Hugh MacDonald meets David Weir: The footballer monk

But first he accepts the invitation to look back. The peculiarity of Weir’s career allied to his quiet but unmistakeable individuality make him an intriguing character. Weir came late to the playing party but stayed on so long he could have cadged a lift home with the milkman. Famously, Weir started professional football in his early 20s after playing at a small university in the USA and continued into his 40s at Champions League level.

Now ensconced on a pew in the manager’s office at Murray Park, the Rangers assistant manager has the air of the modern professional but he also has a past that has both tested him and made him. Weir was once little boy lost. He found himself both by immersing himself in another world and by dint of a talent that was bolstered by extraordinary desire. Weir is a reader, a father, a son, an art collector, a coach, a husband. He is, at his very core, a winner.

This winner was once lost. He stood in JFK airport in New York only accompanied by a sense of innocence that led to him to look for his bags while his connecting flight was taking off. At 18, he was travelling via NYC, Detroit and St Louis to the University of Evansville in a corner of Indiana. He thought his bags had to be collected at every airport. A woman in an airline booth came to his rescue, sending him off on another flight and assuring him his bags would be there when he arrived.

“I went to America because I was not good enough as a player,” he says simply. “It was my first experience of being on an airplane, first experience of being abroad, first experience of being alone. My dad was in tears at the airport. I had never saw that before.”

An enclosed, working-class life had been exchanged for a life of uncertainty. “It was tough. I found it difficult. You grow up. You have no choice. I don’t know if I discovered toughness, probably the opposite. I was homesick and I missed things. But I developed toughness.”

This served him as he was immediately offered a contract with Falkirk on his return and he went on to play for Hearts and then Everton. This toughness found its natural home at Ibrox. “I was at Everton and Davie [Moyes] was bringing in new centre-backs, just doing his job. I was almost accepting my career was coming to an end. But a physio at the club told me: ‘Why should it be the end? Your body is strong. You can go on if you want'.”

He did. The invitation to join Walter Smith, newly restored at Ibrox in 2007, was irresistible. “At Rangers you have to prove people wrong every week,” says Weir, who was then a 37-year-old centre-back. “That worked for me. I need that constant demand to prove yourself.”

He was, of course, not only coming to the club he supported as a boy but reuniting with a manager who took him to Everton and restored him to the national team after he had been publicly discarded by Berti Vogts after a match against the Faroe Islands in 2002. Cups, titles and a European final would feature on a CV that became so stretched it should have been inscribed on rubber.

He learned from the Vogts experience that there is always a way back. So what did he learn from Smith and Moyes?

He says of Smith: “The biggest thing from him was that at half-time he would tell you what had happened – which is relatively easy – but he would also tell you what the opposition was going to do and therefore what you would have to do and what would consequently happen. He was almost always right. His knowledge of situations was spot-on.”

And Moyes? “His level of detail was minute, especially about the opposition and how we could hurt them. I think Mark and me are more proactive. We tend to look more at our team and what we can do.”

So what of Warburton? “We both have a possession-based philosophy, more Spanish-based than English-based. We also like working with younger players, helping them develop. The football side is an easy marry up. If anything he is more aggressive, more expansive. I was more pragmatic. He is right, I have been converted,” he says. “People say our defence can look exposed but that is part of how we play.”

Observers have also noted the team looks fitter. “It is all football-based,” he says of training. “It is not a radical technique. We work hard, but we work hard playing football. It has all got to be geared to what you want to do on Saturday.”

Weir quietly demurs when it is put to him that the return to Rangers in the management role was an easy decision for him to make.

“I had hesitations but only in respect of Mark,” he says. Weir joined Warburton at Brentford in December 2013, helping to take the club into the Sky Bet Championship where they impressed. They left in February after the owner, Matthew Benham, announced plans to introduce a new management system with a coach reporting to a sporting director.

So why the hesitation? “Mark’s reputation in the game is really good. We have been successful and he was going to get his pick of jobs. I was conscious that I didn’t want my heart ruling my head, particularly in regard to what I said to Mark. I did not want to push him. That was my biggest fear,” says Weir.

“We had to do it for the right reasons and obviously Mark asked a lot of questions and I was as honest I could be. I told him I felt the people in charge of the club now were there for the long term and there for the right reasons.”

He adds: “I told Mark: ‘This will change your life. You will be the first English manager. It is not a thing that comes around very often. It is a great opportunity but be aware of the attention and the significance of the role. You are the spokesperson for half of Scotland really. It will affect everything, your family, how you are perceived. No longer will you be able to slip under the radar’.’’

Weir was not too concerned about budgets or replacing the team that had failed last season and was heading almost en masse out the door. “It is comparative to the budget that we had at Brentford. I told Mark: ‘We can put a team together with that budget’. We were operating in the Championship on the second or third lowest budget and we achieved success in the face of bigger budgets. We knew we could put a team together with relatively sensible money. But we would back ourselves if we got bigger money too.’’

There is a belief and a shrewdness in that answer. Weir protests at one point that he does not want to appear too clever in print but he is undoubtedly sharp, referencing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the bestseller that examines rational and irrational thought. He also has learned through Benham, a bookmaker, that every statement has to be examined for validity. “Some commentators say 2-0 is a dangerous score for the team in the lead. Statistics show that more than 90 per cent of teams in that position go on to win,’’ he says, pointing to an example.

He has listened and learned. But he has also worked. “What helped me in the last few years at Rangers as a player was that I was on my own. My family was in Cheshire. I was a footballer 24/7,” he says.

“I only came up originally for three or four months but I loved it. I loved the size of the club. I loved working with Walter again, I loved that every game is important here. It always is to you. But here every game is important to everybody.”

This immersion in an atmosphere he loved helped him to stay fit. “I tried to maximise the experience. I was always a good professional but I became even more focused. I was up early so I came in early. I did my stretches, did the bike. I would get a massage, do my stretching again. I would cook my own meals. I was living like a football monk,” he says.

The aesthete, though, has a taste for art. He has bought a range of pieces, most notably those of Adam Neate. Asked if the purchases were a hobby or an investment, he says: “A wee bit of both. I would never buy anything I did not like. When I was earning, that was my one weakness I would go buy a bit of art. I would celebrate a final by going out and buying a painting. When I am home, I get enjoyment at looking at them. Every piece I have when I look at it I say: ‘I am really glad I bought that’.”

He is conscious of the rewards football has brought him but he has had to make sacrifices. “The biggest one is the family,” he says. “They are still in Cheshire but that means it is full-on when I am up here in terms of work. It also means that I can switch off when I am with them.” He has four children aged from 15 down and the two oldest boys play football at Wigan.

Weir has retained the work ethic of a father who retired early from BP in Grangemouth but went back to work when he found a life of leisure did not suit him. Of the weekly separation from the family, he says: “I basically look at it as working away from home as so many other people have to do nowadays. Mark is good on this. He is a good communicator and wants to make the players aware of what they have got and what they can achieve. There is a lot of work involved.”

He adds: “Footballers get the reputation for being stupid. They are far from it. It is a hard industry, a brutal industry. It is so hard to get over that white line on a Saturday.”

The “footballer monk” broke that “white line” at an age when many are cultivating a midriff that would shame Friar Tuck. Now 45, he must stand and watch. And think. And look ahead. And work.