Even before blindness in his right eye ended a playing career that included 27 Scotland caps and a key role in Celtic’s nine-in-a-row success, he had started to coach the youth team at Chelsea, his final destination as a player. He was 28 years old.
Since then he has filled almost all of the increasing number of managerial and advisory roles at the modern football club. On the day that Hay, now 56, arrived at East End Park, Jim Leishman became Dunfermline’s executive director of football. Depending on the parameters of that most fashionable of positions, the two men could find reversed the relationship they enjoyed at Livingston, where Hay was general manager to Leishman’s head coach. Such division of responsibility attracts derision from Scottish football observers accustomed to the omnipotent manager, but Hay is relieved that we are finally catching on to the structure that saved his faith in football at a time when it was at its most fragile.
After first assisting and then succeeding Ally MacLeod at Fir Park and taking Motherwell to the First Division title, Hay returned to Parkhead as manager, aged just 35, in 1983. In 1985 his Celtic side lifted the Scottish Cup, while the championship followed the following season. He was sacked after failing to defend the title against Graeme Souness’s revolutionised Rangers.
Hay was crushed by the decision, the enthusiasm that had characterised his rise as a manager torn from him. After a brief sabbatical, he was considering a short-term offer from Newcastle when a call from Scandinavia caught his imagination. “Within the space of 24 hours I almost took the Newcastle job; then, through somebody I knew in Sweden, Lillestrom came up and I just felt that was right.”
In his only season, the Norwegian semi-pro side won a championship that, save for Viking Stavanger’s 1991 success, has been the property of Rosenborg ever since. The Scot had rediscovered the training ground, freed by a system that would herald his re-emergence as a manager back home, more than a decade later.
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“You gain through the experience of each season and hopefully you can use that to help the club you’re at,” he said. “Lillestrom was a part of it. That was the first time I became a coach and not a manager. It was the general manager who dealt with the organisation and the contracts. That’s the way the game has gone now and you could see that it was the way ahead. I got back to coaching the team.
“After leaving Celtic I hadn’t been too keen to get back in, and going to Norway rekindled my enthusiasm for the game. I’ve been a manager and an assistant manager, an agent, a scout, and I’ve worked behind the scenes at Livingston. Strangely enough, I find that I’m as enthusiastic for this job, at Dunfermline, as I was for my first one.”
If Hay is to continue the renaissance that, despite being twice overlooked at Almondvale, saw him step out of the shadows to bring the CIS Cup to West Lothian, much will depend on his relationship with Leishman. Hay hopes that his colleague will allow him to focus on the field of play, but as well as relieving some of the pressure, Leishman will hold the purse strings. The new manager has already gone public with his desire to replace the departed Stevie Crawford and Derek Stillie, respectively the club’s top scorer and first-choice goalkeeper, but the director of football will be no pushover.
“There will be times when I have to say no to Davie, but he knows the realities of the game just now,” said Leishman. “If I have to say no then he’ll understand the reasons behind that. The money is just not available, but I’ll be saying yes as many times as I can.”
Changed days from Livingston’s debut season in the SPL, when Hay’s renowned European contacts harvested a host of foreign signings who delivered a third-place finish. “It was a great relationship then and I’m sure that will continue,” said Leishman. “We signed (David) Fernandez, (Javier Sanchez) Broto, (Oscar) Rubio, (Francisco) Quino, we brought a lot of good players to Livingston. It’s a shame that started to break up last year, but you move on.”
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Hay has done just that. He has heeded the lessons of a harsh business, survived the long knives at Celtic and Livingston and failure at St Mirren, where relegation sent him to the periphery of the game until Livingston sought his sage advice, while sticking to an ethos fashioned by Jock Stein, the man who signed him for Celtic and whose portrait is never far away at Dunfermline, another club he managed. “I’ve tried to be fair but firm,” said Hay. “I think that the one club where I was over-critical of the players might have been St Mirren. I was, at times, too firm and we finished second-bottom. Apart from that, I’ve had success everywhere.
“My philosophy hasn’t changed that much since I took my first job at Motherwell. I give the players respect and they can only lose it. Accordingly, I try to get respect back. I try to get them as fit and as well-organised as possible, and through that the enjoyment comes. If you asked most players I have worked with, I think they would say they enjoyed it.”