THERE are times in life when a man has earned his right to rub it in.

Standing alone in a pub in the north of England, decked out in a tartan uniform that would make Harry Lauder look unpatriotic and having just made a 400-mile round trip on the bus to a match he was supposed to be nowhere near, Stuart McCall felt no guilt whatsoever over making the most of a rare moment of one-upmanship over the Auld Enemy.

McCall played 40 times for the country of his father Andy's birth, scoring in a World Cup and playing in the finals of three major tournaments.

Ask him about his favourite memory related to the national team, though, and there is no hesitation over the answer.

McCall was a teenager on the groundstaff at Bradford City when he made a point of defying the ban on away supporters imposed by Ted Croker, then secretary of the Football Association, ahead of the Home International match between England and Scotland in 1981 and catching an early-morning bus to London to see John Robertson record a famous Wembley win with an expertly-converted penalty-kick.

It was a day of defying authority. Despite his tender years, he was back in a bar in his native Leeds before shutting-time and keen to fill the locals in on every single second of his awfully big adventure as part of the Tartan Army.

"People ask me about my favourite Scotland moment playing-wise, but, for me, it was going to Wembley in 1981," he said. "I went down on a bus from Leeds with my pal.

"I bought something Scottish at every service station, so I got a 'See You Jimmy' wig I didn't really need, a St Andrews flag and a Lion Rampant.

"I was only 17 and I was at Bradford. It was funny because I remember getting the 6pm bus home from Golders Green after the game, so I was back in Leeds for just before 10pm.

"I was head to toe in tartan and I went into my local and a guy said: 'Do you want to give it a rest?'. He thought I'd got all dressed up to watch it on telly in the house and was milking it, but I had the programme, threw it down and said 'Get it up ye'.

"I travelled down on a normal bus from Leeds to London. It was one of those Wallace Arnold ones or something.

"We had to get on that bus at 6pm at Golders Green or else we wouldn't get home. I remember fighting my way through the Tartan Army on Wembley Way to catch it."

McCall, of course, would return to Wembley several times as a player. His one and only taste with Scotland, however, came in the finals of the European Championship in 1996 where his former Rangers team-mate, Paul Gascoigne, proved his nemesis.

The draw for the qualifying section of the 2018 World Cup offers an opportunity for revenge. McCall will already have pencilled the date of November 11, 2016 into his diary.

He still cannot help but wonder what would have happened in that pulsating Euro 96 encounter, though, had Gary McAllister not seen a penalty saved by David Seaman just moments before Gascoigne charged up the field and flipped the ball over Colin Hendry's head before making it 2-0.

"Before that penalty, Terry Venables, the England manager, actually had the board up and Gazza was coming off," recalled McCall. "However, the keeper saved it, they broke and from the corner and Gazza scored one of the best goals ever seen in a Scotland-England game.

"We deserved more for the performance. Everyone will point to the penalty, but I thought it was a really good save.

"I don't think we should have won the game, but we possibly didn't deserve to lose."

McCall finds it impossible to hold a grudge against Gascoigne, though. Despite delivering one of the most painful defeats of McCall's career, the complex and irrepressible Geordie still found time to make a gesture that remains with him to this day.

"There were club battles all over the pitch that afternoon," recalled McCall. "I was up against Gazza, a Rangers team-mate. It was a Tottenham pair in Colin Calderwood and Teddy Sheringham against each other and Alan Shearer was facing a Blackburn team-mate in Colin Hendry.

"I'm always focused on the game, so I'm not one for swapping shirts. Before the match, Ally McCoist had asked for Gazza's shirt and so had Darren Jackson as he'd played with him at Newcastle.

"We came off at half-time with game goalless, Gazza ran down the tunnel, took his top off, gave it to me and said: 'That's for your little girl'.

"I'd done a TV interview the night before and, because my daughter was born in England and loved Gazza from Rangers, she wanted it to be 3-3 with me and Gazza getting a hat-trick.

"I think I said something like she would have loved Gazza's shirt, but I'd never have asked him for it."

McCoist did get the jersey Gascoigne wore during the second half of the match, but McCall remains content that he got the jersey his colleague from Ibrox failed to score in.

"After Gazza had given me his shirt, I put it in my bag at half-time and never mentioned it again," he said.

"After the match, we were on the bus going back to Birmingham, where our next game was taking place, and was sitting right at the back.

"Coisty had Gazza's shirt out and I was asking him how he could take the shirt of someone who had just knocked us out the tournament.

"He said I was only jealous. I said 'Jealous f*** all, I got a shirt that didn't score against us'.

"Gazza's goal was the difference, but, if the penalty had gone in, he was coming off."

As a player, McCall's greatest moment was perhaps the early goal that laid the foundations for a 2-1 win over Sweden in Genoa in the finals of the 1990 World Cup. He earned his seventh cap in that pulsating affair and admits, considering he had previously opted to play for the England Under-21 side before having a change of heart, it altered his relationship with the Scotland support.

"A lot of the Scotland fans probably didn't know who I was before we went to the World Cup," he admitted.

"The punters were probably thinking: 'Who is this jumped-up little Englishman pulling on a Scotland shirt?'

"They'd have been on about my stupid accent, talking to Hazel Irvine on telly after we'd beaten Sweden.

"That's one thing I remember, doing an interview with her on the springboard of the swimming pool at the hotel at around 9am… when I'd been up until 7am playing cards."