Taking a 1980s Graeme Souness bone crusher and living to tell the tale is one thing, but doing it with one shoe is another entirely! That's the painful reality Billy Stark famously endured during a 1-0 victory over Rangers at Parkhead in 1987.

Former Liverpool midfielder Souness, then the Ibrox club's player-manager, saw red for his wild lunge after Stark's tidy finish had put Celtic ahead in a game they ultimately saw out comfortably. It was to be a pivotal victory in the battle to return the title to the East End in the club's centenary season.

It's been 35 years since Stark pitched up in Glasgow from Aberdeen but people still ask him about is facing that tackle. It's a brutal two-footed lunge of the kind that Souness was capable every now and then but the visceral impact of him holding his boot and thus being essentially bare-footed as the impact arrived is what makes it stand out.

READ MORE: How Celtic derailed the Souness revolution: Billy Stark remembers a wonderful fairytale

Looking back in gentler footballing times, it's remarkable he emerged unscathed so it's perhaps understandable the gory detail is more seared in memory than his match-winning strike.

Stark said: "A lot of the Celtic supporters still remember Graeme Souness' tackle and in some of their minds, that challenge is more important than the goal. That is what they talk about most. It was an incident in the game that added to the goal that helped cement your popularity with the Celtic supporters. It didn't do me any harm but it could have done me real harm. 

"I saw Souness coming in from the corner of my eye and I managed to shift the weight off my foot and I jumped and managed to hurdle the challenge. I'd slid into a tackle before that and my boot came off and I had it in my hand. Granty (Peter Grant) shunted the ball to me. I played a short pass to Paul McStay and Souness came thundering in. He was a magnificent player but he could have ended a few careers with his tackles. He will admit that himself.

"He wouldn't last a minute in today's football. He was a force of nature to play against. Souness in a different context had that same Big Billy[McNeill] aura on the pitch because he was an arrogant so-and-so but he could back it up - that was the thing.  

"That win helped us in terms of laying down an early-season marker as it turned into a negative for Rangers as their player/manager had been sent off. Celtic actually won three out of the four derbies in the Centenary Season but that was definitely the most important in terms of what happened when the rest of the campaign panned out. 

"The first derby win over Rangers at Celtic Park was crucial as we became winners that day and we proved to ourselves that we could compete for the big prized against the so-called best team in the league. The performance that day showed Rangers what Celtic was all about as we absolutely outplayed them that day and should have won by more goals. We took a lot from that win over Rangers and we grew as a team confidence-wise. The rest is history as we go on and win the league and Scottish Cup double in our centenary year."