Humble Pie

He said, ‘We want you back up. Can you bring your dad to training on May seventeenth?’

At that point, I wasn’t even allowed to call the house. The trouble was that the people at the club wanted to know that I was properly supported.

I was thinking, ‘Fuck, am I properly supported? No.’

I rang Mum and asked her to tell him. I couldn’t face doing it myself.

So she did tell him, and, all of a sudden, he was…not nice, exactly, but smarmy. He was going to enjoy my success as though he was me.

I played for the first team twice, in preseason friendlies, but it was a bad time for me. Dad’s deceit was really getting to me.

Then they said, ‘We’re going to continue watching you. We’re really excited. We are going to sign you – but it’ll be next year, rather than this year.’

By this time, I’d been offered a cooking job in London. It was in a new 300-seater banqueting hall that had opened at the Mayfair Hotel. They were looking for four commis chefs: Second Commis, Grade Two. I don’t know what the fuck that means, even now. It’s a posh kitchen porter, basically, but the salary was £5,200 a year. Anyway, I told them that I could not start yet, and went back up to Rangers for the third year in a row.

This was the summer of 1984. Half the players weren’t there because they were travelling in Canada, so everything was focused on the youth players. They were deciding who was staying and whom they were going to sign that year. Ally McCoist was there, and Derek and Ian Ferguson. They’d been involved with the club since they were boys, and I suppose that’s all I ever really wanted to do, too: to stay put in one place, play football, and become a local boy.

The training went very well this time. I remember playing in a reserve team game against McCoist, and I had a good game. I was hopeful. I was feeling positive. The following week, we were playing a big charity match in East Kilbride. I couldn’t believe it. I was in the squad, and I got to play. The trouble was that they kept moving me around the pitch. And then, to make things even worse, I got taken off fifteen minutes before the end. They must have made at least seven substitutions that day. Never mind. I trained for another two weeks, and then I played in another youth team match – another really good game. I was starting to think that I might be in with a chance.

Then came a disaster. In a training session, I seriously damaged my knee, and, stupidly, I tried to play on. We had to take penalties with our right feet. We each had to put a trainer on our left foot and a football boot on our right. The idea was to make your right foot work constantly. It must have been nearly four o’clock when they divided us into two teams and told us to play fifteen minutes each way and to give it ‘everything you’ve fucking got’. By the time we finished, I was in serious pain.