October 8, 2024
Full articleYou may think that a footballer becoming a lawyer specialising in sport off the back of a career in the professional game would all be part of some grand plan.
David Winnie, after all, knows the game. He knows what it’s like to be a player, and how to deal with agents. He has the qualifications. And he still has, what he modestly calls, ‘his little black book’ of contacts from within Scottish football and further afield.
But Winnie learned long ago that sometimes, life doesn’t care about your plans.
When he was starting out at St Mirren, Winnie was one of the Scottish game’s hottest properties. He could have gone to university, but then Saints boss Alex Miller persuaded him to give full-time football a crack.
And don’t get him wrong, over the piece, he was glad he did. Even though he was entering a world where, as a callow youth, his naiveite would soon be exposed.
“Tony Fitzpatrick once got on at me for trying to put a bandage on my knee before a game,” Winnie recalled.
“He said, ‘what are you doing?’ I said, ‘well, I’m getting this on my knee’.
“’No, no, no, you don’t do that,’ he says. ‘You might as well just put a big X on your knee. Take it off’. And that was the mindset.
“To be honest, it was a bit like being in the army.”
On the pitch too, he felt a little out of his depth to begin with.
“I think it was about my second or third game as a professional player, I played against Aberdeen when I was 17,” he said.
“Aberdeen had won the Super Cup not long before it. They were arguably the best team in the world at the time. Crazy. I think it was two or three-nil at Love Street, and they just picked us apart.
“I thought to myself, ‘well, that is what it takes to be a professional football player’.
“I didn’t realise at the time that I already played the best team in the world that day, you know, that’s what they were at the time, they were a fantastic team.”
Winnie would have given you long odds that afternoon that he would one day be part of that side. But he still had plenty to achieve at Love Street first.
Having found his feet, Winnie would go on to be part of the St Mirren side that lifted the Scottish Cup in 1987, and one of the youngest captains in the Premier League, as it was at the time. As he led the Saints out to take on champions Rangers at Ibrox on the opening day of the 1989/90 season, he was on top of the world.
Clubs from England were sniffing around him, and he would have surely impressed them that afternoon. But life had other plans.
Winnie was oblivious to the nightmare that lay ahead as he celebrated with the St Mirren supporters following a sensational win for the Buddies.
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