Interview: Gordon Strachan, Scottish football veteran

Published on Friday 24 June 2011 17:40

Phew, I'm thinking, Gordon Strachan's not around. Suddenly I feel like the spotty cub reporter of hard news that I used to be - secretly relieved when there was no answer at the home of an especially tricky customer (cue disbelieving editor: "What did you use to knock at the door - a feather-bloody-duster?").

I keep trying his phone, just in case, and the next day he answers. "I'm in Orlando, at Disneyland. I'm getting my photo taken with Mickey Mouse while the grandkids are on the rides but I need to duck behind this wall to avoid these Rangers supporters - call me back." I do, and the trail goes cold again.

Then a week later, the man generally reckoned to be the trickiest customer in all Scottish football, leaves a message on my phone which signs off: "Hope you're well." I'm seriously contemplating quitting while I'm ahead. It surely can't get any better than "Gordon Strachan Inquires After Journalist's Well-Being Shock". But it does. Resuming the story of his holiday, he says he couldn't escape Rangers fans from the off. "I flew out from Gatwick but it might as well have been Govan International. I turned to my wife Lesley and said: 'Look at these faces, listen to these accents - are these guys not a bit familiar?' I leaned over and asked where they were going. 'Bears' annual gathering - Orange County Convention Centre.' I was like: 'Orange County - where else?'

"We had some good banter. At Orlando I had a car booked. Some of the boys who got off the plane first had grabbed the driver's laminated card so as I came through arrivals I was met by a group in the royal blue holding up a 'Gordon Strachan' sign. Later, I bumped into a different crowd. 'What are you daein' here, wee man?''I'm your surprise guest-speaker for the keynote address: How Celtic and Rangers can live together in happy harmony.'"

Before the interview, a colleague had warned me that nothing to drink and early to bed would be good preparation for the inevitable testing time involving all of Strachan's famed quirkiness and contrariness. But guess what? He's warm and funny and far from obtuse when we meet in an Edinburgh hotel, his only edginess coming right at the start when he suggests we move seats to behind a large pillar. Understandable, really: these Rangers fans get everywhere.

We talk about football but other things, too, such as books and films and fantastic car journeys and what a great white looks like, up close. Reviewing the SPL's seasonus horribilis - almost exclusively Old Firm-related - he launches into what sounds like a typical Strachan rant, from back when he was Celtic's manager: "Are we talking about Scottish football or west of Scotland society? The football gets blamed a lot but Glasgow is a violent city with a big alcohol problem and sadly as regards the men who beat their wives, if there was no football then something down the pub would probably set them off. If I got stick from Rangers fans in the street I didn't view them as supporters. To me they were people, who were backsides. You don't put on a scarf and turn into a backside, blaming football for it. You just are one."

But discussion of "yob culture", a Strachan staple, now leads us to A View from the Bridge. Nothing to do with Stamford or Wayne, we're talking the Arthur Miller play with Ken Stott in the role of brutish Brooklyn longshoreman Eddie Carbone. Stott is a fellow Edinburgher, a wee bit older (Strachan is 54), a Hearts fan (our man grew up a Hibby) but a great actor. "And that was a great performance. I particularly liked it when Ken stopped the play to shout at two girls in the audience fiddling with their mobiles. Me and Melvyn Bragg who was sitting behind were gobsmacked."

Ah, the instant-gratification culture - football managers know to their cost about that. He's thinking of his friend Alex McLeish and his tough introduction to Aston Villa. "I spoke to Big Eck yesterday; he'll be OK. That's just a couple of hundred folk shouting and screaming. Listen, all you have to do in football is win. A politician does something a wee bit naughty and he'll probably resign. In football you can be a wife-beater, do drugs, take backhanders, generally cheat the system and as long as you win you'll be forgiven. In fact, win often and they might put up a statue to you. Yup, football's an incredible business. Beauty and madness. Barcelona and Fifa. Just incredible."

Strachan's severe moral dischuffment is never far from the surface and it re-appears when the chat comes round to his last job at Middlesbrough. "One of the players bought himself a Ferrari just as 2,000 folk were losing their jobs in the steel industry. I said to him: ‘You come from the area where these redundancies are hitting hardest - are you off your head?' So, having reprimanded that boy, I couldn't then hang on for the sack and compensation. That's why I walked away."

Tipped for the Championship flag last season, Boro were flirting with relegation when he quit, his great Scottish experiment having failed. "I made mistakes and, while the chairman or the players letting you down would have hurt, accepting that made the failure easier to handle. I don't want to go into the mistakes but a few times I was like: ‘Uh-oh, what are you daein', Gordon?'"

Nine players were recruited from the SPL. Remembering Bill Shankly's credo that two Scots were essential but three risky, was that too many? "Ach no, I don't think so. We were unlucky with injuries and Kris Boyd was a good lad, you know. You probably look at him and think ‘He doesn't work at his game' but he does."

A smile, and a wistful look. "God works in mysterious ways, you know. I was saying that to the minister in Muirhouse. If Boro hadn't gone wrong for me, I wouldn't have had as much time as I did with my dad before he died. Three and a half months. I hoped it might have been longer but I've got to be grateful and I am."

