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DUNCAN FERGUSON has broken his 18-year silence in Scotland and confessed: “The daft boy everyone remembers has gone.”

Now 40 and chasing the coaching badges he hopes will see him become a boss, the former striker spoke to MailSport at Largs yesterday.

And after five years in exile in Mallorca, the former wild child of Scottish football insists he has changed.

He said: “I’m 40 now. I’ve three kids, a wife, I’m settled. Do people honestly think I haven’t changed?

“That’s what happens in Scotland though, eh?

“People look at me now and what they see is what they remember – a BABY, a young kid.

“You would always change things if you could turn back the clock – but who can do that?”

Big Dunc is now older and wiser and ready to return to a game that saw him make front and back page headlines in a career that involved transfers worth almost £20million.

And the former Dundee United, Rangers, Everton and Newcastle idol revealed: “I miss the game terribly.”

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His shoulders are as broad as they ever were. The chips, however, appear to be gone.

Meet Duncan Ferguson at 40. Husband, doting father of three, aspirational coach, management material in the making.

It’s an introduction worth making because it’s an image most will have trouble perceiving.

One look at him and it’s tempting to see what you’ve always seen – the enfant terrible of Scottish football.

A brooding, swaggering figure, a darkness and an unapproachable distance surrounding him, the result of an ingrained malevolent suspicion of people’s intentions towards him from a young age.

Physically? He’s still all presence, all 6ft 4in of him. Bit heavier maybe, bit less hair, bit more stubble – but still the same.

Same glint in his eye, same running style, same idiosyncrasies – clutching the cuffs of his top inside his palms.

It’s easy to see what you’ve always seen. The hard bit is accepting he’s different.

But he is. No question.

The burdens he carried have gone. The headline writer’s dream has gone. Duncan Disorderly is now plain old orderly.

It’s Ferguson’s first interview to a Scottish journalist in 18 years. It’s been six years since he hung up his boots at Everton for the last time, jumped on a plane for Mallorca and didn’t come back.

It’s all part of the mystique, the enigma, surrounding a guy who was always accused of never caring enough, never loving football enough and never making the most of his prodigious talent.

Yet here he is. Standing at the Inverclyde National Sports Training Centre alongside 39 of his peers.

Grafting. Learning. Laughing. Making mistakes. Nursing the same insecurities as everyone else about being judged.

If you don’t love the game, want to be part of the fabric of football, join the mainstream, you’re not standing here.

He admits: “I miss the game, I miss it something terrible. I moved abroad for five years with the family and it was alright for a year, you can live with that.

“Then the grind sets in and you realise you’re effectively retired but still young.

“In the end though, you have to go out and start working. I’ve got three kids and a wife, I need to provide for them.

“You come out of football at 34 years and think you’re old – you feel it. You think ‘this is the end’. That you’re going to go and lie in a deckchair for the rest of your days.

“Then you suddenly twig that you have your whole life ahead of you.

“I need to get back to work, get motivated and do something with myself.”

Ferguson admits his alternatives were limited. He said: “I don’t have another skill, I don’t know anything else. It was natural I was going to be drawn back to football.”

Natural for him, maybe. For others, his conversion from player to coach seems the ultimate in poacher turned gamekeeper.

Again, it’s an easy prejudice to have when it’s based on a 20-year-old database of evidence.

The four convictions for assault, the 44 days in Barlinnie following his headbutt on Raith Rovers’ Jock McStay while he was on probation for an Anstruther bar fight.

The controversy of the 12-game SFA ban that followed. The record-equalling eight red cards in the Premiership.

It begs the ultimate question: How would Duncan Ferguson the coach, manage Duncan Ferguson the player?

“That’s what I’m here for, to find out if I have it in me,” he confessed. “People who say things about me don’t know the first thing about me. It’s a perception thing.

“I’m 40 now. I’ve three kids, a wife. I’m settled. You just move on in your life, don’t you? A lot of things we’re talking about are 20 years ago when I lived in Scotland and I was a young man. A baby.

“I can hardly remember back then, seriously. You’re talking about all the things that happened when I was younger.

“You’re a young man at 17, 18, right? You do crazy things. That’s what you do when you’re young. Everyone does.

“Is it out of my system? It is.

“That’s what happens in Scotland though, eh? They look at me now and what they see is what they remember – a kid at 19 or 20 years.

“I’m 40 now. Do people honestly think I haven’t changed? I’ve had a life in between, a career. A good career.

“I’ve got the kids, I’ve got perspective on my life. That young man has gone.”

Well, maybe not gone completely.

Sure, on the surface there’s a guy who is now charm personified, who’s humble about his reasons for being here.

Speak to anyone else on the course and they’ll tell you he’s fantastic company and as committed as any of them.

Talk to Jim Fleeting, the SFA’s main man when it comes to turning out the calibre of coaches we’ve become famed for, and his face cracks in to a gigantic smile.

He loves Ferguson to bits because, in every session, he leaves nothing behind except sweat.

And there’s plenty of it. It’s 27 degrees, yet he’s charging around in his waterproofs, socks up to his knees, like it’s the depths of winter.

And that’s when you see the 20-year-old is still there. Watching him interact with the ‘runners’ – the kids from Cumbernauld College who play out the scenarios set up by the coach– he’s brilliant.

He’s in the thick of a two-touch game of keepy-uppy as they warm up – laughing, kicking guys out for spurious offences against the game. At the side of the park, he’s full of encouragement for them.

And, as they break for lunch, he’s the only one from the group who’s across to them as they’re coming off the park, shaking hands, ruffling hair.

He looks at them and sees himself. They look at him and see ... what?

Again, the perception and his reality are different. Most people look and see a world-class talent whose career never lived up to his potential. They see seven caps and the overhead kick off the bar against Germany as a metaphor. So close, yet...

Him? He recalls a career spent almost entirely at the top with Dundee United, Rangers, Everton and Newcastle.

He sees top managers paying top dollar for him – £19.75million across his career.

He sees a captain’s armband around his bicep, handed to him by men like Sir Bobby Robson and David Moyes.

You think back to games like the night he scored a double against Manchester United at Old Trafford, terrorising Gary Pallister, cementing Peter Schmeichel.

You think back to him eclipsing Alan Shearer at Goodison on the £15m England striker’s Newcastle debut.

Ferguson said: “I’ve had an unbelievable career. I’m blessed that I played as long as I did, considering the operations I’ve had, and I stayed at the top right to the end.

“I stopped at Everton, the club I wanted to stop at – it was fantastic.

“I played at the very top. Captained teams under loads of managers. Look at the names – Sir Bobby, Howard Kendall, Joe Royle, Ruud Gullit.

“You’re talking about guys who have won European Cups, gone the distance in World Cups, won every domestic trophy.

“Then there’s the Scottish guys like Moyes, Walter Smith and Jim McLean in my early days – how many people have a list of experiences like that to call on?

“I had Andy Roxburgh and Craig Brown as well. If I can’t use the knowledge I’ve picked up from all these great guys, there’s something wrong with me.”

And the one thing he can add to the package is his own experience. He sighed: “If people still want to see the same boy they saw in the past, that’s up to them. There’s nothing I can do about that.

“People are reminiscing about things that happened 20-odd years ago. These days are gone. Of course I could have done things differently – but experience comes with age, doesn’t it? You mature.

“I don’t look back with regret, I just accept that I’m here and still learning. You would change things if you could turn back the clock – but who can do that?”