CQN continues its EXCUSIVE extracts from Alex Gordon’s book. ‘That Season In Paradise’, in the historic campaign in which Celtic swept all before them as they conquered Europe.
MYTHS and reality have gone hand-in-hand as willing, if unusual, partners in the world of football since the first pig’s bladder was booted around a village somewhere back in time. It is widely believed Jock Stein bought Joe McBride for £22,000 shortly after gathering his breath following the trailblazing Scottish Cup Final triumph over Dunfermline. Not so. In fact, McBride didn’t sign on the dotted line for his boyhood idols until June 5, fully forty-one days after the Hampden epic.
It had nothing to do with the centre-forward swithering about joining Celtic or trying to squeeze an extra fiver out of the Parkhead coffers with Dunfermline willing to pay considerably more for the player they had earmarked as the ready-made successor to fill Alex Ferguson’s No.9 shirt. With Joe McBride involved, you could be certain there would be no such acts of skullduggery. However, with continued reports of his boyhood favourites, following a puzzling and interminable delay, showing an interest, he had tabled a transfer request at the end of the 1964/65 league season and Motherwell were prepared to sell their top asset.
The truth of the matter is simple; the barrel-chested frontman was persuaded to stay at Fir Park for a little longer with the club involved in the revived, but ultimately short-lived, Summer Cup tournament. Ironically, Jock Stein had masterminded Hibs’ win in the competition the previous year when the Edinburgh outfit defeated Aberdeen 3-1 in the play-off decider after a 4-4 stalemate following the two-legged Final.
Motherwell had gone thirteen years without a major trophy success – they had won the Scottish Cup in 1952 when they overcame Dundee 4-2 – and they had reached the home-and-away Final of the ill-fated tourney that endured for only two years. They hammered holders Hibs 6-4 on aggregate in the semi-final and were due to face Dundee United, with the first meeting at Fir Park scheduled for Saturday May 29 and the return at Tannadice in midweek. McBride led the Lanarkshire line-up to a 3-1 home victory and, although United won 1-0 on Tayside, the Fir Parkers just edged it 3-2 on aggregate.
So, on June 2 1965, the Motherwell fans had something to celebrate following an end to their favourites’ prolonged and barren years and, three days later, McBride became Jock Stein’s first signing for Celtic. As is often the quirky manner in the beautiful game, Alex Ferguson withdrew his transfer request, remained at Dunfermline and was joint top league scorer with thirty-one goals at the end of the 1965/66 season alongside…Joe McBride.
During the summer, Jock Stein was ruthless as he plotted to build on the Scottish Cup success. He wanted to work with a smaller first team squad and over twenty youth players were shown the door at Parkhead. Big Jock wouldn’t have lost a wink of sleep after being involved in such a dramatic cull of young talent.
Davie Hay recalls, ‘I think I might have been Big Jock’s first signing for the club. He took over in March and I arrived a month later. Prior to that, however, I had been asked to train at Celtic on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Coming from Paisley, I was a St Mirren fan, but there was no looking back when Celtic came calling. Tommy Docherty attempted to take me to Chelsea and made an excellent offer. However, it was always going to be Celtic for me. As I arrived, one of the first things I noticed was that Big Jock was pruning the playing staff. He wanted the coaches to concentrate on smaller groups of players.
He reckoned they should spend more time with certain individuals and, of course, it worked. I was lucky enough to get the nod. Many of our group were allowed to move on and, if fortune had smiled on them, they might have gone on to do wonderful things at Parkhead. Jim Holton, for instance, trained with Celtic while I was there. He was a big, raw centre-half, but he wasn’t taken on. Jim went to West Bromwich Albion, kick-started his career, spent a year at Shrewsbury and was signed by Tommy Docherty for Manchester United in 1972. He was also a team-mate in the Scottish team in the World Cup Finals in West Germany two years later that returned home unbeaten, the first nation to be knocked out without losing a game. Jim was proof a few will slip through the net. No-one is going to realise the potential in every youngster, that’s just not possible. Some take longer to mature than others. Some can bloom overnight after struggling for so long. It just happens.’
As Stein looked to the future, Hay, of course, arrived alongside side the likes of Kenny Dalglish, Danny McGrain, Lou Macari, George Connelly, Vic Davidson and Paul Wilson, an eager bunch of skillful teenagers who earned the nickname ‘The Quality Street Gang’. The Celtic manager’s immediate target in the close season in 1965, though, was the Scottish First Division Championship. Conquering Europe was not in his thoughts; not at that point, anyway.
