DUNCAN FERGUSON Football's greatest hard-man sets the record straight on fighting, partying, prison and more

Infamously, once beat a burglar so badly, his wife was worried he had killed the intruder.

During his playing career in England, he collected EIGHT red cards, a record for a player.

Three times as a youngster, he was convicted for assault, twice after fights at taxi ranks and once after a scrap with a fisherman in the picturesque coastal village of Anstruther, in Fife. A fourth assault charge - for headbutting Raith Rovers defender John McStay while he was playing for - ended with Ferguson serving a jail sentence in Barlinnie, one of Britain’s most notorious jails, known locally in Glasgow as The Big Hoose, or Bar-L.

But almost 30 years on from that stretch in The Big Hoose, Big Dunc has mellowed out. A lot.

And anyhow, he reckons his reputation has not always been that fair, even though it seemed, for many years, he did not exactly try and shake it off.

WATCH: The Full interview with Duncan Ferguson and Chief Sports Writer Andy Dunn will be available on the from 10am on Monday.

“I’m not that big hard case that everyone makes me out to be,” he laughs when we meet in , a city he has long adopted as home.

“But I’ve got the record. I’ve got the red cards, they are there. I’ve got others things that happened to me off the field, they are there. You cannot get away from that. But I’m not that man.

“I got myself into some scrapes when I was younger … but who’s not had a fat lip when they were younger?

“I thought it was incredibly unfair and unjust what happened to me (being sent to prison for the McStay incident), but you get that reputation. You have got to deal it with your whole life … Big Dunc, the hardest man in football.

“Let me tell you … I’ve never even been the hardest man in one of my dressing-rooms.”

Most of his team-mates would tell you differently and he certainly never shied away from confrontation, as he makes very clear in his upcoming autobiography.

Released next week, Big Dunc is a searingly honest account of his career and his life, including a painful reflection on that time in Barlinnie.

“In a way, I found it hard to talk about that,” he says. “You kind of lock it away.

“I was a young man, I was fearless, I didn’t care. I had this approach that I had to get in there and get it done but it was obviously terrifying. They knew I was coming. I was in D Hall and when I walked in there for the first time, the place fell deadly silent. People were all on the landings. It was like a coliseum and all eyes were on me. It was not an easy experience.”

Duncan’s tough guy image became even more vivid when it emerged he had hospitalised one of two men who were burgling his home in 2001 while his wife and children were home.

“I gave him a bad one, I was pumped up,” he says. “One of them was too fast for me.”

Bizarrely, it happened again in 2003 and, this time, the sole intruder also came off worse when apprehended by Ferguson.

Not many people, if any, had Ferguson in the wrong for those altercations but he is the first to admit that a lot of the trouble he found was because of his own doing.

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And a lot of it was down to his relationship with alcohol, a relationship that he knows undermined a playing career - with Dundee United, Rangers, United and, of course, most memorably, with - that should have brought him more than 423 professional appearances and 126 goals, and a mere seven international caps.

He says: “I thought I could go out drinking, do what I wanted to do, did not need to rest. I was falling out of nightclubs on a Friday night. I thought I was indestructible.

“I thought I can go out on it on a Friday night and destroy a team on a Saturday … and I was doing it. But in the end, it all catches up with you. You start getting injuries. But you don’t clock that it’s the booze that could be causing these injuries.”

But he did clock that he would better off without the booze.

He says: “Where there’s drink, there’s trouble. That’s what it is like in everyone’s life, particularly my life. When we were young, we were getting into states. I was out at 13, getting bottles of cider.

“When you are drinking, there are a lot of idiots about … and you are one of them.

“When I retired from playing and I was still drinking, I got myself in a wee bit of trouble,” he says. “I had stopped playing football but the violence was still there off the field.

“I knew then that I had to stop because I was putting myself in danger. I moved to Majorca and it was easy to drink every day. And sure enough, before you know it, you ARE drinking every day. But one day, I woke up and knew I had to stop - and did. I have not touched a drop since.”

That was over a decade and a half ago and 53-year-old Ferguson is now pursuing a career in management that he hopes will one day lead him back to his beloved Everton.

It is a sentimental thought - proof that under the hard case, maybe there is a bit of a softie.

Big Dunc: The Upfront Autobiography by Duncan Ferguson, with Henry Winter, is published on 8th May by Century

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