Alan Pattullo: Charlie Adam desperate to be darling of Dens

Former Rangers and Liverpool star plottong move to boyhood team

Charlie Adam was with Reading last season. Picture: Mike Egerton/PA Wire

It felt like a blast from the past to hear Charlie Adam, in his Formby-via-Fintry accent, talk so enthusiastically about wishing to join Dundee, the club he supported as a boy on the radio recently.

Footballers nowadays tend to get a bad rap for being cold- eyed mercenaries who are never happy with a salary unless it’s being bumped up.

But here was Adam, practically begging to join a club he knows are hamstrung by financial constraints and referring to them as “we” before he’s even put pen to paper.

Of course, it should not really surprise. Adam has enjoyed an enviable career at the likes of Rangers, Blackpool and Liverpool. He has, for the most part, been too good for the club he really wanted to play for. However, he has never hidden his love for the team and once phoned up then Dundee manager Paul Hartley to offer his services when the Dens Park side were invited down to play Crystal Palace in a testimonial for Julian Speroni, their former goalkeeper, at Selhurst Park five years ago.

It was an emotional evening, no more so than when Adam got the goal he desperately craved before pointing to the heavens in tribute to his father, the late Charlie Adam snr, another Dundee fan who, unlike his son, did not get the chance to play for his favourites.

Instead, he actually turned out for Dundee United under Jim McLean in the late 1980s, when it was rumoured he had to cover up a Dundee tattoo.

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