scottish football while Celtic enjoyed occasional successes amidst regular disappointment.

Yet, when the final whistle blew at Hampden that day, it was the Hoops who emerged triumphant and with a margin of victory that had never been seen before, or even since, in a British domestic cup final.

‘CELTIC 7 RANGERS 1’ … It was a scoreline that almost defied belief. Supporters listening to their radios wondered whether they’d misheard the announcer, while those stopping to pick up a copy of the Saturday evening paper could be forgiven for thinking there had been a misprint in the headline.

As for those Celtic supporters among the 82,293 who were at Hampden that day … they could only thank their lucky stars that they had been able to witness such a momentous event.

No doubt for many years to come they would regale every family function with tales of that day, from Sammy Wilson’s opening goal to Willie Fernie’s penalty in the last minute to complete the scoring.

And in between, there was Neilly Mochan’s two goals and Billy McPhail’s hat-trick.

The team which faced Rangers that day: Beattie, Donnelly, Fallon, Fernie, Evans, Peacock, Tully, Collins, McPhail, Wilson, Mochan – would, in terms of results, only be eclipsed by the aforementioned Celtic team 10 years later who triumphed on the European stage.

But they still remain an important part of the club’s history, even 68 years on. Songs have been sung in praise of their achievement, books have been written and ‘Hampden in the sun’ is a phrase forever associated with that wonderful October day in 1957.