The fact that it is a Scotland international football weekend, and that a potential Faroe Islands banana-skin is on the menu, was all the gratuitous excuse that was needed yesterday to speak to Alan Rough. The former Partick Thistle and Scotland goalkeeper is a bluff, likeable, slightly chaotic character who seemed worth some jovial conversation last night before he hit the airwaves with his own brand of homely, self-effacing punditry for Real Radio.
''Roughy'' these days is everyone's friend, though in a career spanning Partick Thistle, Hibs and Celtic, as well as 53 caps for Scotland, he got caught in some hair-raising antics which didn't always generate a decent press. I need only mention one such career calamity: Argentina 1978. To have come through that, as Rough has, with only the memory of a bad perm for a permanent wound, can't be bad.
As I told him yesterday, in some minds he will forever remain the five-to-three Firhill goalkeeper. In those glorious, some say mis-spent years as Thistle's finest, Rough had his own unique style, emerging from the Firhill tunnel before Thistle's weekly smattering of 7000, more often than not wearing a blue, red, or sometimes green goalkeeper's jersey, which, in those far-off 1970s days, seemed cooler than cool.
As the outfield Jolly Jags waggled their legs in preparation for kick-off, Rough would spit into his paws and sometimes calmly run mud through his fingers, all the while seeming strangely detached from the proceedings. He was, and remains today, a man who dislikes fanfare.
He was a sort of Scottish Phil Parkes, the QPR goalkeeper who famously advertised Cossack hairspray on TV, with a Parkes-like mane of strawberry-blond hair which almost seemed to billow in slow motion as he leapt this way or that keeping Thistle or Scotland in the match. Look again at footage of his famous Fosbury-flop save from John Toshack at Anfield in 1977: as Rough hits the deck, how cool is that blousy, Mott the Hoople thatch, ruffled yet largely undisturbed? ''There's no way that was my best save for Scotland,'' he says, ''but it's the one everyone remembers.''
All that time he was Scotland's No.1 goalie, this move and that to bigger clubs forever breaking down, ensuring that Firhill's five-to-three guardian of the sticks would remain where he belonged.
''I came through the ranks at Thistle, playing for the under-16s and under-18s before making my first-team debut at the age of 18 in 1968,'' says Rough. ''I loved my time at Firhill just because Thistle were such a friendly, family-atmosphere club, though it is probably true that I stayed there for too long. I mean, I was a Scotland international playing for a relatively small club for almost 13 years.
''They were more innocent days back then. There were bids for me left, right and centre but I never got to hear of them. I now know that, for a fact, teams such as Spurs, Coventry, Sheffield Wednesday and Middlesbrough all came in for me but I was never informed and nothing ever materialised.
''The most disappointing one was probably Middlesbrough. I did eventually hear about that offer from someone at Thistle and I think around (pounds) 100,000 had been tabled for me. I can recall it painfully, because it was 1977, the morning of the Scotland-England match at Hampden, and I remember Alex Cameron coming up to me about two hours before kick-off and saying: 'You must be disappointed about Middlesbrough?' I said to Alex: 'Middlesbrough? Why would I be disappointed, what are you talking about?' He then told me they'd just signed Jim Stewart from Kilmarnock, so that was another move up the spout.''
Life wasn't any less colourful with Scotland. A veteran of three World Cups, Rough's finest moment in the public eye was that famous backward, arched dive to deny Toshack's sure header in the World Cup qualifier between Scotland and Wales at Anfield in 1977. It was the seminal moment of the match which vouchsafed Arthur Montford's famous shriek 25 minutes later: ''And Argentina here we come!'' Ach, well . . . these things happen.
As a Scot, one doesn't want to dwell on Argentina '78 any more than one does Culloden, the Darien disaster or Sydney Devine, but the fact is, it happened. Rough was one of that brave band of men who survived endorsing cars and insurance gizmos amid great fanfare before leaving for ''the Argentine'' only to return home three weeks later to a shamed nation which was going berserk.
This reporter, by the way, was one of those guilty fools. I was there with my father at the big Hampden send-off at the end of May 1978, the one where Ally MacLeod walked through an on-pitch guard of honour formed by Tennents beer-can girls wearing little more than pom-poms, before shrieking and bawling at those same players 25 days later.
''I played 53 times for Scotland, and maybe that was one reason why I remained satisfied for so long at Thistle, because back then you had a big international match about once a month to look forward to,'' says Rough. ''To be honest, I'd love to say the World Cups were the highlights, but they weren't because you couldn't enjoy them, there was too much pressure. Even Mexico in 1986 was a midden. You were praying to get home.
''Everyone knows about Argentina. It went from bad to worse and turned into a total nightmare. The worst of it was probably the way the Scottish fans turned against us. And the newspaper coverage back home made it worse, all so exaggerated and embarrassing. To be on News at Ten each night, and to hear of all these lurid tales which somehow were being printed back home, made you realise the whole thing had gone daft.''
In fact, typical of Rough, he was involved in a second, dramatic World Cup do-or-die qualifier nine years after the '77 game at Anfield when, once more against Wales, and the night Jock Stein died, he mesmerised everyone by insouciantly walking out for the second half after Jim Leighton suffered his contact lenses fiasco in the Scotland dressing-room at half-time.
As the slightly more portly Rough, then with Hibs and getting towards the end of his career, meandered forth that night, the experience of Scotland fans gawping at the pitch and exclaiming ''Christ, it's Rough!'' is still memorable. For some reason, fate decreed that this very calm, almost demure character should be the subject of some remarkable incidents.
''I had a great career, especially with Scotland, the obvious regret being that at club level I should perhaps have made more of it,'' he says. ''When I do the radio show now I think I have a decent affinity with neutrals, probably because of my Thistle connection, them being the 'non-bad' club of Glasgow. It's funny how it all lingers, because my career was years ago.''
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