The Graham Spiers Interview: Hamish McAlpine

Hamish McAlpine was the man to ask. Now 67 years old, and raised amid that lovely fertile soil known as the Carse of Gowrie on the north banks of the Tay, it was uplifting to find him hale and hearty in Coupar Angus last week after his recent health scares.

"Och, I'm fine, I'm tickety-boo," Hamish tells me. "I had a wee heart attack while strimming the hedge a couple of years back but they put a stent in me and cleared me up. I also got a new knee a year past Christmas, so I'm feeling in good shape. I play a bit of golf, I go shooting in the hills...I'm great."

It was worth divining just how McAlpine became the eccentric goalkeeper that he was. A legend of Dundee United through the 1970s and 1980s, his father, Ian, had been a striker, and Hamish himself had had no notion of becoming a goalie before the Church critically intervened in his life in the mid-1950s.

"It all started for me when the local kirk minister in Inchture, my home village, decided he wanted to run a football team," he said. "So he got a few of us together but we kept getting humped. After one game, which I think we lost 15-1, they said to me, 'right, Hamish, you try going in goal.' Well, that was it. I put on the heavy woolly jersey and then went a couple of games without losing a goal. They said to me, 'you just stay in goal, Hamish, that's fine.' I didn't really want to be a goalie but it was the start of my career."

Dundee United fans - and the rest of us - recall McAlpine as the agile, often eccentric keeper whom Jim McLean suffered on and off for almost 17 years at Tannadice. Time and again driven demented by McAlpine's hair-raising antics, McLean tried a host of other United keepers - Sandy Davie, Peter Bonetti, Billy Thomson - but always ended up restoring the local moustachioed maestro. McAlpine would play over 700 games for Dundee United.

"I think Jim McLean trusted me - sort of - by and large," says McAlpine, groping around to explain his relationship with the old tinpot. "One thing about Wee Jim was, if you had a bad game, a howler, he'd put you in the next week and give you a second chance. He was consistent that way.

"We didn't get on great, and he could be a wee bit cruel at times, but I've always said, who likes their boss? Jim would rant and rave after some games, but a lot of the time, by the Monday morning, it was forgotten, it didn't linger.

"That Dundee United team of the 1980s never felt like we had any superstars among us. That's how we felt about ourselves. We stuck together, we supported eachother, and we looked out for eachother. I think that helped us when Wee Jim was going off on one."

But, even amid all that camaraderie, I asked McAlpine, how could you withstand the relentless McLean intensity season after season?

"Well, I sometimes didn't care for the way Jim went on about things, and he could get pretty aggressive. Also, if you felt you'd given 100% Jim would turn round and say, 'I want 110%.' He was certainly a hard man to work under. But at the end of the day, he brought us all on as players, he made us better footballers. He just wanted to win, and so did we, so in a perverse sort of way it all worked."

McAlpine himself is recalled with a fervour by United fans, his mix of heroism and daftness making him a perennial cult hero. On a memorable occasion at Ibrox he took a United penalty, struck the Rangers crossbar, and had to frantically retreat back upfield as Rangers broke forward. A tenacious McAlpine display against Werder Bremen in 1982-83, and a penalty save on a thrilling United evening at Old Trafford in 1984, also live long in the Arab memory.

"That night in Bremen - never to be forgotten," he says. "We got slaughtered for 90 minutes but somehow came out with a 1-1 draw. One thing, we knew how to survive at United. And I don't think any United fan will forget Old Trafford in 1984. It was one of many fantastic nights we had."

McAlpine, in fact, was a frustrated outfield player, which is why he often took to playing as the last sweeper, as well as goalkeeper.

"I just liked being involved," he says. "I was always half-decent as an outfield player - on a few occasions I played outfield for United's reserves - and maybe I felt I wanted to work more for the team. I sometimes used to think that, as goalie, I did the least of the work, so if I came out 20 yards, and it saved a team-mate retreating 20 yards, it seemed to make sense to me.

"Sometimes it went disastrously wrong, and Wee Jim would be sitting with his head in his hands. It's just the way I was."

Not many footballers have musical compositions in their honour, but Michael Marra's elegiac 'Hamish The Goalie' is one. The Dundee songwriter died in 2012 but his paeon to Hamish - it is essentially a love song - is among his most revered creations. Marra's imagination roamed wild in verse, such as his suggestion in the song that McAlpine could boot the ball from Tannadice Park into Invergowrie Bay.

"It was a privilege having that song written about me," says Hamish. "Michael Marra used to live in the same village as me - about 200 yards up the street here in Newtyle. It's a quirky song in a way. I mean, the line about me kicking the ball from Tannadice into Invergowrie Bay. Well, that's four or five miles in total. It never happened."

No. But a lot else did around this great, enduring character.