Murdo MacLeod's wife on moment she was told Celtic legend might not survive heart surgery

ON two separate occasions over a 12-year period, I’ve been taken into the same room, inside the same hospital and told there’s a chance my husband won’t survive the aftermath of heart surgery.But my husband is Murdo MacLeod.

During the nine years he spent playing for Celtic he was known to supporters and his ­teammates as The Rhino. There were reasons behind that nickname.Murdo’s strength, fortitude and bloody-minded ­determination gave him an iron will to enable him to overcome any form of adversity.We were married when we were no more than kids and raised a family to be proud of.He was good enough as a part-timer at Dumbarton to be signed for Celtic and won every domestic honour there was at the club before pursuing his career elsewhere.We moved to a foreign country and assimilated ourselves into the German way of life while Murdo was at Borussia Dortmund.And then we came home again to see my husband enter the next phase of his life, winning trophies as a player at Hibs, a manager at Dumbarton and, most ­memorably of all, as Wim ­Jansen’s coach when Celtic won the league title that prevented Rangers getting 10 in a row.You don’t stand back and allow that kind of man to slip away from this life.

Especially not when he and I raised a family who formed a shield around him and refused to accept that medical opinion was the final word.In October 2022, I assembled that family around around me in the room at the Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank so that the medical staff could update us on Murdo’s condition.There present was a female doctor and a male anaesthetist.

I remember thinking one was doom and the other one was gloom. Neither of them truly knew The Rhino.We were asked if we wanted to have a husband and a father suffering