FOR someone who grew up in the Muirhouse housing scheme in Edinburgh where many of the heroin-fuelled escapades of Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie took place in Trainspotting, Gordon Strachan has done rather well for himself over the years.
Strachan, who turns 60 today, has achieved just about everything it is possible to in the game, both north and south of the border, as a player with Aberdeen, Manchester United and Leeds United and Scotland as well as a coach with Celtic.
Not bad at all when you consider his home neighbourhood was the site of the “worst toilet in the world” – the squalid convenience where anti-hero Renton is forced to take the opium suppositories he has scored from his dealer.
Yet, the national team manager, who lived “round the block” from Irvine Welsh, the author of the cult 1990s novel, as a boy, has an entirely different view of the notorious area where the book and subsequent films are set.
As he sat at the nearby Spartans Community Football Academy, the Lowlands League club he is a patron of and who he is gifting old Aberdeen, Leeds and Scotland strips to, and reflected on his life and career to date, it is obvious he holds a huge affection for Muirhouse and is grateful for the grounding it gave him.
“I used to fight with Irvine’s brother regularly,” said Strachan. “Bump into him in the street, have an argument, da da da. Irvine paints this picture of the place, but I think he stayed there longer than me. I left home when I was 15. The drug thing was just starting when I was leaving.
“It just used to be a hard area. If you said something you’d get a smack in the chops, but no one was going to knife you. There were no drugs or all the rest of it.
“I was Spud! I loved living here. I thought it was brilliant. I had football pitches next to the house, a golf course and a beach, it was all there for me to enjoy myself.
“My mate (James front man Tim Booth) is a singer songwriter. He once wrote a line: ‘If I hadn’t seen such riches I could live with being poor’. I just thought this was the best place in the world to get brought up.”
A visit to the pictures to watch T2, the sequel, with his wife recently certainly had Strachan and his other half, if not their fellow cinema goers, in stitches.
“Have you seen the new one?” he asked. “He is writing 1690 on his arm. Lesley and I are looking at each other, howling. That has to be the funniest thing I have ever seen. But even funnier was watching it in England. No one got the joke. The rest of them? Not a clue!”
As someone who stands just 5ft 6in in his studs, Strachan would probably have been an excessively combative character on and off the pitch if he had been raised in Morningside. His belligerent nature, though, is a by-product of his upbringing as well.
That may have served him well over the years when taking on bigger and stronger opponents at football grounds around the world in his playing days, but it has also led to a fair few fall-outs with journalists, players and managers, most infamously with Sir Alex Ferguson, over the years.
Strachan doesn’t dwell for long on such run-ins. That is underlined by the fact he is sitting down for soup and sandwiches with the journalists who have been so critical of Scotland’s performances in their disappointing Russia 2018 qualifying campaign.
He is, though, pleased that his relationship with Ferguson, the man who was responsible for him finally realising his potential at Aberdeen, where they won the Premier League twice, the Scottish Cup three times, the European Cup Winners’ Cup and the European Super Cup together, has been patched up.
“I could spend my life talking about Alex Ferguson and Jock Stein to a lesser extent,” he said. “To have that knowledge of what went on with Alex Ferguson is incredible. You just think ‘we were the only ones involved in that’. That whole Aberdeen thing was immense.
“There were only about 20 of us who worked under Alex at Aberdeen when he turned into that great manager. It was a wonderful, wonderful dressing room to be in. The raw energy in there was amazing. How many people in the world can say they were involved in that? It got a bit tense at times! But it never harmed anybody.
“It is a bit like brothers who fell out of love with each other and got back together again. I think I spoke to him last Friday. It’s like most things in life, when you don’t speak about it then it festers, but once you speak it gets sorted. Not just with Sir Alex, with anybody. We spoke, yeah, and we are fine now.
“It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t a big thing. I’m quite happy floating along. I don’t bear grudges. It can happen. But the best thing in life is to speak about it.
"Anyway, I think Fergie fell out with everybody. You ask Steve Bruce, Mark Hughes, they’ve all been there. There is a whole line of them. I was just one of the first. I was one of the pioneers!”
In a peculiar quirk of fate, their sons Darren Ferguson and Gavin Strachan, who were both professional footballers themselves, are currently manager and co-manager respectively at English League Two club Doncaster Rovers.
“It is a strange thing that our two boys have got together,” he said. “The good thing is we see each other because our boys now work together.
“We haven’t been to games recently because they’ve been on a winning run. I phoned him and said ‘if you’re not going I’m not going either’. So, strong-minded football people like him, and to a certain extent me, don’t go to games because we think it might cause havoc. There’s a nonsense behind that.
“The strongest-minded manager in the world, the best manager of all-time, won’t go and see Doncaster in case it messes them up! And I’m the same! We both say: ‘I’d better not go in case it messes them up!’ It’s got nothing to do with us. It’s bonkers isn’t it?”
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