The Wee Prime Minister

[chilledbear 16]

One of my all time favourites, a son of Airdrie.

 

Click the link to see the full interview from May last year.

 

http://www.scotsman.com/sport/football/spfl-lower-divisions/interview-ian-mcmillan-airdrie-director-and-former-rangers-and-airdrie-forward-1-2319440

 

 

 

Interview: Ian McMillan, Airdrie director and former Rangers and Airdrie forward

 

Ian McMillan remains a director of Airdrie United aged 81. Picture: Robert Perry

by ALAN PATTULLO

Published on the

26 May

2012

00:00

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RELUCTANT star reflects on an enduring bond with Airdrie and life as a part-timer at Ibrox

 

The McMillan family is deep into Olympic countdown mode as the days tick down to the Great Britain women hockey side’s first appointment, at the end of July. Ian McMillan, formerly of Airdrie and Rangers, is the grandfather of Laura Bartlett, one of only two Scots in the squad. He clearly believes she should be the focus of any attention, rather than his octogenarian self.

 

This, however, is the Wee Prime Minister’s own question time. For any sports writer, an hour or so in the company of someone renowned for being one of Scottish football’s gentlemen is a dream assignment. In this version of PMQs there is no braying from across the room to have to endure either, only the pleasant hum of background chatter emitted by McMillan’s golfing crowd, who meet at the Airdrie Golf club each week to put to the world to rights.

 

McMillan himself is slightly anxious. He is concerned that he has not got enough to say, and that, at age 81, no-one will want to read about what his views on the game any longer. He fears he is as relevant to present day football as Harold Macmillan is to contemporary politics. His near-namesake’s occupancy of No 10 Downing Street during the late 1950s and early 60s saw McMillan bestowed with his Wee Prime Minister moniker, one still employed by friends to this day.

 

Having listened to him, however, it is not hard to understand why he is still a director at Airdrie United, as well as honorary president. It would be considered gross negligence if his influence had been lost to the game, and to his hometown club in particular, where he has also served as ball boy, esteemed player, youth coach and, for six and-a-half years in the Seventies, as manager.

 

 

Sandy Clark, whose career started under McMillan at Airdrie, recalls never having heard the manager swear, something almost unheard of in professional football.

 

That’s not to say he was not sworn at. The notorious Airdrie crowd did not even spare their own, although McMillan, whose managerial tenure included a Texaco Cup final appearance against Derby County and a Scottish Cup final defeat to Celtic, never had it as bad as some. “Do you know the old Broomfield?” he asks. “You had to walk from the pavilion right the way up to the dug-out near the stand, and at half-time and full-time you had to walk all the way round, and if you were losing you would get slaughtered – quite rightly, because some of the games we played were not very clever.

 

“As a manager I got more abuse than as a player,” he adds. “One comment I always had a wee smile at was: ‘I think you should stick to playing McMillan!’”

 

That he appeared for Scotland at all is notable enough. McMillan was a part-time player all his days. While this was not so remarkable in his first ten years as an inside forward with Airdrie, it became something to marvel at as he continued to hold his own after a £10,000 move to Rangers. He was the sole part-time player in a side that reached the semi-finals of the European Cup in 1960. “They could have given me the cold shoulder, but they never did,” he says of his team-mates. “They were very welcoming.” He does concede that working as a chartered surveyor from Monday to Friday did tend to compromise his performances on a Saturday. Given that many Rangers fans of a certain vintage rate McMillan as one of the club’s most under-rated players, it’s possible to wonder just how good he could have been had he been able to train with his team-mates each day, rather than with the youths in the evening?

 

“I had to take wee rests occasionally,” he says. “That is what I maintain, if you are fit and able to do 90 minutes, then you can be a better player. And I think I could have been a better player. I only trained three nights a week as opposed to the others, who trained all week, so I had to rest occasionally in games. That was a fault.

 

“If I had been able to train a bit harder, then looking back I could have been a better player,” he continues. “I could have lasted the game longer, I could have been in the game more often.” He made a conscious decision to remain part-time, and it was the sensible one at the time. He had had two young daughters, Laura and Lesley. The latter is now the mother of Scottish hockey internationalist twins Laura and Kay Bartlett, while the former passed on some of her father’s footballing prowess to Iain, a striker with Livingston.

