People still come up and say: ‘You’re rubbish’ but they never remember all the saves...
IF you do, i ndeed, need to be mad to be a goalkeeper, Rab Douglas should expect the knock on his door and the firm hand on the shoulder any day now.
He turns 44 in April, yet the idle Saturday afternoons he has endured since leaving Forfar just before Christmas have been torturous.
‘When you are used to playing every Saturday … it’s a hard one,’ he admitted.
‘My son was back from Canada, so we had a good family Christmas for the first time in 20 years. The down side is you want to play football on a Saturday — but I’ve had a good innings.’
He i s right on that score. If footballers were of a mind to compile bucket lists, Douglas would probably be on to his second red pen by now.
Three Premier League titles and three Scottish Cups with Celtic, a Third Division title with Livingston, First Division and Challenge Cup winner’s medals with Dundee, a u EFA Cup Final, 19 Scotland caps and more than 600 appearances. Not bad for a guy who did not turn full-time until the age of 25.
Why, then, has he continually had to bat off accusations of being not quite up to the job?
His medal haul, not to mention the calibre of manager to have trusted him, suggests otherwise.
‘you get people coming up to you in the pub and saying: “you’re rubbish’,’ he said smiling over a bowl of soup i n his adopted Broughty Ferry.
‘Very rarely do you get someone saying: “I remember that save”. But that’s just the nature of being a goalie.’
From Meadowbank Thistle, his first senior club, to Forfar, his most recent, his constant companion has been a sense of perspective.
A bricklayer to trade, Douglas’ emotional shield against the flak has been a sound appreciation of what constitutes real problems.
‘Football is not a pressure,’ he insisted. ‘When you are working on a building site and your cheque bounces on a Friday, that’s pressure. And that did happen back then.’
The period he speaks of recalls back-breaking shifts punctuated with twice-weekly training sessions with amateur club Symington Tinto and Saturdays spent rolling around muddy goalmouths.
‘It (Symington Tinto) had its own clubhouse and floodlit training area. It was impressive for an amateur club,’ he recalled.
‘Myself and another brickie built the extension on to the club house. Hopefully, it’s still standing!
‘We had our own rules — if you didn’t train, you didn’t play. Boots had to be cleaned. Small things, but everybody respected them.’
Saturday morning kick- off s allowed the man from Lanark to indulge his other passion — avidly supporting Motherwell.
‘ I went home and away,’ he explained. ‘I’ve still got a full ticket stub from the 1991 Scottish Cup Final (Motherwell beat Dundee united 4-3) because one of the boys didn’t turn up. It’s a collector’s item.’
Three games with Junior club Forth Wanderers preceded a move to Meadowbank, who were soon to be relegated to the bottom tier of the Scottish game before being rebranded as Livingston.
‘I’d no belief whatsoever,’ Douglas reflected on his first season. ‘In the second year, I decided to go for it and I kicked on from there.’
By then established as the first- choice goalkeeper, Douglas’s performances in Livingston’s Third Division title-winning team alerted Dundee.
under the full-time tutelage of former Scotland No1 Billy Thomson at Dens Park, he helped them win the First Division championship in 1992 and his performances helped them stay in the top flight for two seasons.
At the turn of the millennium, word had it that the old Firm were on his case. If money talked, Ibrox appeared to be his destination.
‘Blair Morgan, my agent, would have doubled his money had I gone to Rangers but he said I had a better chance of playing at Celtic,’ he explained.
‘you see goalies who have sat on the bench 340 times and played six games. That never appealed to me.’
His steadfast refusal to accept second- best was the common denominator in the dressing room Martin o’Neill was then assembling at Parkhead. For newcomers, it felt like entering a furnace.
‘It was full of born winners and international players,’ said Douglas. ‘I went from being a big fish in the Dundee dressing room to a small one in the Celtic one. That takes a while to settle into but it was a great bunch of boys. I made pals for life there.’
Douglas soon dislodged Jonathan Gould as o’Neill’s No 1 and played a pivotal role in the club’s first Treble since 1969. The league was retained the following season but his sterling contribution up to that point seemed to be forgotten when he shipped two goals in a 3-3 draw with Rangers at Celtic Park in 2002.
‘I was going to chuck it,’ Douglas revealed. ‘Paul Lambert and big Terry Gennoe (the goalkeeping coach) had to speak to Martin.
‘But you just have to come back. No one remembers that you also kept clean sheets in three successive old Firm games.’
It was a similar story as the road to Seville was traversed that season. Despite heroic displays against Blackburn and Liverpool, there are those who have never forgiven him for his failure to prevent Porto’s Derlei scoring the decisive fifth goal in a pulsating u EFA Cup Final.
‘I got stick, Bobo (Balde) got stick (for being sent off) — that’s the nature of football,’ said Douglas.
‘But, on the night, we weren’t quite good enough. I’m not everyone’s cup of tea but I feel I played my part in getting us there. Looking back, it was perhaps the best Celtic team since the Lisbon Lions era.’
Balde was indirectly responsible for Douglas losing a grip on the keeper’s jersey the following season.
Infuriated by a flying elbow from Barcelona midfielder Thiago Motta, the Celtic defender got his revenge in the Parkhead tunnel, yet escaped unpunished. Trying to act as peacemaker, Douglas received the red card that would heroically launch David Marshall’s career in the Nou Camp in the return.
‘you could never wish David to make a mistake but you do wish it was you playing,’ reflected Douglas. ‘I did feel a bit aggrieved.’
By that stage, the international scene had also given Douglas cause for grief. Hailed as a hero for keeping a clean sheet in the first leg of the Euro 2004 play-off with Holland, he picked the ball out of the net six times in the Amsterdam return.
The peak and the trough of his 19 caps had come within a week. ‘I don’t think anybody had a good night in that game. We just got annihilated,’ he said. ‘ Ruud van Nistelrooy ripped us apart.’
With Swedish keeper Magnus Hedman now at Celtic, Douglas’ appearances became increasingly sporadic, although his last game before heading south to Leicester in 2005 was a Scottish Cup Final win over Dundee united.
His three years south of the Border proved to be a mixed bag. ‘I played nearly a full season under Craig Levein at Leicester but then got injured,’ he recalled.
‘The managers kept changing. Neither Martin Allen nor Ian Holloway saw me play but I was completely bombed. Holloway put me on the bench the day Leicester were relegated. you don’t forget things like that.’
A second spell at Dundee was initially the perfect tonic, only for the dark clouds of administration to gather in 2010. The imposition of a 25-point penalty ought to have relegated the club, yet somehow they prevailed.
‘It was the worst period,’ added Douglas. ‘I remember seeing Neil the kitman unlocking his door with tears running down his face. He was first to be axed. I shed some tears myself that day.
‘What that squad achieved was as
We were the best Celtic side since the Lisbon Lions, I would reckon