Aidan Smith: If I’d played the game, I wouldn’t need you lot to tell me about it

The key words here, of course are “if you’ve played the game”. The sub-text is “Just how stupit are you?”

Now, not every manager or player, past or present, says “If you’ve played the game” the same way. Some drop it into the fitba chatterama casually, almost innocently. Some say “if you’ve played the game” as easily as Billy Dods saying “he’s put his laces through it”, as easily indeed as Pat Nevin saying “he’s got that in his locker”. But say it, they most certainly do, and sometimes they really, really mean it.

Kenny Dalglish meant it when he asked of a journalist after the Liverpool-Man U FA Cup tie: “Have you ever played football?” He was irritated at being asked if he had sympathy for Patrice Evra, booed throughout. The journo had almost certainly not played football beyond park kickabouts and Dalglish was reminding him that ex-pros form a very exclusive club, for whom there is no admission unless you’ve been there and done it and can display the medals.

Sometimes, when I hear “If you played the game”, I will shout back at the radio or the TV: “It’s true, we haven’t. You lot have and we respect that. But please don’t forget that, if we hadn’t turned up in all weathers – I myself did 18 years on Easter’s Road’s blasted heath of an East Terrace before it was roofed – then you wouldn’t have had careers.”

Other times – and this refers to “if you’ve played the game” in a punditry context – I will shout: “All right, change the record, will you? I mean, you lot are in the media now, rubbing shoulders with guys properly trained in the trade. But I don’t retaliate with: ‘If you had been to journalism college you’d know that you can’t really say: Rangers will have to play gooder than last Saturday’.” [You just retaliated – Sports Ed].

Dalglish of course is still very much involved in football. For those who aren’t any more, broadcasters – newspapers as well – are keen to have their views. I am, too, and my problem with “if you’ve played the game” doesn’t concern the phrase as such but that it is rarely followed by great insight. It’s either a straight admonition, as in Dalglish’s case, or it tantalises, leaves us hanging, usually for the anecdote that hardly ever arrives.

I want their stories. I want to know what Big Jock would have said at half-time, what the Wee Prime Minister would have said at full-time – jings, what anyone would have said anytime. I love this stuff. But where is it? Old footballers, they know not what they had. I often think this. They did something remarkable – played football – and at the same time they bore witness. Come on, guys, your favourite opposition centre-half must have said something funny at a corner-kick, even just once!

This is the point – you could say the only point – of having an ex-pro in the studio or given a column in the inside back pages. To tell us, those who will never know, what it was like to play, in a packed stadium or at three-men-and-a-dug Ochilview. The point is very definitely not to send them into South Africa’s townships, as the BBC did with Alan Shearer, to attempt the job of foreign correspondent reporting on the trickle-down economics of the last World Cup.

Then again, maybe I’m expecting too much from our humble football folk. Maybe they don’t remember all the (to us) wonderful incidentals because, to them, they weren’t that important. Recently I had the enormous privilege of interviewing Denis Law. He was excellent company, told wonderfully vivid stories about his Aberdeen upbringing and its hardships, but admitted he always dreaded Matt Busby’s team-talks, liked to prepare lying on a bench with a shirt covering his face, and even now rarely watches matches. “Denis doesn’t really like football”, a veteran scribe told me afterwards.

Well, he liked it enough to do it better than anyone else, the greatest Scot there’s ever been. And I don’t have to have played the game to know that.