Craig Brown has remembered Jock Stein as a “legend” and spoken of his deep admiration for his achievements. On the 25th anniversary of Stein’s passing, the Motherwell manager recalled the attributes that made Stein one of Scotland’s greatest ever managers.
“He was never Jock Stein to me and to all our players, he was Mr Stein,” Brown said. “Everyone called him Mr Stein. I hear Billy McNeill, his famous captain, talks about Jock occasionally but even he refers to him a lot as Mr Stein.”
“I trained as a young boy at Celtic and he was the youth coach. He took us for training and since then, he always remembered every one of us.
“When we went further in our careers to other places, any time he met you he would say ‘I see you were doing this and I see you were doing that’. He had a wonderful memory.”
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Stein’s success, leading Celtic to nine successive league titles and winning the European Cup in 1967 with a team of home-grown players, was an inspiration to others, Brown said. The former Scotland manager said that having the opportunity to learn from Stein was crucial to those who followed in his footsteps.
“In a football context, he had a photographic memory,” Brown recalled. “He didn’t need a camera to tell the players at half-time everything that had happened in that first half. The only other manager I’ve heard like that is Sir Alex Ferguson.
“Jock Stein had a terrific memory, terrific knowledge and was a wonderful gentleman to everyone in Scotland who had anything to do with him.
“He used to come to the coaching courses to talk to us at Largs and we were hanging on his every word because he was such a legend. In my mind, he still is a legend, the legend of Scottish football.”
Brown said that lifting European club football’s biggest prize remains an astonishing feat. No manager has won the trophy with a Scottish club since and the Motherwell manager says that even if they did, it would be impossible to achieve with the same resources.
“It was the European Cup then, not the Champions League where you get three or four teams from one country,” he said. “The champion team of each country competed and Celtic, with a team from a 30-mile radius of Glasgow, won that. It means the man was absolutely immortal.
“You just can’t possibly conceive a situation like that ever arising, even then. But it did arise then and it will never happen again, that’s for sure. So that makes him absolutely unique in football management and as a fine guy, a gentleman.
“He was a down-to-earth, humble, hard, honest, wonderful example of a football manager.“
