Jimmy Quinn (footballer, born 1878)

Jimmy Quinn (8 July 1878 – 21 November 1945) was a Scottish footballer who played for Celtic and represented Scotland.

Signed for Celtic by Willie Maley from junior club Smithston Albion in 1900, he took several seasons to make his mark, playing at outside- then inside-left before being moved to centre. Like so many players of the time and since, he was a coal miner.

He scored 216 competitive goals in 331 appearances – 187 in the league (273 appearances) and 29 cup goals in 58 appearances, 7 or 8 of those goals in finals (1904, 08, 09, & 1911). He won six successive championship and five Scottish Cup medals with Celtic and was capped eleven times for Scotland, scoring seven times, including four out of five goals v Ireland in 1908. His strike rate of 0.65 – almost two goals every three games – is surpassed among Celtic goalscorers only by Jimmy McGrory, Henrik Larsson and Sandy McMahon. As a scorer of league goals, his total of 187 is surpassed only by McGrory's.

The foundations of Quinn's enduring fame were laid in the 1904 Scottish Cup Final, when Celtic faced their Old Firm rivals Rangers. At half-time Rangers led by two goals to nil. In the second half, however, Celtic came back to win 3-2, Quinn scoring all the goals. This was the second hat-trick in a Scottish Cup Final. It was 68 years before the feat was repeated by John "Dixie" Deans in Celtic’s 6-1 defeat of Hibs in 1972. However, Quinn’s single-handed reversal of a 2-0 deficit is unique in a Cup Final.

That cup-final hat-trick was the first a Celtic player scored against Rangers in a major competition. Quinn also scored the second, in a 3-0 league victory on New Year’s Day 1912. He was the only player from either side to have twice scored a hat-trick in an Old Firm match until Ally McCoist emulated him when scoring all three goals in Rangers' Glasgow Cup final victory in May 1986 to add to the treble he'd netted against Celtic in the League Cup final two years earlier. He was the first Celtic player to score 200 goals for the club, and only four others have done so—McGrory, Bobby Lennox (273) Larsson (242) and Stevie Chalmers (228). 90 years after his retirement, he remains the club’s fifth highest goalscorer.

Quinn scored 7 goals in 11 appearances for Scotland and 7 goals in 8 games for the Scottish League XI.^[1]

References

Sources

• Factfile - Celtic ed Chris Mason, pub Parragon 1998
• David Potter, The Mighty Quinn: Jimmy Quinn, Celtic's First Goal Scoring Hero (Tempus, 2005)

External links

• Jimmy Quinn at scottishfa.co.uk