Colin Stein still keen, 40 years after he was up to his old tricks

THE message left on my phone is unnecessarily modest, ridiculously unassuming. "Hullo, this is a Colin Stein ..." A Colin Stein?

I know of only one so I call back and we arrange that I'll be on the train that gets into Linlithgow at 6.08pm. "Then I'll jump in a taxi," I say. "No, no," says Colin, Colin, Colin Stein. "If you're telling me I scored the first professional goal you ever saw and you can actually remember that far back, I'll pick you up."

The strike was for Hibs against Clyde in 1967, in the old group stages of the Scottish League Cup, and from that day this Flora Stevenson Primary School centre-half was desperate to play centre-forward, just like the blond barnstormer.

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Football chants were uncomplicated in 1967 and I remember the popular Cowshed refrain at Easter Road as being "Colin, Colin, Colin Stein ... (next line) ... Colin, Colin Stein." But the Scotsman's Ed, a man not to be doubted, says the pay-off was "The greatest player the world's ever seen". This may have been the Rangers version; they were "the peepul", after all. They loved him at Ibrox too, probably more, for Rangers were his boyhood heroes.

We're driving through "Lithgae" in what constitutes the rush-hour and I can't help noticing what a careful motorist he is. "I've calmed down a lot," he says. "Plus, this is the wife's car." On the radio there's a phone-in and Rangers are being ranted about. Stein saw them beat St Mirren, just, last Saturday and wasn't impressed. "That Kyle Lafferty," adds the Barcelona hero, now 62. "He must be, what, 6ft 4ins? So how come when he jumps for the ball he's only 5ft 8ins?"

Stein stands tall as the last player to score a hat-trick for Scotland. In fact he got four goals in an 8-0 thumping of Cyprus in a World Cup qualifier at Hampden on 17 May, 1969. In the sitting-room of his pebble-dashed maisonette while his wife Linda serves up tea and Jacob's Clubs (choice: blue or orange), he says he's surprised and not a bit saddened that his record has lasted for 40 years. More recently, indeed, Welshmen – today's friendly opponents – have netted hat-tricks against us.

"I remember the game well. A sunny afternoon and with Charlie Cooke, Eddie Gray and wee Willie Henderson in the team we were aye going to get goals. I had one disallowed and if I'd got five I would have equalled Hughie Gallacher's Scotland record. Right at the end we were awarded a penalty – at the Rangers end. The crowd were chanting my name, wanting me to take it but big Tam Gemmell nicked the ball off me."

My scribbles in the one shilling programme confirm that Gemmel (sic) completed the rout, that Billy McNiel also scored but that all the glory belonged to our man Stien. "Christ, your writing's as bad as Gordon Brown's," he laughs.

Stein didn't always score spectacular goals but he had a great knack for unique goals, crucial goals, historic goals, goals in threes, runs of goals (he's the only Scot to ever score in five successive internationals) … and a last-minute equaliser in the most tragic Scottish game of them all.

Even when he didn't score, it was ground-breaking. A ballooned shot high into the Copland Road end for Rangers was immediately followed by the first piece of televised swearing I'd witnessed, not audible of course but clearly: "F****n' b*****d!" Highlights commentator George Davidson tried to cover up for him – "And Stein says 'Oh how near I was!'" – but for me this was as thrillingly subversive as John Cleese in a dress and hairnet on Monty Python.

The lad from Philipstoun was playing for Armadale Thistle when, in 1965, he scored a hat-trick in a Juniors' final at Easter Road watched by Hibs manager Bob Shankly who signed him the next day – fee, 10 plus a match ball. By then he was already an orphan, his miner-father dying when he was six and his mother 11 years later.

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He says: "I loved my time at Hibs – we had a fine team with some good oldies like Allan McGraw who I saw for the first time in ages last week and some rare young players: Peter Cormack, Peter Marinello, John Blackley, Pat Stanton and Thomson Allan, best man at my wedding." He battered the fifth goal past Dino Zoff to complete the thrashing of Napoli; then came the summons from Ibrox.

"Would you call it tapping? I dunno. The Rangers manager Davie White told me he admired me and as far as I ken it's not a crime to pay someone a compliment. One day I had to go to a big Edinburgh hotel for signing talks, only the Hibs chairman William Harrower wouldn't tell me who with. What he did say, just as we were going in the door, was that he'd never sell me to another Scottish club.

"It was Everton. Their manager Harry Catterick even got a car to fetch Linda from her work but I wouldn't sign. The next day, though, I was a Rangers player." The 100,000 fee smashed the Scottish transfer record. As a joiner he'd earned 3 a week, at Hibs it was 35, but at Rangers the wage went up to "over a hundred quid." The big time. He bought himself a new car, a Ford 1600E. There was a new chant as well, and he sings it: "'We've got John Greig, Colin Stein – and Her Majesty the Queen.' That sort of stuff was mair innocent then."

