The news of the death of Jimmy Johnstone will have been received with sadness in most football households. Jimmy was one of those players who, even if he was playing for a team that you absolutely detested, got a certain amount of your respect for a number of factors.

His height – or more correctly lack of it - was always brought into the equation and he was usually thought of as being a bit slight. Believe me, nothing could have been further from the truth. Granted, Jimmy was only five feet four inches but he was built like a boxer, with strong shoulders and thighs like tree-trunks. He was no push-over.

When Jimmy was brought down, as he was fairly regularly in an age when tackling was a bit more crude than today, he merely took the ball once more and drove at the same defender, knowing that another illegal and nasty challenge was probably on the cards. Small he may have been but the heart was leonine in its bravery.

The red curly hair of his early days made him look like a wee boy. That is true and it would be fair to say that Jimmy was always the ‘little kid’. ‘Jinky’ was his nickname and a very appropriate one, too, as he was always up to something. While the rest of the squad were paying attention to the blackboard and Jock Stein’s words about the quality of our forthcoming European opposition, Jimmy was whistling tunelessly, tying up his laces and staring out of the window. And, at the end of the Boss’s dissection of our opponents, when he asked if anyone had any questions, Jimmy might pose a really relevant query like how long the flight was to the place in question? No wonder the Boss lost it sometimes!

There was another quality that Jimmy had in abundance. He received the public’s sympathy. Even when he was totally in the wrong, as in some of his ordering-offs, for instance, the general public always felt that someone ‘had it in for him’.

That sympathy was received off the pitch too. When someone undeniably pushed Jimmy out into the Firth of Clyde in a rowing boat with one oar and no rowlocks, he received much of the nation’s sympathy for having to be rescued by the Coastguard.

That Jimmy was the first one to jump into the rowing boat in the first place was often overlooked!

A scamp he may have been but, my goodness, how he could play. Until Jock Stein returned in 1965, there had been a danger that Jimmy’s undoubted talent might not have come to fruition. Indeed, in the years before then, his appearances for the first team were by no means regular. Once Stein arrived, however, Jimmy became a fixture in the side.

The big ‘starring’ occasions are plentiful and easily recalled. In Lisbon, in May 1967, he hustled and harried the  Internazionale defence, which allowed others time and space to do their work. 10 days later, a crowd of 100,000 plus turned out in the Bernabeu in Madrid to pay homage to their centre-forward hero, Alfredo Di Stefano; by the end of the testimonial game between Celtic and Real Madrid, the name on everyone’s lips was that of Jimmy Johnstone.

Jimmy had a fear of flying, so when Jock Stein mentioned that if Celtic got a good lead from the first leg of the European Cup tie against Red Star at Parkhead in the autumn of 1968, he might not have to travel to Yugoslavia, the Wee Man took the message on board. Try as they might, the Red Star players could not get the ball off him, Celtic won 5-1 with Jimmy getting the final goal. At the whistle, the rest of us, not privy to the arrangement between the Boss and Jimmy, though the latter had had a brainstorm as he went round shouting ‘I’m no going! I’m no going!’. Two years after that, in the European Cup semi-final against Leeds at Hampden, in front of a record crowd of 136,505 and millions on TV, Jimmy gave Terry Cooper a torrid time as Celtic reached a second Final.

For such an active man, the diagnosis of motor neurone disease ( MND )some five years ago must have come as a terrible shock. As the disease progressed, he became more and more immobile, totally dependent on his wife Agnes and children Marie, Eileen and James.

Yet, when we visited him, Jimmy showed no sign of self-pity, always keen to hear how we were and what our families were up to. As I mentioned above, when others spoke of his talent, I considered his bravery a bigger asset. When I saw how he used that quality to cope with the effects of MND, my admiration for him increased.

Until recently, few people knew much about motor-neurone disease. Now, thanks to the profile which Jimmy brought to the condition and his unstinting efforts to help others and develop research, MND has a much higher consciousness in the public mind. What a wonderful, lasting legacy from a courageous and talented man.