Phillip the 'teuchter' who crossed Dundee's divide

EVEN the greatest journey begins with just a few short steps. In fact, when it comes to moving between Dundee and Dundee United, or vice versa, that’s all it takes - just a few short steps. Iain Phillip is one of the few brave men who have attempted to cross the street directly, not even using the cushion of another club to ease more gently across the great divide, and dilute the sense of treachery.

In truth, when Phillip decided to swap dark blue for tangerine it wasn’t a difficult decision to make, even though he professes to having supported Dundee when growing up in the Angus village of Newbigging. The Dens Park club he’d spent two spells with, bookending a brief career in England with Crystal Palace, were finding it difficult to re-route back to the Premier Division after what proved a calamitous relegation in the first year of the reconstructed Scottish league.

For Phillip, United presented the get-out clause, and it proved remarkably well-timed. He joined United at the dawn of their great era of conquest, while Dundee rustled dismally through the dead leaves of the First Division, taking three seasons to return, and even then berthing only temporarily.

If this memory doesn’t serve to stir the present-day Dens men, once more flirting dangerously with demotion, then the recollection of another four-season spell of low crowds and dimmed ambition in the mid-1990s should help devote them to the cause of SPL survival.

Phillip didn’t enjoy the First Division, and had little appetite for the gritty football required to exit it. Although he describes himself as a "teuchter" from the countryside he was the most elegant of defenders, quite unsuited to the rough and tumble of an invariably agricultural promotion scramble.

However, his testimony should be heeded by those players who this weekend step into the latest round of what is proving a ferocious relegation battle. Top of today’s rump bill is the Dundee v Dundee United clash, the first time since 1976 that the clubs have contested a quite so brutally vivid fight for survival.

Should either team emerge triumphant, any lavish celebration that is planned might prove rather too precipitous. Dundee won this last donkey derby 29 years ago, rounding off an unbeaten season against their rivals.

But the prize for this might as well have been a bowl of fruit since it didn’t take long to wither in their hands. Dundee still fell through the trap-door, condemned by an inferior goal difference to their city rivals, and also Aberdeen. The margin was slim, the cost great as the First Division swept Dundee into its depths.

"It didn’t suit me at all," says Phillip, who can spot the triffid-like tangle of football club floodlight pylons from his office in Dundee, but who has not stepped into a ground to watch a game since he played the final match of his career for Arbroath.

"It was a different style of football in the First Division. We had to change to cope. The ‘get stuck in and play the ball later’ approach wasn’t in my make-up really.

"I was glad to get away, and also it became clear that me and new manager Tommy Gemmell weren’t really hitting it off. I jumped at the chance when Jim McLean came in for me."

Any concerns he had about joining the enemy fled from his shoulders when considering the alternative: reserve team football at a First Division club. Gemmell clearly didn’t fancy him, and Phillip, for all his self-confessed lack of confidence, wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass him by.

He had already suffered the agony of seeing a possible move to Celtic blow away on a miserable night in Stockport. He was playing for Palace in the FA Cup at Fourth Division Stockport County, and the rain-lashed evening proved a fitting backdrop to a 4-0 hammering.

Jock Stein could have picked a different match to assess Celtic’s latest signing-target, preferably the 5-1 defeat of Manchester United that remains one of the highlights of Phillip’s career south of the border.

In the solemn hush of a Stockport corridor, Phillip was unable to even look at Stein as they passed each other. "He just said, ‘look, it was one of those games, I’ll come down again’," says Phillip. "But nothing ever happened."

By the time he’d returned to Dundee the nagging doubts and the creeping suspicion that he had gone as far as he could in the game began to snag at his soul.

A League Cup win just weeks after his return - celebrated with an ill-advised hooly round at Jim McLean’s house, after he’d just taken up the reins as Dundee United manager - offered a degree of comfort, but the subsequent descent into First Division obscurity brought the old fears galloping back.

He’d adored his first spell at Dens, playing "with the thrill of an amateur" too caught up in the adventure of the game to care. "My confidence hadn’t been knocked then and in the old First Division the pressure wasn’t the same as in the Premier League," he explains.

"Dundee were never going to win the title, but we’d always be in the top six, and we were a good footballing side."

Phillip’s move to Tannadice saw him reacquainted with a purist’s philosophy, and two league-cup winning medals - the second of which earned against Dundee - and a league title win provided a genuinely talented defender with the successful flourish his career deserved. And in one aspect he’s unique, being the only player to have collected major honours with both Dundee clubs.

And he’s also one of the few Dundonians unaffected by the tribalism of today’s nerve-shredding occasion. "I will keep an eye on the score, but I won’t be rooting for one or the other," he says. "I have an affection for both clubs. I hope they both stay up."