Celtic Player of the Day – The Great Jimmy Quinn

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The Celtic Star

·13 juin 2025

Celtic Player of the Day – The Great Jimmy Quinn

No-one symbolised a whole generation more that the miner bhoy from Croy, the great Jimmy Quinn. The irony was that the idol of all Scotland was a very quiet, shy retiring man who was never a glory seeker….

He scored a hat-trick against Rangers in the 1902 Coronation Cup final, but that was considered to be a flash in the pan as he was a somewhat underperforming left winger. But then for the 1904 Scottish Cup final, Maley was compelled to draft him in as centre forward. He scored another hat-trick that day, and Celtic never looked back after that.

Jimmy Quinn

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He wasn’t all that big, but he was stocky with mighty shoulders, and quite capable of scoring goals by shoulder charging as well as his feet and his head. As well as being a great goalscorer, he was also a great leader of the line, unselfishly distributing the ball to his other forwards and being ready to feed off them.

His form for Celtic was replicated with Scotland, and the English journalists were all convinced that he was the best in the world.

Jimmy Quinn, Willie Maley, Jimmy McGrory and Patsy Gallacher

Known often just as “Jimmy”, he was the man that everyone talked about. Frequently fouled and the victim of injustice, Jimmy emerged through it all, and remained until the end “just an ordinary man”. He died in 1945.

David Potter

More on Jimmy Quinn from David Potter…

The great Jimmy Quinn is a man whose legend lives on, now well over 100 years after he stopped playing professional football. He was born in Croy in 1878, and died in the same village in 1945. He was a Crojan through and through, basically only leaving the village to play football – occasionally as far as England, and sometimes even on tour in Europe – but he was never anything else other than Jimmy Quinn of Croy – and of course Celtic.

He was signed by Maley in late 1900, and Maley was very aware that he would have to work hard with this shy, gauche youth who would sometimes be called “Jamie the Silent”. There was no instant success, as Quinn was inconsistent whether he played on the left wing or in the centre.

His first great game was an odd one – the Glasgow Exhibition Trophy, the British League Cup, the Coronation Cup, call it what you will, when Quinn scored a hat-trick against Rangers in the final on June 17 1902. It was the middle of summer, the close season and it was very easy for opponents to belittle Quinn’s achievement.

They could hardly do that, however, with the Scottish Cup final of 1904 when Quinn scored another hat-trick, this time before 65,000 at the New Hampden Park. It was as if Willie Maley had pressed a switch, and the new Celtic took off with Quinn, now an icon, in the vanguard as Celtic won six League titles in a row 1905 until 1910 and Quinn also won the Scottish Cup in 1907, 1908, 1911 and 1912.

He was a great goalscorer, He could head the ball, had a devastating shot, could score great individual goals – one at Kilmarnock on Christmas Day 1909 simply becoming known as “Quinn’s Christmas” and excelled at shoulder charging, using his mighty shoulder muscles for this (to modern eyes) barbaric way of scoring goals. He played 331 times for the club and scored 218 goals.

He played 11 times for Scotland, becoming the hero of Scotland in 1910 when he and McMenemy scored the goals that beat England at Hampden In 1908 he had scored four goals for Scotland in Dublin where the talk for days afterwards was “Quinn, Quinn and nothing but Quinn”.

And yet he remained a quiet, shy man. Having played his last game in 1915, he retired to Croy to work in the mines, emerging only to go to Glasgow to see his beloved Celtic. He remained a hero with Celtic fans until his death in November 1945, having had the awful experience of seeing his son John go to the Second World War … and not come back.