into

Indeed, if one squinted a little while following the buzz-bomb that is Bannan around the park and forgot how much Scotland were struggling to beat such unremarkable opponents then it was possible to imagine it was McCall out there in the drizzle, the pulsing heartbeat of a team once routinely relied upon to make it to major finals. To those of a certain age he was their era’s Billy Bremner. Except that, unlike the legendary Bremner, who he used to adore watching play for Leeds United, McCall managed to score in a World Cup finals.

He arrived in style against Sweden in Genoa that night 21 years ago to score his one and only goal in 40 appearances for Scotland. “People point out to me that I only got one goal. I tell them: ‘Listen, when you have scored in a World Cup finals you don’t want to go blot your copybook by scoring against San Marino’,” he says now, with a smile. He was the only player from both the England and Scotland squads to feature in every single minute of Italia 90, Euro 92 and Euro 96.

There was a time, however, when McCall feared being left behind. His peers were all picked up by senior clubs and he had begun to be convinced that his lack of inches would count against him. “I was born in Leeds, a kick away from Elland Road,” he recalls. “My Dad used to play with Leeds – with John Charles and Jackie Charlton, and he played with Stanley Mathews and Stan Mortensen at Blackpool.”

These are the memories his father clings to now. Andy McCall, 86, is now in a home in York, and can barely recognise his own son when he visits following the onset of Alzheimer’s. McCall was recently sorting through old cuttings, his own as well as his father’s. An old match programme, from when he was playing for Pudsey Boys’ club, features some biographical details about the then 12 year-old McCall. His favourite player? Tony Currie, a fellow midfielder who played the best football of his career at Leeds in the late Seventies. And favourite team? Glasgow Rangers. “It’s there in black and white,” he says, perhaps still conscious of a need to convince others of his credentials.

“I followed Leeds, too, because they had a good Scottish contingent – Bremner, the Grays, Joe Jordan and David Harvey. I played for Leeds City boys but when I got to under 15s and I hadn’t really grown. Everyone by then had been taken on. Two at Leeds, two at Arsenal, two at Nottingham Forest, two at Huddersfield.

“Instead, I went on to play for a team called Farsley Celtic – oh, hang on I’m not allowed to say that up here, am I?! – and we played a game against Bradford City. It was only me and another lad who had not been taken on as an apprentice by a senior club. At that time, with leaving school, I had begun to write away to banks for work. I thought I’d missed the boat because I hadn’t grown.”

Bradford duly snapped him up, possibly, McCall suggests, out of sympathy for his plight. “They were asking whether there was anyone in the team who hadn’t been taken on,” he says. “Yes, the little runt in the middle of the park.” Perhaps inevitably, it was a Scot who rescued him. George Mulhall signed McCall, putting him on a contract worth £20 a week and setting in motion a deep association with amber and claret which continues to this day, even though the colours now belong to Motherwell rather than Bradford. Mulhall quickly moved on, but the first team-coach, the Paisley-born Lammie Robertson, took the youngster under his wing.

McCall couldn’t move for Scottish influences in his life. Aside from Mulhall and Robertson, there were, of course, his parents. Despite being from Hamilton, his father played all his career in England. This geographical detail would later have an impact on McCall.

“I used to have a go at my mum and dad because my brother was born in Scotland, in Hamilton,” he recalls. “My sister was born in Blackpool, because my dad was playing there at the time, but she’s massively Scottish. And I was born in Leeds, because Dad was by then playing for Leeds. And I was like: ‘why didn’t you come back up and have me born in Scotland?’. He would tell me that in those days the roads were not as good, and we had a little mini with a dodgy clutch. The plan was always for me to be born in Scotland but it never happened. The little mini they had was not reliable.”

According to McCall, he was “born into football”. He might also have added that he was born into a storm. His father could have saved a lot of later heartache had he made that trip, dodgy clutch or not. If McCall had been delivered in Scotland to two Scottish parents then there would not have been any debate about who to opt for when it came to playing international football.

It would have spared the need for the delaying tactics McCall employed in order to stop him becoming shackled to the England team. After being named in both the Scottish and English Under-21 squads on the same day he elected to play for the land of his birth before almost immediately regretting his decision. Hence the deliberate snapping of stocking tie-ups and the tossing of a shin guard beneath the dug-out bench as manager Dave Sexton sought to bring on the dilly-dallying McCall for the final few seconds of a match in Turkey.

McCall was saved by the final whistle as he fumbled around in the dug-out, wasting more precious seconds. He recalls walking down the tunnel at the end with relief flooding through him. “If anybody had taken a picture of me then I had the biggest smile on my face,” he says. There is, though, a photograph of him looking slightly ill at ease as he lingered on the touchline, preparing to throw his lot in with England.

“I could never have played for England against Scotland, I would have been scoring own goals,” he says. “The senior team were playing the following night and won 8-0. I remember being sat on he plane coming back and Mark Wright and Peter Shilton had a bottle of champagne, and they were handing it out to all the Under 21s. And I was like: ‘I am drinking with the enemy here!’”

