SOME 30 years separate two Celtic wingers as they walk past one another in the foyer of a seriously posh Glasgow hotel.

The present player, Scott Sinclair, his partner Helen Flannigan, she of Coronation Street fame, and their incredibly cute baby have just finished breakfast when a man who, for a decade, was a hooped touchline torturer comes over to meet me. I find myself asking if he’d ever been put up in such palatial surroundings by the club.

“Nah, I was in the Great Eastern’” jokes Davie Provan, of a landmark not that far from Celtic Park which, for years, provided shelter for the city’s less fortunate in the east end.

Provan is 60 now and, for a man whose career was cruelly cut short before his 30th birthday by myalgic encephalomyelitil (ME), looks trim and healthy. The blue eyes shine bright as ever and that tongue, which has allowed him to forge a hugely successful career in the media, remains sharp.

Provan, a genuinely gifted player, has never been one for nostalgia and yet he has agreed to sit down and cast his mind to 30 years ago when his football career was ended at its height.

“We won the Scottish Cup in 1985 [beating Dundee United 2-1 with Provan scoring a memorable free-kick] but I had missed a good bit of the season through injury and so reckoned that if I could play through the summer then I could get off to a flyer the following season,” recalled Provan.

“Tommy Docherty got me fixed up with Sydney Olympic and I did start really well. I was flying. But then one Tuesday night I was out, had a couple of beers, nothing over the top, and was violently sick.

“I was diagnosed with gastric flu, missed one game and had a week off. I lost half a stone which I couldn’t afford to, and trained right through which, with hindsight, was the worst thing I could have done, I should have been resting. Then I felt good again.”

However, he was soon to find out that he was far from good.

“It’s Ibrox for an Old Firm game, I run out the tunnel that day and knew something was wrong,” said Provan. “I had blurred vision and felt I was wearing lead boots. Zero energy, no spark. Something was profoundly wrong.

“We are 3-0 down at half-time and I had to put my hand up in the dressing room to say I was unwell. Can you imagine that? It did not go down well with Davie [Hay, the Celtic manager]. That was me out the team.”

No blood samples were taken. Nobody knew was ME was and, while training was the worst thing he could have done, no blame is laid at anyone by Provan.

He said: “I was still playing for the reserves but it got to the stage I slept in for a three o’clock kick-off. I was sleeping 17 hours at a shift. I had to drag myself into training. Celtic were mystified. I was referred to Professor Dermot Kennedy at Ruchill Hospital.

“I told them my symptoms, cold hands, feet, nose, fatigue, headaches, muscle pain. It was some list. Within five minutes of walking in there I had been diagnosed with ME. Professor Kennedy asked how old I was. I told him 29 and he said I probably wouldn’t play again.”

Provan didn’t believe him. He felt that somehow he would get back playing for Celtic. He took to the pitch as substitute the following February in a game against Motherwell, but knew that it simply wasn’t happening.

Hay left, Billy McNeill came in and, after Provan revealed he was done as a player, the man who signed him for Celtic in 1978 from Kilmarnock for £100,000 ensured he would be granted one of the most memorable testimonials in the club’s history.

“It was November 30 and when I left my house it was minus-five. The locks on my car door were frozen. I remember thinking I wouldn’t get a turnout at all on such a cold night. They printed 26,000 programmes because they didn’t think they would get any more – the crowd was 44,000.

“For a while I was bitter that it had been taken away. You take being fit for granted. I thought I had another three years at Celtic and then I would go down the leagues. But when I took a step back and thought more deeply about it, I missed going down the leagues where there would have been some hatchet men who would want a kick at me.

“I missed my legs going so I went out at the top. I had achieved everything domestically that I could have, league and cup medals, player of the year, so eventually I got my head around it and realised I had been very lucky and this could have happened when I was 19 instead of 29. So it was a case of close that chapter and look forward.”

So what next? Radio Clyde asked him to come on board and he stayed for 20 years. He had been with Sky Sports for the last 21 years and has just signed on until 2019. There is a reason for this. He is good; however, Provan’s straight-talking hasn’t always gone done well.

He said: “ It was hard at times, don’t get me wrong. I fell out with Tam Burns, Charlie Nicholas didn’t like it when I said his legs were gone. There were guys I had shared a dressing room with. That’s not easy.”

Provan is keen to stress that despite his long connection with Celtic, he has always and will continue to call it how he sees it. However, he makes no secret of his feelings when I ask what Celtic still means to him.

“A great, great deal,” he says. “I never forget the fact 44,000 turned out for my testimonial. Listen, I get stick from Celtic fans now and again because they think I am too hard on the club. I wasn’t a supporter, not at all. But ten years, three hundred games, leagues and cups, it was great to be part of it.

“I know the club had to move on from the family dynasties but I trusted the old chairman Desmond White implicitly. I used to sign a contract and he filled in the blank numbers. That’s how much I trusted Mr White.

“I know Celtic is much better run but I do think when a club puts those three letters ‘PLC’ at the end of their name they lose something. Maybe I am being a bit misty eyed, but there is an old Celtic and new Celtic, and for all its faults I was privileged to be a part of the old Celtic.”

As honest as he is on air, he is even more acerbic in print. He literally writes his own unmissable column for the Sun on Sunday and did so for years in the News of the World. This where he annoys Celtic supporters, although he is always greeted warmly by those old enough to have seen him play, with his socks rolled down and skipping past full-backs as if they didn’t exist.

There is an argument – and one this observer subscribes to – that ex-Rangers players are often reluctant to criticise the Ibrox club no matter what.

“I don’t think there is any doubt that is true,” said Provan. “You would have to ask them why that is. Maybe there is an unknown code they subscribe to but it’s almost a given that former Rangers players won’t slag off Rangers.

“When David Murray was taking the club deeper into debt, you still had not one of them sounding the alarm bell even when Hugh Adam sounded the claxon. It was still ‘that’s Sir David, steady as you go.’”

Provan grins as he says this. It’s as if he knows his approach is right and the lickspittles are stealing a living. He has years left in him and there is so much more to say.

He said: “I feel fit and well enough to do it. I’ve had maybe three of four relapses in the interim from when it was really bad to now. If I overdo it physically I relapse a bit and have to rest and recharge the batteries.

“Fortunately I am not out digging roads. I only have a microphone in front of me.”