 

“I was 27 when I moved to Rangers, and I weighed up [whether to go full-time] and it was borderline,” McMillan continues. “If I had been 22 it would a different story. I would have gone full-time then. I had a young family, two wee girls. It was a big decision. I knew that I could get an injury, and be finished. My wife and I sat down and thought: well it is going not too bad the way it is, we will just carry on.”

 

Making things slightly easier was a job switch from one side of West Regent Street in Glasgow to the other. “John Lawrence, who was chairman at Ibrox at the time, asked me to come over and work for him, so I was able to get away for games in Europe,” he says. “Prior to that, it had been difficult.” McMillan was thus free to star in the Ibrox side’s run to the last four of the European Cup, where they came up against Eintracht Frankfurt.

 

“Our trouble was that even when we were abroad we played as if we were playing against Stirling Albion, we just kept going forward,” he recalls. “We were one each against Eintracht Frankfurt at half-time, but you could tell the writing was on the wall. They were a tremendous side. They ran over the top of us in the second-half, beating us 6-1, so the return leg was a bit of a non-event. We were a top side, and they whacked us 6-3 at Ibrox. I was interviewed on television afterwards, and they asked me how I thought Eintracht Frankfurt would do against Real Madrid in the final? Well after that experience, I said, I think they will beat Real Madrid!”

 

Of course, the aristocrats from Madrid defeated the Germans 7-3 at Hampden Park, in one of the best remembered games in football history. McMillan watched on from the stand at Hampden, where he had already made three appearances for Scotland as well as enduring a 7-2 away defeat to England at Wembley. Unusually perhaps, of the six caps he earned with Scotland, five were won out of Airdrie. However, he struggles to make playing for Scotland sound like a happy experience. “We didn’t get good results,” he says. “It was not really as enjoyable as playing with Airdrie, my local club. But Rangers was the best of the lot. Great players, they made it easy for you.”

 

Games against the amateurs of the United States and Denmark were the only ones he won, and McMillan sometimes wondered whether he belonged in such illustrious company as Lawrie Reilly and Gordon Smith. Reilly scored a hat-trick against the States that day at Hampden, in a match described as an “amusing interlude” in Andrew Ward’s Scotland – The Team.

 

Two goals for Scotland within the first ten minutes killed the game as a contest, and the score was 4-0 at half-time. Making a mockery of the self-doubt McMillan says he experienced with Scotland is the late Bob Crampsey’s recollection of the day. Writing in The Scotsman in 1998, the respected football historian noted that “the team that had won 6-0 was never picked again yet I invite you to look in particular at the right wing, Gordon Smith and McMillan, two of the purest footballers this country has produced.”

 

The US, whose centre-half Charlie Colombo wore leather gloves throughout the game, didn’t have a hope, despite an astounding 1-0 victory over England in the 1950 World Cup in Brazil. “They had played England, and beat them, we though oh oh, who do we have here?” remembers McMillan.

 

“We had not a clue about them. Because they had whacked England we thought we need to watch ourselves here. Maybe that was a good thing. If they hadn’t beaten them we might have come out and think it was toffee. If you think that, it can rebound on you.”

 

Still, it’s possible to detect from McMillan that he felt he didn’t belong in a Scotland jersey. “I moved from Airdrie to Rangers, not knowing what was ahead of me, worrying about going from a wee provincial club to a big club.

 

“I maybe had the wrong attitude. You have to be a bit like Jim Baxter was, a wee bit arrogant, a ‘nobody is like yourself’ sort of thing.

 

Instead, McMillan was the complete opposite to Baxter. “I had a slight inferiority complex,” he admits. “It’s not a good thing for a footballer.”

 

McMillan considers Baxter to be the best footballer he played with, but his complaint about his team-mate is a familiar one in that he feels he could have been even better. “I couldn’t believe what I heard he’d been up to on a Friday night when I turned up on the Saturday,” McMillan says.

 

Harold Davis, who played just behind him, is a different story. The Korea war veteran made the best of himself despite horrific wounds sustained in active service with the Black Watch. Recalls McMillan: “At the end of the game you would be in the big bath and you could see the scars on his tummy. You would think: ‘how is he able to full-time football at this level after what he went through?’ That’s the type of man he is. He used to encourage me, if things weren’t going well.

 

“I always maintain that, because he was behind me, I lasted longer at Rangers. Harold won all the balls for me, and I said to him: ‘Harold, I am fine if I get the ball in a bit of space. As soon as you win the ball, I will be looking for it right away’. And that’s how we operated.