McCall admits it might be difficult to comprehend why he ended up choosing England. A combination of pressure applied by Bradford and also a niggling feeling that Scotland, with Dundee United and Aberdeen riding high at the time, were proving less willing to pick Anglo-Scots, had helped inform the 20 year-old’s decision. “I took stick for being Scottish all through my youth at school,” he recalls. “And then to go and put myself in the position of picking England, I look back and think: ‘what a bloody idiot’.”

He had already served his time with the Tartan Army, on a “Wembley weekender” in 1981 to see John Robertson score the winner against England from the penalty spot: “Wallace Arnold bus, me and my pal. At every service station I’d buy something different, a lion rampant flag, a tartan scarf and then, finally, a see-you-Jimmy wig. The experience blew me away. I went down again a couple of years after when we got beaten 2-0. I was as big a patriot as anyone for Scotland. Don’t be fooled by the accent.”

The switch from England did not happen immediately, however. Scotland left him sweating a bit. When the call did eventually come he was unable to emulate his father by winning a B cap. Bradford had a relegation crunch match with Sunderland on the same night. He finally pulled on a dark blue jersey for the first time as an over-aged player in an Under 21 fixture, against, inevitably, England. “Some of the boys I had been on the trip with to Turkey I played against them that night,” McCall recalls. It finished England 1 Scotland 0, the scoreline that featured as a headline on the back page of one newspaper on the day it was reported that McCall had pledged his international allegiance to the English. “I just cringed,” he said, with reference to the coverage. “I didn’t want it to be like that.”

Having not lived in Scotland since leaving Rangers in 1998, McCall has been frustrated in his intention to move the family home north of the Border. While the journey between Lanarkshire and Yorkshire is not quite so time-consuming as in his father’s day, and though there has been an upgrade from an old mini, McCall would prefer not to have to make the three-and-a-half hour trip each weekend. However, failure to find a buyer for his home in Harrogate, and concern about the impact of changing schools on his youngest two children, means the family base remains in Yorkshire.

The separation is the one downside to a match between McCall and Motherwell that seems made in heaven. He was worried he had blown it at Bradford, where trying financial circumstances made making a decent fist of the manager’s job almost impossible, although he did well enough. “A stat came out from the League Managers’ Association that, if you don’t make a success of your first job, then 49 per cent of managers don’t get another chance,” he says.

“Motherwell gave me a shot from nowhere. I’d like to pay them back.” This he is doing, from a Scottish Cup final appearance last season to a top-of-the-league clash with Celtic at Parkhead this afternoon.

A quick scan of McCall’s office at Fir Park reveals the usual managerial clutter. There are football reference books, a pile of newspapers which managers of course claim never to read and a wall chart on which McCall’s small but some would say perfectly formed squad is listed (though the difficulty Motherwell are bound to have when seeking to maintain their lofty position in the league is – almost – spelled out by the abbreviation ‘inj’ next to Steven Saunders’ name, with the highly rated defender ruled out for the rest of the season after rupturing an Achilles tendon). Then there’s the tray of up-turned wine glasses and a decent-looking bottle of red in preparation for some hospitality when Derek McInnes’ St Johnstone visit in a week’s time. These post-match quaffing sessions between rival managers have become a staple of the game. He’ll probably share a drink with Neil Lennon today, even though it’s likely that he’ll be gesticulated and hollered at when he climbs down off the bus at Celtic Park, as per norm. “Last year I got off the bus and it was all ‘Stuart McCall, you’re a w***er’,” he says. “I went in and said: ‘Listen to that, they are calling me a winner. Well, I suppose I did win here often enough’.”

Surprisingly, despite playing under Walter Smith for seven years at Rangers, the 15 minutes he spent speaking to his former manager while knocking back the rioja (well, his team had just lost 6-0) after a game in February amounted to their longest one-to-one conversation. “He was giving me advice about how to bounce back,” he says. “I was just listening, taking everything in.”

McCall sensed Smith had been a bit embarrassed at the scale of victory, in the same way Sir Alex Ferguson had not particularly enjoyed seeing another manager endure such personal trauma in Manchester United’s recent 8-2 victory over Arsenal. Indeed, Ferguson almost winced on Arsene Wenger’s behalf as the seventh and eighth goals went in. Smith, too, felt McCall’s pain. Not so Ally McCoist. “Blooming ‘Coisty was still running around retrieving the ball with only about three minutes to go,” says McCall. “I was like: ‘Hey, we’re five down here, go easy...’

Some friend. McCall, however, has been making some new pals on the streets of the Steeltown. “Motherwell are rivals to Hamilton, and I thought when I was coming here that might be a problem, because when I was a boy I used to go and watch the Accies when we’d come up here to visit relatives,” he says.

Not even Scottish football fans can be so petty, although they can be fiercely partisan.

“I had a woman come up to me a week before the [Scottish Cup] final last season,” recalls McCall. ‘I used to absolutely hate you when you played for Rangers,’ she told me. “I said: ‘C’mon, hate’s a bit strong isn’t it?’

“She went: ‘No, I definitely hated you. But I love you now’. And then she gave me a big kiss.”