Interestingly, Celtic kicked off their nine-in-a-row championship-winning surge with their smallest squad of players in years with only nineteen full-timers and nine part-timers with only two groundstaff as back-up.
To bolster the squad, Stein turned his attention to the exotic and intriguing Brazilian market. Ayrton Ignacio and Marco di Sousa, inside-forwards from Sao Paulo, were jetted in for a two-month trial period. Another two exciting prospects, Jorge Farah and Fernando Consul, were being lined up to join them at the Scottish Cup winners. It was no gimmick, as many sceptics glibly claimed. In the late fifties and early sixties, a fair percentage of South American talent – mainly from Brazil and Argentina – made its way to Italy. However, a transfer embargo halted the influx and Italian club sides were limited to a certain number of foreign signings. Agents, mainly based in Portugal, were forced to look elsewhere to place their clients in Europe. Jock Stein, always innovative, tapped into the market in the hope they might have something to offer Celtic.
I watched Ignacio and Di Sousa in a reserve game against Motherwell at Parkhead – over 11,300 fans turned out that evening – and, from the little knowledge I had of football, I was hugely impressed by Ignacio. He scored a bewildering, swerving right-foot shot from an angle that almost tore a hole in the net and, at the age of thirteen, I left the stadium that evening convinced Big Jock had unearthed ‘the new Pele’ for Celtic. Didn’t happen that way, of course, but it was a gamble worth taking.
Celtic’s record in the league since winning the title in 1954 was nothing short of diabolical. Jock Stein must have been alarmed at the lack of belief and conviction among the players he had just inherited. Even Billy McNeill accepted the club’s best chance of success would be in a knock-out competition rather than the marathon that was the league.
‘We were ambitious enough as a set of players,’ said the club legend. ‘We were realistic, as well. Most years, by the time January was out, we were nowhere to be seen, as far as the league was concerned. That was when our focus would be diverted to the Scottish Cup. Winning that competition was a major deal back then, probably a lot more so than it is today. We discovered that fact in 1965, of course. We finished a lamentable eighth in the table, winning only sixteen of our thirty-four games. And, even with Big Jock behind us, we had horrible results like losing 5-1 to Dunfermline at East End Park only days after the Cup Final and there was also a ridiculous 6-2 loss against Falkirk at Brockville on the countdown to Hampden. Yet, after our victory over the Fifers, our supporters celebrated all the way through the summer. Our abominable form in the league wasn’t mentioned.
‘However, the Boss changed our mindset. In his typical blunt, forthright manner, he gathered the squad around him one morning at Barrowfield before the campaign kicked off and told us, “Right, listen. Every team is at the top of the league at the moment. No-one has won, no-one has drawn, no-one has lost. We’re all lining up together for a very long race and we’ve got to believe we will be first at the end. Celtic Football Club is all about winners. Let’s not be standing here this time next year talking about chasing others; we want them chasing us.” You could say Big Jock got his message across. Suddenly, we realised that the odd Cup success every now and again was never going to be acceptable to Jock Stein. He was looking for us to become the dominant force in the country. As a matter of fact, he was insisting on it.’
Joe McBride was ready for the challenge, determined and anxious to make up for time scoring goals for other teams elsewhere. It had taken him eight years as a professional – and 115 league goals for five different teams on both sides of the border – before he was invited to take his sledgehammer skills to the east end of Glasgow. He made his debut in the unlikely surroundings of a tiny football stadium in the Isle of Man in a Benefit Match for the Society for Handicapped Children. The game was played against Motherwell in a virtual downpour on a Wednesday afternoon on July 28 in front of 2,500 fans. It wasn’t the most memorable baptism for McBride and it ended in the twelfth minute after a clash of heads with his former team-mate John Martis.
Stein might have wondered about the wisdom of taking only fourteen players – including two goalkeepers – for the flight that morning to the holiday island. Stevie Chalmers replaced McBride and, in fact, netted the late equaliser after Ian Thomson had given the Fir Parkers an unlikely lead. Before the end, Bertie Auld limped off with a thigh pull and Johnny Divers came on in his place. Thankfully, the match came to a halt before substitute keeper Ronnie Simpson was invited to display his outfield talent.
