Belfast Celtic

On 27 December 1948, Jimmy Jones went down on the Windsor Park pitch with a broken leg, put there not by a tackle but by supporters who had come over the boundary during a Boxing Day match against Linfield. Belfast Celtic finished the season and never played in the Irish League again. The club wound up formally in 1960, but the walk-off had already decided things twelve years earlier.

It had been founded in 1891, and for most of the decades in between it won more than it lost. Fourteen Irish League titles between 1900 and 1948, eight Irish Cups, and a shelf of regional trophies besides — the City Cup, the Gold Cup, the County Antrim Shield, the Belfast Charity Cup, some of them won ten times over. Celtic Park, the ground everyone in Belfast called Paradise, held up to 50,000 for the biggest of those occasions.

Elisha Scott stood in goal there for years before he moved into the dugout, a former Liverpool and Ireland keeper who gave the club a name known well outside its own support. Jimmy Jones scored the goals that mattered before that Boxing Day changed his career and the club's future in the same afternoon. Charlie Tully and Jimmy McAlinden wore the green and white in the same years the trophies kept arriving.

None of it survived contact with Linfield. The two clubs had carried Belfast's derby between them for decades, and it was that fixture, not any final league table, that ended Celtic's time in senior football. Linfield play on. The rivalry that once belonged to the two of them passed instead to Linfield and Glentoran, who inherited the name Big Two without either club ever meeting Belfast Celtic on a pitch again.