 

“Football is all about movement, making space to get away from your opponent. I just needed a second, then I could get the ball under control and use it. That is what I was good at. I could get the ball and take men on and I had good vision, I could pass a decent ball. But I couldn’t header and I couldn’t tackle! I had deficiencies as well as one or two qualities.”

 

His lack of inches meant he relied on his wiles to escape the rough and tumble of the game at the time, and the lightness he displayed on his feet was perhaps partly attributable to the Italian-style football boot both he and Ralph Brand preferred to wear, to the great suspicion of manager Scot Symon. “It didn’t have that bulbous toe which was common at the time,” he says. “You could get the feel of the ball better.”

 

The knocks have, though, caught up with him, leading to a hip replacement 17 years ago which itself now needs replaced. The complaint, he believes, is a consequence of his preference for shielding the ball with what he refers to as his “largish bottom”, and which meant 18 years’ worth of heavy impacts from behind as defenders jostled for the ball.

 

It has curtailed his golf outings, but he will be fit enough to watch from the stands as his granddaughter plays in a second successive Olympic games, this time in a rather more convenient location than Beijing.

 

“I think I have been allocated a ticket,” he smiles, clearly proud that the Olympic ideals he espoused throughout his career – “to my mind there was nothing better, whether you had won or lost, than coming in after a hard game of football” – are still being upheld in a talented family.

[BrahimHemdani 1]

Ian McMillan was a very talented footballer who played in an outstanding Rangers team that won the Scottish Cup three years in a row 1962 - 64 and both legs of the 1961 Cup winners Cup Final (the only time it was played over two legs) as part of the legendary forward line: Scott, McMillan, Millar, Brand and Wilson. Subsequently Willie Henderson took over from Alex Scott on the RW.

 

He also scored the 5,000th goal at Ibrox v Raith Rovers; I was there

[BEARGER 1,829]

Also one of my favourite players, a footballer with a brain.

[Scott7 5,127]

Twenty minutes of McMillan worth more than ninety minutes of most others.

 

If there had been substitutes in those days would you play him from the start and take him off after an hour or would you wait 'til the opposition was a bit tired and then bring him on for the final destruction?

 

How I remember the slide rule passes for the flyer Scott to race onto. Moravzcyk the nearest comparison of modern times.

[barca72 440]

Baxter and McMillan, 4-2-4, before it was called 4-2-4. Those two were a treat to watch.

[BrahimHemdani 1]

Twenty minutes of McMillan worth more than ninety minutes of most others.

 

If there had been substitutes in those days would you play him from the start and take him off after an hour or would you wait 'til the opposition was a bit tired and then bring him on for the final destruction?

 

.

 

I would always play my best team from the start, that way you have the option of keeping them on or changing later as you suggest. If you leave one of your best players on the bench, you may never have the opportunity to bring him on, or only when it's too late.

[BrahimHemdani 1]

Baxter and McMillan, 4-2-4, before it was called 4-2-4. Those two were a treat to watch.

 

With Jimmy Millar playing slightly behind Ralph Brand as the "twin strikers" of the day; I will never forget the two late goals they scored in the '64 Cup Final against Dundee. When Jimmy Millar scored to put Rangers 2-1 up with a few minutes to go, a drunk beside me who couldn't see past the spectators in front said, "Is it a goal" to which I replied "Yes it's a goal". When Brand scored his second to put the result beyond doubt, he said "Is is another goal" and I replied "Yes, and we've won the cup".

[foggy dewhurst 0]

Henderson , M cmillan , Millar, Brand, and wee davie Wilson how much in the present day crazy prices would these gems cost .

[Scott7 5,127]

Cost of gems? Priceless.

 

That Dundee final was superb a football match. Dundee were terrific. Rangers a wee bit better than terrific although McMillan had finished by then.

[chilledbear 16]

Cost of gems? Priceless.

 

That Dundee final was superb a football match. Dundee were terrific. Rangers a wee bit better than terrific although McMillan had finished by then.

 

So many good Scottish footballers at the time and they were distributed throughout the Leagues. When you think of the ones in the top English teams, it's a scandal where Scottish football is at this time.

 

Little known fact, Henderson and McMillan didn't play that often together, probably a season and a half. It was mostly Alex Scott on the right with Ian inside.m