Normal service was resumed in the next friendly encounter, a meeting with Shamrock Rovers at Dalymount Park where Joe McBride walloped in his first hat-trick for the club as they thrashed their opponents 7-0. A crowd of 10,000 took in the action and, so typical of McBride’s run-until-I-drop unselfish attitude, he was still battling away until two minutes from the end when he completed his trio. Bobby Lennox (2), Charlie Gallagher and John Hughes were the others to get on the scoresheet. The players didn’t have to raise their game above a canter in Dublin and must have expected a more testing confrontation when they arrived at Roker Park four days later to take on a Sunderland side that had just paid £90,000 – a huge fee in those days – for Rangers’ left-half Jim Baxter.
The elegant, ball-playing Fifer boasted an excellent record against Celtic while performing on the other half of Glasgow’s Great Divide, but that meant nothing on this occasion. John Hughes, in particular, was in the mood and ran amok while playing through the middle. Yogi thumped two efforts behind Scottish keeper Sandy McLaughlin while Joe McBride, Bobby Lennox and Bobby Murdoch piled on the agony in a 5-0 landslide. The blase Baxter had sallied and sauntered through one-sided Glasgow derbies to maximum effect in the past while the Ibrox fans taunted their Celtic counterparts on far too many uncomfortable occasions. This time, though, the chants of ‘Easy! Easy! Easy!’ were reserved for Sunderland’s record signing who, by the way, just happened to be a very good friend of Billy McNeill.
It wasn’t long before McBride’s dream was shattered. Due to knee and ankle injuries sustained on Wearside, his competitive debut appearance had been delayed until the third game of the League Cup, the tournament which was utilised to spearhead the new season back then. Celtic had kicked off the competition with a 2-1 loss to Dundee United at Tannadice which prompted Jock Stein to say, ‘We can do better. We know that and we will be trying to prove that when we play Motherwell on Wednesday. However, we’re not blind here. We were beaten by a good team and the Dundee United players deserve credit for doing so well.’
In midweek at Parkhead, Stein watched his side scrape their way to an unimpressive 1-0 win over Motherwell. Stevie Chalmers led the line on both occasions, but had failed to score – Bertie Auld and Johnny Divers had been the marksmen in the respective games – and Stein took the opportunity to replace him with a fully-fit McBride. Dundee, with a strong line-up, arrived in Glasgow on August 21 and went home with a 2-0 victory, Kenny Cameron scoring both goals in the space of nine second-half minutes
Tommy Gemmell played that day. He remembered, ‘That defeat actually gave us a well-deserved boot up the backside. We hadn’t performed well and we couldn’t argue that Dundee deserved their win. As you might expect, Big Jock was fuming. He was eager to start the new season the way we had finished the previous one and that meant winning a trophy and, of course, the League Cup was the first one up for grabs. And, yet, we had started with two defeats in three games and we weren’t too convincing in our win over Motherwell, either. It was fairly obvious we had to get our collective finger out. And fast!’
Rather bizarrely, the powers-that-be dictated the Scottish First Division should not kick off on a Saturday, but, instead, moved the opening fixtures to Wednesday August 25. Celtic were due to begin the campaign with a trip to Tannadice to take on a Dundee United side that had actually finished the previous league season one point adrift of the Glasgow outfit. They had been good enough, though, to inflict an opening-day League Cup defeat on Celtic and were confident of registering more punishment on their rivals. From nowhere, Celtic began firing on all cylinders. They eased their way to a 4-0 success with Johnny Divers scoring the first goal in the memorable procession to nine successive championship victories. He netted early on, but the loudest cheer from the travelling fans was reserved for the fifty-second minute when new boy Joe McBride slammed a pass from Stevie Chalmers, in for Jimmy Johnstone on the right wing, past keeper Donald Mackay from twelve yards. Four minutes later, Ian Young, a steady and dependable right-back, slotted in a penalty-kick after Bobby Lennox had been downed and Tommy Gemmell, the cavalier left-back, rifled in a twenty-yarder in the sixty-fifth minute to complete the scoring. It was a remarkable transformation in the space of only eleven days on Tayside.
