Friends re-United

May 11 2008 Gordon Waddell

Hegarty And Co To Mark Title Triumph 25 Years On

PAUL HEGARTY walked out of Jim McLean's office seething. A £450,000 offer from Spurs blanked. The chance of a lifetime gone.

It was 1979.He thought he was at the peak of his powers.

Four years later Paul sat on the shoulders of his Dundee United team-mates, head in the clouds, hoisting the Premier League trophy aloft.

And he knew then McLean's decision to keep him that day, to keep all his stars at Tannadice, had just made them legends.

It will be 25 years to the day on Wednesday since McLean walked his homespun heroes up the street to Dens Park for the 90 minutes that would provide a lifetime's satisfaction.

The day he claimed his cornershop wagedwar on the supermarkets - and won.

A team reared almost exclusively through the ranks, low on wages but high on desire, sticking it to the Old Firm as well as Aberdeen and becoming Scotland's champions.

It was a monumental achievement - and two and half decades on it's just as impressive. Maybe more so. Nothing anyone has done since has rivalled it.

And sitting with a coffee in Broughty Ferry last week poring over the memories, the man who captained United to glory grinned: "It didn't happen overnight - it was built.

"And when you look at how it was done you have to take your hat off to Jim.

"Wehad a fantastic squad and of the core of guyswho playedmost games only myself and Eamonn Bannon had been bought.

"Eamonn came from Chelsea for £165,000 and I signed from Hamilton Accies as a striker in 1974 for 30 grand!

"Apart from that Dundee United were every other player's first club. To achieve what we did the way we did was truly unbelievable.

"It's like Bolton winning the Premiership now. It's not going to happen."

Yet ironically for Hegarty he almost was not around to savour the success.

A classic sliding doors job, Paul admits a big "what if?" hangs over him when he thinks back to the days when player power was a distant dream.

Herevealed: "In 1979 United had the chance to sell me to Spurs for £450,000 when Keith Burkinshaw was manager - the team had Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa in it.

"But I still had two years left on my contract andWee Jim knocked it back. In those days the club had all the power.

"Dave Narey was the same - he had a stack of teams after him and West Ham were also in for Paul Sturrock at £650,000.

"It wasn't our choice though. If it had been we'd probably have gone down south to try to enhance our reputations.

"But we didn't have agents or power. I was upset at the time, missing the chance to go to a big English club who won the FA Cup twice on the trot straight after that in 1981 and 82.

"Maybe I wouldn't have made it there - who knows? But for a few months it affected my game.

"It just shows you how the dice roll in football. We won the League Cup, did it again and you could sense something growing.

"Then came 1983 and the title.

We have our place in the history books and I wouldn't swap those memories for anything." McLean had taken the reins at Dundee United in 1971 and began planting the roots of a team that would blossom nearly a decade later.

But it wasn't until Wee Jim took the club to their first ever trophy - a League Cup win over Aberdeen in December 1979 - that Hegarty insists they caught on to their true potential.

And it finally exploded in the spring of 1983.

It was one of the tightest finishes to a title race in history but if anyone deserved it for artistic integrity it was the Arabs.

Over the season they knocked seven past Kilmarnock, hit Morton for six, netted five three times and four on another five occasions.

Their 90 goals in 36 games was a record then and still dazzles now thanks to the dynamism of Davie Dodds and Sturrock up front plus Ralph Milne and Bannon out wide.

Hegarty, 53, said: "Winning the League Cup twice in a row was a hurdle for us - we could see the progress.

"We knew there was a chance of taking the title when that season started but the longer it went on the more we believed.

"The last quarter especially, the time when the campaign comes alive, that's when we showed what we were made of.

"We won our last six games on the trot and scored 19 goals.

"Not that we didn't have our hairy moments. Three games to go we were playing Morton, we were 1-0 up and one slip could have cost us the whole lot.

"Then Hamish McAlpine was injured and I had to go in goal for the second half because you didn't have a sub keeper then.

"But it's a measure of how good the defence was that I had nothing to do and we cruised it 4-0."

The title was won on May 14 with the sweetest taste of all at the home of rivals Dundee.

Milne and Bannon had United two up inside 11 minutes and despite Iain Ferguson's counter leaving them an hour to survive, the championship was theirs by a point from Celtic and Aberdeen in a cheek-clenching finale.

The rain-lashed open top bus ride will live long in Hegarty's memory - as will the testimonial they had to play the next day against For far.

Unsurprisingly the Arabs lost.

He thinks. It put McLean's name up in the pantheon of great Scottish bosses, a tactical genius with the foresight to rear some of the finest talent the country has seen.

But throughout it all his reputation as a confrontational dictator never vanished.

For every player who shone, another suffered with fines, controversial contracts and persistent rumours of dressing-room bust-ups.

Ultimately though it was about what was achieved, not how.

And the record books will show an array of outstanding pros fiercely loyal to their boss.

Hegarty with 707 appearances only comes third on a list behind Narey with 866 and Maurice Malpas on 832.

Throw in 687 for McAlpine, 576 from Sturrock and a meagre 441 for Bannon and it proves Jim must have been doing something right.

Eight-times capped Hegarty said: "He was a hard manager and a disciplinarian, there's no getting away from it.

"But it didn't hinder me at all. I was actually that way inclined - strong on discipline.

"I was a decent Second Division striker when McLean signed me, no more than that.

"But with his knowledge and wisdom he saw something that made him turn me in to a centre-half who played more than 700 times and captained Scotland.

"He had the vision. But his man management? He'd be the first to say it could have been better. I got fined by him, the same as everyone else did.

"His coaching and fitness regimes were second to none though. He set standards for himself then tried to apply them to everyone else.

"And ultimately he built a team that went the distance. The longer we were together the more we knew each other and the better we became.

"You don't get that nowadays because agents move players on all the time.

"But getting to know our mates as people, not just footballers?

Living in each other's pockets, all staying in the city? It doesn't happen by accident, it's good management.

"And the real strength of that campaign was the togetherness.

Only three of us played all the games but we had a squad of 20 and it didn't matter if you played one match or 36, every minute mattered."