Patsy Gallacher was born Irish and literally in the poor-house, the youngest boy of six siblings. He was at his greatest 5ft 7ins tall and built like the waif he might otherwise have been. Yet, in spite of the interruption to football of the Great War, he was arguably the best right-sided inside-forward Scottish football has ever produced and at a time when his was perhaps the one position where there was a dearth of competition. Imagine a forward-line with Alex Jackson outside him, Alan Morton on the other wing, Patsy's Rangers friend Andy Cunningham inside Morton and his one-time team-mate at Celtic and name-sake, Hughie, leading the line.  

And it was, in spite in his thirties and early forties a century and half of appearances for Falkirk after a short interlude in the United States, at Celtic that Gallacher made his reputation with some four hundred and thirty league games, four hundred and ninety-one in all, in fourteen season less four for the War with one hundred and eighty-six goals, one every two and a third matches. But even that had not been without its problems. His primary school had an all-female teaching staff. He had had to organise its team. And then there was his physique. He was puny, frail-looking but his potential was enough to get him trials at Clyde and Celtic. and that was it. He would join the Parkhead club and make his senior debut in October 1911, aged twenty, revitalising an aging team and winning a Scottish Cup medal at the end of that first season. It was to be the first of four Cups and six League titles and it was in his last Cup he scored perhaps his most famous goal of many, somersaulting over the line with the ball held between his feet.