A local sports reporter was moved to write, ‘There was a champagne quality about the play of this latest Celtic blend. Victory was the product of teamwork and they were an impressive balance of speed, skill and spirit. The Parkhead forwards, backed by a defence that moved swiftly out of retreat, performed with a directness that eventually told on their opponents.’ Praise indeed. So, it was one down and thirty-three to go in pursuit of the club’s first Scottish crown in twelve years.
The following Saturday, though, it was back to the League Cup and the crazy soccer calendar saw Dundee United provide the opposition for the third time in a fortnight. John Hughes, the juggernaut forward blessed with almost balletic balance, had missed the start of the season due to a suspension held over from the previous campaign, but Stein wasted no time in thrusting the powerhouse raider straight into the first team as soon as he was available. Big Yogi, playing on the left wing, was unstoppable. Celtic were already two goals ahead with efforts from Ian Young, via another penalty-kick, and Stevie Chalmers when the game was petering out with only three minutes left on the clock. And that represented plenty of time for Joe McBride to double his competitive goal haul for the club. Chalmers set it up with a speedy run and deft pass and the centre-forward touched the ball to one side of the outrushing goalkeeper, Donald Mackay, as he went the other to catch up with it before rolling it over the line.
Jock Stein declared himself ‘satisfied’ with the win. However, he added, ‘We have to remember there are two halves to a football match. I couldn’t fault the lads in the first-half, but I feel they eased up a little after the interval. The fans come here and pay their money to see ninety minutes’ worth of football and I’ll be reminding the players of that fact.’ The words were accompanied by a stern expression. Clearly, gone were the days when a Celtic manager would complacently accept a victory under any circumstances.
Unfortunately, McBride had taken a knock against the Tannadice outfit and was forced to miss the return League Cup encounter against his former side Motherwell at Fir Park. Celtic went into the tie in the realisation that a win would put them on top of their section. They duly got their two points, but they made heavy weather of the task. John Hughes took over McBride’s duties in the middle of the attack and scored a penalty-kick in a 3-2 triumph. Bobby Lennox claimed the others. Jock Stein’s men had a one-point advantage over Dundee United, Dundee and Motherwell going into the sixth and final group stage game.
Dundee, after their 2-0 stroll in Glasgow in Joe McBride’s debut, stood between Celtic and a quarter-final place. Hughes switched again to the left wing to accommodate the fit-again McBride and Big Yogi once more put on a spectacular show with an astonishing solo goal in the team’s excellent 3-1 success at Dens Park. Celtic were already leading with an eleventh-minute effort from Johnny Divers when Hughes ignited the 28,000 crowd and decimated the Dundee defence when he latched onto a pass, nimbly raced away from international right-back Alex Hamilton and, with a posse of opponents chasing after him, simply thundered an unstoppable thirty-yard drive that clattered into the net before keeper Ally Donaldson had a clue what was going on. Andy Penman pulled one back before the interval, but it was that man McBride who again applied the killer touch with a strike five minutes from time. Hughes and Chalmers combined and McBride, like any self-respecting goal thief, was unmarked when the ball came into the penalty area and, from close range, he nodded it beyond the exposed Donaldson.
Joe McBride’s mantra was simple. ‘I leave the Fancy Dan stuff to guys such as Jinky and Yogi. I concentrate on doing what I think I do best and that is scoring goals. When I see the whites of the goalposts the other guys know they are wasting their time shouting for a pass, it’s just not going to happen. The way I figure it is simple. I just let fly and try to make sure I get my effort on target. Look, I can have my back to goal when I receive the ball, but I will know where the goal is, those frames don’t move. So, if I’m doing my job properly, I should at least make the keeper work. I won’t always hit the target, of course, but that is always my ambition. And if I don’t score and the keeper fumbles the ball, then we’ve got nippy, alert players such as Bobby Lennox and Stevie Chalmers who are sure to punish him. Jock Stein didn’t buy me to set up goals. He bought me to score goals. That’s my game and he laid it on the line when he paid a fair chunk of money for me. If I continue to score goals, I know I’ve got a reasonable opportunity of staying in the team.’
