His 15 minutes of fame on the Ibrox turf would have sufficed after rejection reared its head down the road.
Seven years on, Calum Ferrie has urged his team-mates to grasp the chance “millions” would love to have tomorrow afternoon. While plenty in the Queen’s Park squad will not have experienced seeking to silence Ibrox, their No.1’s senior debut came on this very pitch. Injury to Elliot Parish saw Neil McCann turn to Ferrie, who was just 19, with Dundee 3-0 down and it would become four by the end.
Ferrie was introduced with five minutes left and now, not far off 200 games, he laughed and said: “I like to call it 15 minutes in my own head! It’s every kid’s dream to make a debut in professional football. I look back to getting released from Stoke when I was 11, 12 and told I’d never play professional football. When I was released from Port Vale at 17, 18, being told, ‘We’re sorry we think you’re good enough but we don’t have the budget for you right now.’
“When you face those things in your career and you ever go down thinking, ‘Well, this wasn’t meant for me’, I didn’t want to accept that. I fought for that.
“If those were the only five minutes I’d ever played in my professional career, I could’ve looked back and gone, ‘You know what, I did that, I’m proud of myself and I worked hard for that.’ It’s a privilege to play football. It’s difficult some days, same as in any job.
“You can take solace from that five minutes and go, ‘I achieved that’ and kick on. Everything above that is an absolute brilliant bonus, which to this day it still is.
“The week before, the goalie had been struggling with his back and the gaffer said to me, ‘Look, I’m thinking about starting you at Parkhead.’ He pulled through and I thought, ‘That was my chance, that’s it gone.’
“My brother had come over from America and was at Parkhead. He went back home and then it ended up happening on the Saturday!”
Having “managed to make myself a home here at Queen’s Park”, he added: “I’ve said to the boys, ‘Take time to appreciate the situation you’re in because thousands, millions of people would love to be walking out on Sunday.’ Then in 10, 15 years’ time you can think back and go, ‘I gave everything’. And hopefully we can get something out of it.”