Gary Imlach has had quite a life.  In his adulthood, the author of this heartfelt sports book has done it all in the world of sports journalism, travelling the globe in pursuit of his passion. 

But, judging by the tale he recounts in ‘My Father and other Working Class Football Heroes,’ he has lived the childhood that millions of Scots dreamed of.  Picture the scene: Playing football in the park by your house with a bunch of childhood friends, your dad comes home from work and calls you over, and gestures your friends to come too, to see the prize he won at work.

Oh, and your dad is Alex Ferguson, and the prize he is showing you and your buddies is the Premiership trophy.  That is the modern equivalent to one of the enchanting anecdotes that Gary Imlach recounts.  His father Stewart, in 1970, was the manager of Everton, and they had just won the old First Division Championship. 

“What could we do with it?  A lap of honour up and down the road past the neighbour’s front garden was out of the question – we might drop it.  There was only one option, a team photo.  That’s what you did with trophies.”

There is a charming and hilarious picture inside the book with Gary, his brother and a bunch of clinger on pals scrambled desperately round the trophy, all deadly serious, as if it were they who had won the prize.

Stewart Imlach was a man from a footballing era long forgotten.  He played for Scotland in the 1958 World Cup and won an FA Cup with Nottingham Forest a year later, earning just £14 a week as a professional footballer (it would take Steven Gerrard about 1.3 minutes to earn that today).

As a historical reference this book is more than comprehensive, but what gives it meaning, what sets it apart from the monotony of Wayne Rooney’s forthcoming autobiography: ‘What I had for Breakfast’, is that it captures the world in which professional footballers used to live before the fame and funding of the Premiership and SPL.  How they were just normal people with normal lives, asides from the fact they got their picture in Saturday’s evening paper.

Gary Imlach’s father had as triumphant a career as the vast majority of today’s stars, and most likely a more successful management stint than all but one or two of them ever will.  Yet, as he conducts a historical search of his late father’s bygone career, it is at times virtually impossible to trace any record that Imlach senior existed, beyond memories, yarns from old team-mates, and family heirlooms.

Imlach travels back to his father’s home town, Lossiemouth, to reminisce with Stewart’s old team-mates from the Highland League, whom he played with before he turned professional.   One gentleman that stood out was Sandy Reid, a charismatic but rooted Scot who loved his home too much, and turned down a lucrative offer to travel south.

“He sounded like my father would if he’d never left Lossiemouth.  The way he used to sound on Sunday phone calls home…growing progressively more Scottish while we sat in the living room listening and laughing.  Sandy was the player that got away or, more accurately, the player that never got away.”

But what is evident from page one is that Stewart Imlach was a man that is now in short supply in modern Britain.  He had a hard work ethic, a belief that the only way to succeed was to do your best and try your hardest.  A trait that quite didn’t rub off on all of his children, as Imlach junior the narrator speculates.

“In the end it wasn’t my temper that sabotaged my dreams of playing football, it was something else in my temperament.  Or something not sufficiently there.  That is to say whatever internal force it was that had propelled my father from a tiny Scottish backwater to the World Cup in Sweden, whatever mechanism it was that hoovered up all the available oxygen around him and turned it into pure effort – whether the game was a cup tie or a charity match.”

Gary Imlach never made it as a footballer.  But he did make it.  His father obviously had a strong influence on crafting him into the man he is.  This isn’t just a story about football.  This is a story about family, about a father and son bond, and how the sporting legacy of a late father can continue to strengthen that bond.