McBride, in fact, made a total of twenty-four appearances on the journey to the turn of the year. With McBride leading the line, Celtic won twenty-one games, drew two and lost one – the striker’s debut against Dundee. Just as impressive was the goal return from Jock Stein’s historic first purchase for Celtic; McBride clubbed in twenty-four goals, averaging one-per-game, as he single-mindedly went about his business. He fired in fifteen in fourteen league games – failing to score in only three – as well as seven goals in seven League Cup-ties. missing out on two occasions, and twice in three European Cup-Winners’ Cup confrontations, lapsing only in the second round return leg against Aarhus when Celtic won 2-0 in Glasgow after McBride had claimed the only goal of the first tie in Denmark.
Remarkably, McBride scored in five successive League Cup encounters after drawing a blank against the Dens men at the start of the adventure. He had missed the 2-1 defeat against Rangers in the league earlier in the season with an ankle injury, but he was fit for the League Cup Final against his club’s oldest foes at Hampden on October 22 – ludicrously only five days after Celtic had beaten Hibs 4-0 in the semi-final replay on a sea of mud at Ibrox. If Jock Stein’s men were supposed to be tired following their exertions against a very good Easter Road side, their fatigue wasn’t obvious against the Ibrox outfit.
Two John Hughes penalty-kicks had Celtic 2-0 ahead at the interval. The first award was for an obvious handball from centre-half Ronnie McKinnon for no apparent reason as a long cross was sailing out of play for a goal-kick. Yogi tucked it away as keeper Billy Ritchie, diving to his right, went the wrong way. Number two came shortly afterwards when the little bundle of tricks that was Jimmy Johnstone was flattened by an anxious left-back, Davie Provan. There was a little piece of brinksmanship from Ritchie as Hughes ran up to take the kick. The goalie swiftly removed his cap and threw it into the corner of his goal. It mattered not a jot as Yogi blasted the ball to his right. Ritchie got a hand to it, but the sheer velocity of the drive carried it into the net.
Years later, I mentioned the little bit of gameship from his Old Firm opponent. Had it put him off, I wondered? In typical Yogi fashion, he returned with a deadpan expression, ‘I didn’t even notice. He could have been swinging from the crossbar for all I cared. I just wanted to hit the ball with everything I had and get it on target.’
There was a scare near the end when right-back Ian Young, under pressure from John Greig, diverted a header beyond the startled Ronnie Simpson, but there was no way back for the team who saw the Cup wrenched from their grasp and removed from their trophyroom to find a new home across the Clyde. Joe McBride celebrated his first piece of silverware with his new team-mates in a Glasgow hotel later that evening and probably wasn’t too perturbed that he hadn’t scored on the occasion of his Old Firm baptism; Celtic, after all, had won the League Cup and that was the main objective.
What would most certainly have concerned him would have been the knowledge he would play against the age-old rivals on another seven occasions and never know the joy of thumping the ball into the Rangers net.
Years later, McBride said, ‘I was unlucky I didn’t score against Rangers in a Celtic jersey. I did for the reserves, but never in the eight games for the first team. We won six of those games, drew one and lost one and I didn’t get a solitary goal. I was reminded often I had failed while wearing the green-and-white hoops, but my answer was that I didn’t need to score a goal because my mates took care of that task. Having said that, I would have loved to have scored for Celtic against Rangers. It just wasn’t to be.’
The next Glasgow derby was schedule for January 2 at Parkhead, only twenty-four hours after the first league game of 1966 against Clyde at Shawfield where Celtic won 3-1 and McBride took his goalscoring form into an exciting new year with two strikes. Rangers were destroyed 5-1 in the east end of Glasgow on a bitterly cold afternoon with the action taking place on a sparkling white, flint-hard surface. The visitors scored in only ninety seconds when a whiplash effort from Davie Wilson skidded in front of the diving Ronnie Simpson and found a place in the far corner of his net. Remarkably, despite an onslaught on Billy Ritchie’s goal, that effort still separated the teams at half-time.
It’s now imbedded in Celtic folklore what happened after the turnaround. John Hughes put it this way in his autobiography, ‘Yogi Bare’. He reflected, ‘As ever, Big Jock had something to say in the seclusion of our dressing room at the interval. Like the rest of us, he was not happy. “This is more important than a Cup Final,” he observed. “This is the league championship. Win this and they’ll never catch us. Get out there and get the job done.”
