CELTIC players, management and directors decided a little extra was needed when they marked the club’s centenary in 1988. It wasn’t enough merely to honour the founders and the very first Celtic team; they had to look like them, too.
There was much hilarity, wrote Evening Times sportswriter Alan Davidson, as the new look took shape in the dressing-room, watched by cleaning ladies and ground-staff boys. The players looked amazed as replicas of the club’s original kit was produced: calf-length knickerbockers, baggy shirts and ankle-length boots.
A team from Wildcat Theatre smeared copious amounts of Brylcreem onto the players’ hair then, with a flourish, affixed moustaches onto their upper lips - moustaches that, as Davidson observed, “Lord Kitchener would have been proud to sport.” The photograph shows Roy Aitken and Paul McStay as players from 1888.
“In a million ways,” said manager Billy McNeill, “I am a traditionalist, and it is a source of great pride to me and the current playing-staff that we at this club are part of something great that was formed one hundred years ago.”
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