He wiped his brow and told the gaffer: “Remember, I have to be away for three o’clock.” At the appointed hour, he dumped the spade, went home and washed away a day’s work before heading into the Glasgow hotel.

Andy Ritchie, tarman and Morton player, had an important date. He was to receive his award as the Scottish football writers’ player of the year for 1979.

“I was never full-time at Morton. I had to earn a wage. Sixty quid a week does not go far when you have a family,” he said of his pre-award ceremony duties.

Ritchie is one of Scottish football’s characters in the same way that Pele was one of Brazil’s footballers. His career at Celtic was shortened by his attitude, his spell at Morton was illuminated by it. Ritchie was a diamond that sparkled on the banks of the Clyde. The primitive surroundings of a ramshackle Cappielow were inhabited by a cultured footballer.

But Ritchie was not only a man who possessed talent. He could spot it, too. Sitting in a Glasgow hotel to have a natter about a book detailing the lost geniuses of Scottish football, Ritchie talks engagingly of the players he helped bring to Celtic Park as chief scout for Tommy Burns and then Wim Jansen.

He was the godfather to the Three Amigos of Pierre van Hooijdonk, Jorge Cadete and Paulo Di Canio. The signing of the Dutchman was straightforward.

“Tommy Burns and me sat in a back room with a big pot of tea and two packs of Jaffa Cakes and we watched a video of Van Hooijdonk. He was running out of ways of scoring goals – right foot, left foot, headers, free-kicks, penalty kicks. I remember thinking about how he would look – all 6ft 3ins of him – in a Celtic jersey. He was a £1m player but they knew about that in England,” he said. It was Celtic who signed him, however.

But what about Cadete?

“After a Celtic-Barcelona game at Parkhead, I was chatting to Bobby Robson. He asked me what I did and I said that I was the chief scout. He asked what type of player I was looking for and I said a front man. Later he came over to shake my hand and there was a piece of paper in it. The name of Cadete was on it.” Robson had worked with the player at Sporting Lisbon and knew he would come to Parkhead.

And Di Canio?

“A pal of mine in Italy raved about him. He said that the fans would love him but the manager would get fed up with him after about six months. He was right.”

Ritchie, who now combines scouting work with his role as an SPL match observer, acknowledges that this transfer window is a crucial time for Celtic. “This is Tony Mowbray’s big opportunity to build a team for himself,” he said. The recruitment of a top player “stimulates people” said the scout who brought personalities to Celtic Park.

But how would he sell Celtic to an undecided target today? “I would wait until a big European night and drag him down the tunnel and let him look around. I did it with [Mark] Viduka,” he said.

There were the ones who got away, however. “We had a huge stadium that could hold 60,000 and we wanted to bring players who could get bums out of the seats,” he said. “We wanted to bring Georgi Kinkladze in [from Manchester City] but we were shopping outside our budget. The gaffer said that we would get nothing if we don’t ask –40 times,” he said.

That attempt, of course, failed as did a move to bring a Japanese player to Celtic Park long before the advent of Shunsuke Nakamura.

“I wanted to bring [Hidetoshi] Nakata. Wim Jansen had known him from his spell in Japanese football. We could have got him for about £1.3m. I approached the directors, telling him how big he could be commercially. I told them they would fly jumbo jets in from Japan to watch this guy play. Two months later he dyed his hair red, wore white boots and went to the World Cup. Everyone knew who he was then. He did not hide his light under a bushel.”

Nakata went on to have a successful career in Serie A.

Ritchie is left to ponder what might have been not only with the players who did not sign, but of his career that did not fully match its early promise.

His life changed one Sunday morning when he travelled to Cumbernauld as a “stand-in” for another player in a trial match for Middlesbrough. “I was taken off after half an hour,” he said. “I was thinking: ‘I could not have been that good’.”

He had been sensational and Middlesbrough had withdrawn him as he was causing a fuss among other scouts on the touchline. By the time he travelled home that night, Ritchie was a target for Manchester United, Middlesbrough, Tottenham Hotspur, Rangers and Celtic.

“It was just a matter of who I would sign for,” he said. He chose Jock Stein’s Celtic and became a first team player before his 17th birthday. “I scored more than 100 goals for Celtic Boys’ Club and then was sent to Kirkintilloch Rob Roy where I scored 36 goals in 14 games,” he said.

“I came on as a substitute for Billy McNeill in 1973 and six months later was playing in an Old Firm match,” he added. “It all was easy. You did what you were telt. You got a kick up the backside or a slap on the heid.”

He talks of one game at Brockville where he cut in from the wing to see Kenny Dalglish demanding a cut back to him on the six-yard box. Ritchie, instead, watched the goalkeeper move off his line and thrashed the ball into the net. He was celebrating in front of the fans when he felt a slap on the head. “It was Kenny and he was telling me never to do that again,” he said.

Ritchie’s career stalled at Celtic Park and he left for Morton where he enjoyed a spell from 1976 to 1983 where he bore regular witness to his prodigious talent. But in those pre-Bosman days, he was shackled to the club and the move to a bigger side never materialised.

His cause was not help by extra-curricular activities that drained his fitness. When Ritchie speaks of working as a salesman for Guinness, he is the first to appreciate the irony of the situation.

“Football has changed. It is well-rewarded. The players live well,” he said. “They are quite happy in the gym, pumping iron. But that was a punishment for us. If we were lifting weights we were wondering what the rest of the team was doing at Barrowfield.”

He talks candidly of the missed opportunities of this career. “Instead of knuckling down and working harder, I took the easy way out. I regret that,” he said of a Celtic career that spanned three years from 1973.

Ritchie went on to play for Motherwell, Clydebank, East Stirlingshire and Albion Rovers. He would have graced the shirt of Liverpool, just one of the clubs who made an inquiry for him when he was lighting up Cappielow with his pyrotechnics.

“I only achieved 50% of what I could have achieved,” he said with a brutal honesty. For those who saw him, though, this half-measure provided memories that still intoxicate.

* Flawed Genius: Scottish Football’s Self-Destructive Mavericks by Stephen McGowan is published by Birlinn, £14.99