‘We had forty-five minutes to change things around. I spotted a pair of discarded white training shoes lying in the corner. They had suction pads and were used for training indoors. I think they were Billy McNeill’s gear, I’m not sure. I had been wearing rubber studs in the first-half and they were as useful as a chocolate fireguard. I decided to give the other shoes a try and, thankfully, they fitted. What had I to lose? Kai Johansen, the Rangers right-back, would have been more than delighted with his performance up to that point. I had to give him something else to think about. I discarded my normal boots and replaced them with the shoes. Could they make a difference? We would find out soon enough.
‘The game was merely four minutes into the second-half when I combined with Tommy Gemmell and our left-back sent a dangerous low cross into the Rangers penalty area. Joe McBride dummied the ball and that was just perfect for someone with the speed and courage of Stevie Chalmers. He darted into the danger area and turned the ball past Billy Ritchie. Game on!
‘I was beginning to get into my stride on the left wing. The shoes were doing their job and definitely helped me maintain my poise and balance when I was running with the ball. Suddenly I was leaving Johansen in my slipstream. My pace was beginning to tell and he was mistiming his tackles. Thirteen minutes after the equaliser, we were ahead. It was Stevie again with a header from a left-wing corner-kick. Rangers were on the ropes and we knew it. So, too, did they. Time to go for the jugular and finish them off.
‘Seven minutes later, I got away from Johansen again and saw Charlie Gallagher taking up a great position about twenty-five yards out. Charlie could strike a beautiful ball, that was undoubtedly his forte. He wasn’t a tackler, but Charlie had other strengths. He was a lovely passer of the ball to unlock the meanest of defences and he could hit a shot with a lot of venom, too. I beat another couple of defenders before looking up to make sure Charlie was still unmarked and slipped the ball as expertly as I could in front of him. Charlie simply lashed an unstoppable drive in the direction of Ritchie’s goal. The ball exploded against the underside of the crossbar before bouncing down over the line. The Rangers keeper didn’t move a muscle.
‘The fourth goal in the seventy-ninth minute from Bobby Murdoch was a collector’s item. Not because of the awesome power and flawless accuracy from our midfielder; he displayed those qualities often enough in an exceptional career. No, it was the role referee Tiny Wharton played in it. Jimmy Johnstone and Gallagher combined on the right before Charlie sent the ball across the Rangers defence about twenty-five yards out. The pass was actually heading straight for Tiny when he suddenly opened his legs and let the ball go through them. It was a consummate dummy any pro would have been proud to claim. Bobby read it perfectly and hit a devastating left-foot drive that almost took the net away. I have watched a video rerun of that game and I was hugely impressed by Billy Ritchie. He was left lying on the brick-hard surface, beaten for the fourth time, the game lost and, amazingly, he got to his knees and applauded Murdoch. That didn’t often happen in the heat of an Old Firm duel, but it did display the keeper’s unbelievable sportsmanship.
‘It was all over for the Ibrox side when I moved the ball over from the left. Wee Jinky got involved and the ball dropped perfectly for Stevie to launch a low drive past Ritchie. It was the end of a perfect day played in hellish conditions. The fog continued to descend and about an hour after the game you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face. How, the Rangers contingent in the 65,000 crowd must have hoped it had fallen earlier in the afternoon.’
As Big Yogi pointed out it was, indeed, a ‘perfect day’, but there was one Celtic player who could have been happier at the end. ‘We won, got the points and scored five goals. We could – and should – have scored more and I would have dearly loved to have marked my first Old Firm league game at Celtic Park in front of our own fans with a goal. That would have capped it for me.’ The words belonged to Joe McBride.
Looking back, that was another extremely important victory for Jock Stein and his players. At the end of the league season, they picked up their first title since 1954 by only two points, Celtic in pole position on fifty-seven points with Rangers on fifty-five. The champions scored one hundred and six goals and conceded thirty while their Ibrox challengers claimed ninety-one strikes and lost one fewer on twenty-nine. After trouncing Scot Symon’s side, Celtic still had seventeen league games still to play and surrendered on only three occasions – at Aberdeen, Hearts and, against all odds, Stirling Albion.
After firing two blanks against the men from Govan, Joe McBride would get the opportunity to rectify the situation on the most glamorous of platforms – the Scottish Cup Final at Hampden in front of 126,599 fans on April 23. Celtic went into the gala encounter as massive favourites. What could go wrong?
* TOMORROW: Don’t miss part three of ‘That Season In Paradise’ and another enthralling chapter in A Guy Called Joe.