The Govan aesthetes took to him right away, growling approval at his all-action, in-where-it-hurts, retaliate-first style. It can be difficult to reconcile memories of the goal-monster with the quiet man before me in the leather armchair, married to Linda for 40 years, a grandfather who these days gets his kicks on the bowling green. But when he smiles it's very easy: the Stein grimace used to be omnipresent.

He's smiling now as he recalls the Rangers dressing-room, pre-match. "Everyone had their own wee routine. I didn't say much but Willie Henderson was the joker and Alex MacDonald, from just doon the road at Kinning Park, was aye chirpy. Davie Provan would be throwing up, Willie Johnston would be having a fag in the bogs, a nervous wreck – and big Ronnie McKinnon would be combing his hair in the mirror, all suave, and saying: 'Who are we playing today? Do you think they'll turn up?'"

Stein scored a hat-trick in his Rangers debut (a 5-2 win at Arbroath), another in his next game (6-1 against a bereft Hibs) and was inches away from three trebles in a row at Dundalk in the Fairs' Cup. "But I didn't suddenly think I'd made it. Rangers wouldn't have let me. It was a strict place. There was no dress code at Hibs but at Ibrox: collar and tie." And then Jock Wallace, ex-King's Own Scottish Borderers, instituted even more spit-and-polish.

"Murder Hill!" he roars, remembering the sand-dune slogs at Gullane. "I loved them. I prided myself on my fitness." In truth, he's a bit irked by a remark I made earlier, not intended to demean his era, about how the game used to be slower, that it wasn't just his best mate Bud Johnston who smoked, and that today's players are all "athletes". "We were athletes. Our training paid off in the last 20 minutes of matches when we'd roll teams over. Even Bayern Munich (en route to 1972 Cup-Winners' Cup immortality] couldn't live with us. I'd set my fitness against anybody playing now. I don't envy them all their money, the big hooses and the Bentleys. It's a short career so good luck to them. But I think there are some who don't give 110 per cent."

Football in Stein's day was definitely a "man's game". He thinks he was sent off ten times – "for retaliation mainly" – although one ordering-off was for swearing at Peter Cormack when both were at Hibs. Still in the green and white, there was the time he was punched by Rangers centre-forward Alex Ferguson. "So I elbowed him." (And then he took Fergie's No 9 shirt). For a while every centre-half would wind him up with the same jibe: "100,000 quid? You're not worth 100." But Clyde's Eddie Mulheron kicked him "six or seven times". Stein eventually lost it, got sent off again and was banned for eight weeks, ending his Scotland scoring run.

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Old Firm tussles were fearsome. "John Greig would kick Jinky Johnstone up in the air and Tam Gemmell would boot Willie Henderson in the arse. Then Willie, who couldn't see very well, would turn round and say: 'Wizzat you, Tam?'" Then came New Year's Day, 1971, the Ibrox disaster.

"I don't like talking about it much. For a while I carried around the burden that my goal had caused it. The inquiry found that not to be the case and boy was I relieved. But what a terrible, terrible day ... " A pause, then he says: "Margaret Ferguson, she was the only girl among the 66 who died. Do you know that she'd been in my house just a couple of weeks before? Our daughter Nicola had just been born and Margaret – who we didn't know, she was just a fan – chapped the door with a teddy bear for her."

We talk some more about notable Stein goals – netting for Sir Alf Ramsey's British XI against a Euro select to celebrate entry to the Common Market, winning the final First Division title for Rangers (and stopping Celtic's hopes of ten in a row), spoiling my Christmas Day in 1970 with a last-minute winner against Hibs – but of course his favourite was the one at the Nou Camp against Dynamo Moscow. He lit a big cigar in the dressing-room but the pitch riot stopped the trophy presentation. "Still," he chuckles, "when we got back home we were able to parade the cup go round Ibrox on the back on a coal lorry, in the rain ... "

Following Barcelona, Stein fell out with manager Willie Waddell and was sent to Coventry, but after two happy years at Highfield Road (more hat-tricks) he returned to his spiritual home, a bit slower. As hard on himself as he was on centre-halves, he quit football at 30.

He keeps in touch with the "Barca Bears", especially fellow goalscorer Johnston. "Me and Bud see each other all the time but, you know, we've stopped talking about the Cup-Winners' Cup. Now it's bus passes and heating allowances. And before kids used to come up to us and go: 'My dad says you were a no' bad player'. Now they go: 'My grandad says ... '"

About Colin, Colin, Colin Stein, the old codgers are dead right.

• Colin Stein will be signing copies of his autobiography Shooting Star (16.99, Birlinn) at Borders, Buchanan Street, Glasgow next Saturday from 11.30am.

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