Martin Willie Image 1 Queen’s Park 1937

Description

Inside left Willie Martin joined Queen’s Park from the school of the same name in the early 1930’s. “A strong, forcing type of inside forward with all the enthusiasm which is linked with the Queen’s team”, was the description of him at the time, “Always ready for a crack at goal and possessed of a fierce shot.” Indeed that would prove the case as he set the all time Queen’s Park scoring record in 1937-38 when he scored 31 goals that season, a record which still stands, within the total 4 goals in a 5-1 win over Morton in November 1937 and a hat-trick in a 4-1 win over Third Lanark in January 1938.

While at Queen’s Park he made 7 appearances for Scotland’s Amateur eleven between 1935 and 1937, scoring 4 goals. In all he scored 55 goals in 146 Scottish League and Cup appearances for The Spiders between September 1933, when he scored on his Scottish League debut in a defeat at Celtic, and April 1938, when he signed off with a goal in a draw against Hamilton.

Better would follow for Martin, who soon moved to Clyde in the summer of 1938, and was central to their victorious Scottish Cup run of 1939. By then he had been selected for The Scottish League, scoring twice on his debut in a 6-1 victory over The Irish League at Ibrox in September 1938, and playing in a 3-1 defeat to The Football League at Molineux two months later.

In the Scottish Cup third round at Ibrox, Clyde produced a stunning 4-1 demolition of mighty Glasgow Rangers with Martin scoring all four goals which to this day is probably a record for an opposition forward at Ibrox. Their progress continued all the way to the Final and on 22nd April 1939 Clyde beat Motherwell 4-0 in the Scottish Cup Final in front of 94,000 at Hampden Park, with Martin bagging two second half goals, Clyde winning the Cup for the first time in their history. However his career was then brought to a halt by the outbreak of the Second World War, by when he had scored 20 goals in 33 appearances for The Bully Wee.