John Strachan, scaffolder, cabbie, employee of the local wireworks, took Gordon Strachan, Aberdeen and Scotland legend, triple title-winning Celtic boss, to his first game. "Hibees against the Dons - Charlie Cooke was playing for them." And, back in April, a drawn Edinburgh derby, Gordon took John to what would prove to be his last game before he succumbed to lung cancer. "We also had a final game of golf at Silverknowes. As a boy I used to follow him round with my one club. Back then the flag on the 17th green, the one closest to the tower-blocks, was aye being nicked but there's a fence now and I'm pleased to say it was fluttering for us."

Gordon has spent a lot of time living in Edinburgh recently, back ‘home' from his Southampton base. He grew up in Muirhouse Grove, Irvine Welsh round the corner in Muirhouse Gardens. The Trainspotting author once told me that any promising footballer produced by the area's public parks had already mastered the art of dribbling on account of all the dog poo and broken glass. "Not completely," says Strachan, "this scar on my hand is from back then. Did Dad want me to have a career in the game? Well, he never made a fuss. Back then there weren't any fathers like the lunatics you see at academy games, all wanting to know when their sons are going to become multi-millionaires. Don't forget that football wasn't as glamorous as it is now. Up at Dundee, my first club, I was earning less than the lad next door to my digs who worked for NCR [National Cash Registers]. When I first met Lesley I had 45p in the bank. I was too broke to take her on a second date and so didn't turn up for the rendezvous at Boots. Luckily, she didn't either!

"But I'm sure Dad was delighted when I made the grade, even if it wasn't with the Hibs. He actually wanted to call me Gordon Smith Strachan, after the great man, but my mum wouldn't let him. I loved my trips to Easter Road with Dad, loved waiting at the pub door for him with my juice and crisps. And I loved Peter Marinello and Colin Stein but my all-time hero was Pat Stanton. Wherever I go in the world I talk about him. If folk have never heard of him I get quite upset. And then there was Alan Gordon. He arranged my transfer from Aberdeen to Man U - in those pre-agent days it was useful to know a smart accountant. But before that we played together at Dundee. A wonderful goalscorer and he got the rest of us to do all his running. One time the manager Davie White was surprised to see him showering before the game. Alan's explanation: ‘Ach, I've got be be somewhere at quarter past five so I might as well get washed now.' Clearly he wasn't intent on running that day either!"

Strachan has always been able to tell a funny story. Ask him if he'd ever do the Scotland job and he'll tell you how he thinks he's still too young, how his grandson wolf-whistles Lesley when she's in her bikini, how cabbies contragulate him on his capture of a much younger wife who's actually just two months his junior - and how "old" is his own granny, "a wee squat wifie down the bookies at Lochend". But do his jokes come across better in a hotel lounge when he's nice and relaxed on one of his breaks from football? Not necessarily, he says - depends on the football audience. Take childbirth. He knows as much about it, what it feels like, as a female journalist does about cup exits at St Mirren. That quip landed him in trouble at Celtic; when he used it twice previously in England there was "not a dickybird" of complaint. From the burds present or anyone else. That's the searing intensity of the humour-free zone that is Old Firm, I say. "I know, my jokes did fall a bit flat in Glasgow. Look, I've nothing against journalists. I've even become good friends with the one who did my last unauthorised biography. But having taken until I was almost 50 to get to Celtic I did object to daft questions about fan criticism on blogs, and that from guys who'd been shock jocks the week before."

He pleads guilty to occasional devilment. "In some press conferences I felt like Tony Blair at the Iraq inquiry. ‘Ah, but three years ago you said such-and-such.' ‘Well, I've changed my mind.' But some of my responses came from the inner me, the horrible me. We're all like that in football, I'm afraid - fans, too. But as regards the Old Firm it's hit another level, it's really quite horrific."

We talk about his friend Neil Lennon. He recalls hairy situations of his own at Tynecastle, one where complaints to the police commander about the dugout roof being thumped and abusive comments about his sister brought the response: "Just you watch the game." Why does he think he wasn't the target of death threats and mail bombs like Lennon? "I got them from Celtic fans - and by the way that's another of my jokes. I don't know, my profile was always lower than Lenny's, my life quite dull in comparison. I'm quite boring really."

But he's not, far from it. Comedian Alan Carr (his father was Strachan's scout at Coventry), Scandanavian crime-writers Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbo (current fave reads) and Gregory Burke (author of modern Scottish theatre classic Black Watch; he's seen it four times) all flit through 90 minutes of conversation that rate as his longest-ever encounter with a journo. What will he do next? "Dunno. I love football. I loved being Celtic's manager, absolutely the best job. I loved playing even just once for Hibs - Gordon Hunter's testimonial, scored a goal too. Right now I love helping out at Spartans [he's patron of their academy] because this has got me believing in ‘street football'. But I love my life outside the game, too."

Sand-surfing, snorkelling and whale-watching. The Great Barrier Reef, California's Highway 1 and Rome (for a visit to the Vatican City "that might have endeared me to Celtic fans but I forgot to tell them about it!"). If these aren't Strachan's 50 Things To Do Before You Die, they're definitely 50 Things To Do Before You're Next Asked What It Feels Like To Lose At Football. "I think I'm getting scared of missing out on some important stuff as I get older and I'm sure Dad's death has something to do with that. Putting on a tracksuit, standing by a touchline, shouting at players then shouting some more at journalists - is it enough? I want to see a whole lot more of my grandkids because I saw less than I would have liked of my two sons and my daughter when they were growing up. I want me and Lesley to go on another big adventure. We hold hands everywhere - makes you sick, eh? But now I'm going to see my mum. She's got some of some of Dad's old gear she wants to give me. Right at this moment, nothing's more important than that."