Stuart Bathgate: Barry follows his heart back to his beloved Pars

Published on Friday 17 April 2009 22:19

FORTY years after he left Dunfermline, Roy Barry feels as if he had never been away. Raised in Edinburgh, he played for both of the capital's senior teams during an eventful career which also took him to England. But his heart was always in Fife, and for the past year and a half following his retirement the rest of him has been back in the Kingdom too.

Now 66, Barry can look back on forays into Europe with Hearts and Coventry City, on playing alongside the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson, and on playing against some of the greats of the game such as Franz Beckenbauer. The focal point of his career, however, was the three-year period he spent at East End Park. And the highlight of that spell was the 1968 cup final, when he captained Dunfermline Athletic to a 3-1 victory over Hearts.

It meant so much to him, that relatively brief time of his life, that when he retired towards the end of 2007 he chose to return from London, where he had worked in the taxi business after drifting out of football, to live in Dunfermline. He now regards himself as a supporter of the club rather than an ex-player, and will be among the crowd at Hampden a week tomorrow when they take on Falkirk in the semi-finals of this year's Homecoming Scottish Cup.

With Dunfermline still fighting to stay in the First Division and Hearts lying third in the SPL, the move which was the making of Barry may now seem a strange one for an ambitious young central defender to make. For Barry in 1966, however, it was definitely a step up, and one about which he never had any regrets.

"I think I'd been at Hearts for six years," he recalled yesterday at a reunion with team-mates from 1968 and with members of the Dunfermline team who won the same competition seven years earlier. "It was a good six years – we won the League Cup in 1962-63 – but then the manager at the time, Tommy Walker, and I just fell out.

"It was time to move on, and Dunfermline was a good move. They'd always done well, they were in Europe – in fact my first game for Dunfermline was a European tie – and Hearts weren't in Europe.

"So I went from Hearts, who people assume are a bigger club but are not, to Dunfermline, and I went straight into Europe. So for me it was a great move.

"Willie Cunningham bought me, then Willie moved on and George Farm came in as manager. It might have been George Farm who made me captain.

"I was proud to be captain and I enjoyed it too. It was a great honour to be made captain."

Cunningham had succeeded Jock Stein, who had been in charge for the 1961 triumph. It was under Farm, however, that the club were to win silverware again in the spring of '68.

"Looking back on that cup run, we did all the hard work in the first game, beating Celtic at Parkhead," Barry remembered. "In the games that followed we didn't play well at all.

"In fact our name was written on the cup, because we were dreadful in the first match (in the semi-final] against St Johnstone, and again in the replay, but we managed to scrape through.

"So we were in the final, but really we didn't deserve to be there on our performances in the earlier rounds, apart from that first round against Celtic."

Dunfermline were strong favourites to beat Hearts in the final, and they justified that status with a solid performance. They may have been lucky to get through previous rounds, but they deservedly won the final, with the only luck in evidence going Hearts' way, when John Lunn had the misfortune to put through his own net.

"The quality of the goals is what I remember best. The goals that Pat Gardner scored were world-class goals, the way he took them, the way he volleyed and swivelled. And Ian Lister, with the penalty – he was just so cool. He just stroked it away."

That penalty came just before the hour mark, and a mere three minutes after Gardner had opened the scoring. When the own goal went in ten minutes or so later, Hearts were therefore apparently back in the game at 2-1 down.

"It was crossed, I think John Lunn put his foot out, and it went into the net," Barry said of that moment. "It was just one of those things. We just got up and got on with it."

They did indeed; in fact they were hardly thrown off their stride by Hearts' goal. Dunfermline were confident of victory by then, and they ensured they would lift the cup in the 73rd minute when Gardner scored his second.

While that game remains the highlight of Barry's career, his fondest reminiscences are as much about individuals as they are about games. Ferguson, for one, made a profound impact.

The future Aberdeen and Manchester United manager, whose most prolific period as a striker had come with Dunfermline, had moved on to Rangers a year before the 1968 final. He still looms large, however, in Barry's memories of his time with the club. "Fergie was here when I arrived. He was a bit feisty and we were always fighting.

"So Willie Cunningham, the diplomat that he was, made us room-mates on trips – he thought that would stop us fighting. It didn't. We fought even more. We're friends now though.

"In fact I was in his company recently, and he started talking about Dunfermline, as he always does. And people started looking at him, thinking 'Why are you going on about Dunfermline?' but he always does. He spreads the word – talks about Dunfermline and his memories of being here."

Barry himself stayed at the club for just a year after the cup win, then was sold to Coventry for 40,000. He moved on to Crystal Palace in 1973, and seemed set to play out his career in England when an approach from Hibs saw him return to his home city.

"I was quite surprised when Hibs came in for me. I was playing for Crystal Palace at the time when the manager told me they'd had an offer from Hibs. I was happy to go back to Edinburgh because it's a lovely city, and I'd actually been a Hibs supporter as a boy.

"I had two seasons there with Eddie Turnbull, who I must say was the best coach I've ever worked under. He was a marvellous coach and a great tactician.

"They used to call him Muttley after the cartoon character. He growled and everything.

"If he saw somebody laughing when they'd had a bad game he'd say: 'Who gave you permission to laugh? You've used up all your laughs this week. You've no right to laugh.' He was a great man.

"It was a good two years, but I was coming to the end of my career and eventually I was happy to slip out of it. I wasn't getting quite tight enough, and the legs were beginning to go.

"So I moved on to East Fife as player/manager. I subbed myself one day and never played again.

"We came in at half-time and it had been a dreadful first half. I asked one of the subs to get stripped because he was coming on, and the rest of the team all looked at me wondering who was coming off.

"And I said: 'Don't worry, I'm coming off'. I apologised for my performance and that was the end of it for me."

It may have been the end of Barry as a player, but he remained in the game for a while as a coach, and in 1982 he found himself in charge of Oxford United under the chairmanship of Robert Maxwell. That was just about the end of his active involvement in football – at least it was for a couple of decades, until he gradually began the process which now seems him as a fully-fledged supporter of the club he once captained.

"I have a real affinity with Dunfermline," he explained. "I'm a supporter. I go to all the games – I'll be at the semi-final next weekend and I'll be at the final too.

"It's gone on and on for years, doing well in the cup. Obviously the league's the priority at the moment, but they're in the semi-final of the cup again.

"I think they'll be all right in the league. They all work hard and if they keep doing that I'm sure they'll be all right. And I'm convinced they'll win the cup as well. I think it's time to win the cup again. It's time for the club to have new heroes and new faces. I'm quite confident.

"I used to come up for the odd game. I was at the one (in May 2005] when we needed to win at Dundee United to stay up, and we won 1-0.

"I came back down the motorway with the cavalcade of cars, hundreds of cars with the black-and-white flags and scarves flying. That's when I felt I was a supporter, as opposed to an ex-player.

"There's a big group of us go and I'm part of the group now. I wear the colours.

"Hearts gave me my first break and I have a certain affinity to Coventry City too because I had some good times there. But I'm here, and I came straight back here when I retired, and I've got friends I had here 40-odd years ago. I just love it."