Growing up in Belfast, he was the skinny, football-obsessed boy whose shoes fell apart because he couldn’t stop kicking a ball. He even slept clutching a ball, in his back box-room, beneath posters from Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly pinned on his wall. The boy who was turned down by several scouts because they thought he was too small would soon prove he was head and shoulders above everyone else.
In fact he was a giant. Unnaturally gifted, he glided across the pitch like Peter Pan with double-jointed ankles, twisting the opposition inside out at will, often doubling back to do it again just for pleasure.