Thanks to an industrial-strength quirk of fate, I sat down with Ian McCall 27 years to the day since he took charge of his first game as a manager. Clydebank against East Stirling for historical accuracy.
We met the morning after Scotland’s Nations League draw with Portugal and he had stories to offer on figures involved in that game at Hampden and any other topic I cared to mention. How could it be any other way after 27 years, 956 games in the technical area that used to be known as the dugout and following the celebration of his 60th birthday?
A time in his life in which he admits he has found “peace” for the first time in 10 years. And the story, McCall is absolutely certain, hasn’t yet come to an end. Reaching a total of 1000 games as a manager remains an ambition but the man who left League Two Clyde, by what could genuinely be called mutual consent two weeks ago, won’t take any old job just to reach that milestone in the interests of personal satisfaction.
“The game of football has, as a player and a manager, given me absolutely everything in life,” he says. “I wouldn’t cheat on the game by going anywhere for no good reason just to hit that figure for posterity. My hunger and desire to get back into the game is based on the fact I know I still have something left to offer. I can’t have fooled people into thinking I was a good manager for the last 27 years.”
It was, ironically, a high point in McCall’s life, keeping Clyde in the SPFL by beating Elgin City by three unanswered goals on the final day of last season, that caused him to fall victim to his own lack of judgment. “If Clyde had dropped out of the SPFL there would have been no way back for them,” he says.
“I had the weight of history on my shoulders throughout the season because Clyde means something in Scottish football. They’ve won the Scottish Cup. Scotland’s longest-serving international manager Craig Brown was in charge of the team for nine years.
“But I should have gone after the win in Elgin. I knew that was the case when Clyde, at the start of this season, beat Partick Thistle in a cup tie at Firhill (a 3-2 victory in the League Cup groups). I went down the tunnel at time-up and I knew that I wasn’t as elated as I should have been.”
Elation and devastation have been McCall’s travelling companions throughout the managerial years he sees split into two distinct parts. The time before his gambling addiction and the happier period that has been created on the back of the 13 years spent without that complication in his life.
His personal assessment of before and after is noticeably free of self-delusion or pity. “I was out of the game for four years and during that time I reinvented myself,” he admits.
“I am proud to have come out the other side of my personal problems and given myself another shot at life. People think they know all about you because you’re in football – but they don’t.
“I’m well aware I’m a Marmite figure in the game because of the way I behaved at certain stages in my career. But, 13 years ago, I went to Rugby Park to work as a pundit for Radio Clyde and I didn’t put a bet on before the game started.
“I knew inside I would never put another bet on and I began the journey that started with losing my way to finding peace for the first time in a decade. I was alone in my life for a long time then I met my partner and got married shortly before my 60th birthday.
“I had been gripped by an addiction through nobody’s fault but my own and I did something about it. One way or another, this life in two parts has been a helluva ride.”
McCall got back the managerial years he thought he would never see when, four years after leaving Partick Thistle to sort himself out, he joined Ayr United and grabbed his second chance. “I turned around that club and they did the same for me,” he says.
“It was a magical time and I need people to see that as part of my body of work in the game and not just focus on parts of what I’ve done. And I don’t airbrush out of history the day I took the team to play Auchinleck Talbot away in the Scottish Cup.
“We lost the tie 1-0 and the team bus was late arriving to pick us up at full-time. Auchinleck’s ground is surrounded by people’s homes and they were coming out into their gardens to serenade me with, ‘Sacked in the morning, you’re getting sacked in the morning’. But then there was a time when I went to Dundee United and, at the age of 38, became the highest-paid manager in the Scottish game outside of the Old Firm.”
There was also a time when, just over a year ago, McCall took Partick Thistle to Ibrox for a Scottish Cup tie and did such a good job of frightening Michael Beale’s side the away fans gave him an ovation in spite of elimination. On the team bus after the match, he got a phone call telling him to go to Firhill for a meeting where he was sacked in a manner so shocking, it causes his voice to waver as he recalls the experience.
“It was as bad a moment in football as I have ever suffered,” he says. “Only those who are truly close to me fully appreciate the sense of devastation I felt that night.
“I had, over two spells in charge at Firhill, spent nine years with what I will always regard as my club. A place where I feel I still have unfinished business. But there was turmoil going on behind the scenes and it was the then interim chairman, Duncan Smillie, who told me my time was up.”
The move to Clyde followed six months after that personal trauma and now McCall is back to contemplating where life takes him next. And with an open mind.
“There would be no challenge I would regard as being beyond me,” he says. “I still think I could manage in the Premiership and it’s only a matter of days since Hearts were linked with a manager, Per-Mathias Hogmo, who is four years older than me.
“At the same time, there is no challenge that I would see as being beneath me. I’ve done the Premiership, the Championship and I was voted League One Manager of the Year when I was at Partick Thistle.
“I also kept Clyde in the SPFL when I was working in League Two with part-time players attached to a club who had no ground of their own and were leading a nomadic existence. I would also consider a director of football position which allowed me to use the experience I have gained to help and support a younger manager.
“Look, anything could happen. You’re talking about a former professional player who was asthmatic and, would you believe, allergic to grass. And someone who recently found out after a routine medical examination that he had somehow negotiated 1400 games as a player and manager while having only one kidney.”
Like the man said, it has been a helluva ride and the story isn’t over yet.