Meet the best and baddest Scot you’ve perhaps never heard of...
ANDY Morrison is the former Scottish footballer, a hero to supporters he played for, hardly known in his own country.
Does the name ring a bell? Would it help if I were to say he is a Manchester City legend, the iconic captain who led that club from oblivion years before many of their fans even knew where Abu Dhabi was?
A lively character, this centre-half who could play a bit and made Mario Balotelli look like a Trappist Monk. Still nothing?
Well, let me direct you to his 2011 autobiography The Good, Mad And The Ugly, which has the opening chapter ‘What the **** did I do last night?’, involves a fight, waking up in a police station and a head wound. And then the book really gets going.
Morrison moved from Kinlochbervie on the northern tip of the Highlands at the age of eight to Plymouth on England’s south coast. The accent is English but, with a life story of fights, regrets, a lot of booze, a talent for self-sabotage, all done at a time when 10s of thousands of football fans worshipped the ground he walked on, he is of course going to be Scottish.
“I’m getting to Hampden at long last but it’s taken a while,” says Morrison. The 48-year-old is the manager of Welsh side Connah’s Quay who this evening take on Queen’s Park in the Irn Bru Cup quarter-final.
“I actually came close to a cap when I was at City. I was called up for a ‘B’ international but got an injury and then word reached me that Craig Brown was going to pick me, but then I did my knee in. That would have been the pinnacle.”
This game is a good excuse to talk to a man with an incredible story. Andy Morrison is well worse listening to.
“I’m taking my team to Hampden when there are guys I know in prison cells as the result of addiction. I got out if it,” he said. “Life is always quiet and easy when you are winning football matches.
“Am I content? I’m okay. Life chucks **** at you. We all have moods, we all have demons, and I’ve had bad news so today is not a great day, but I like where I am.”
That wasn’t always the case.
Morrison captained Plymouth, Blackpool (where he is worshipped) and Huddersfield Town. Then in 1998 he signed for City, a shambles of a club heading then out of the third tier of English football. “Andy dragged us kicking and screaming from Division Two,” said Joe Royle, the City manager at the time.
Morrison was captain when they won a play-off against Gillingham on penalties, City scored two goals in injury time of extra-time at Wembley, and then a successive promotion took them to the Premiership.
But life was difficult. As he