'Sheffield United saved my life' - Tony Currie on bowing, Jekyll and Hyde and THAT terrace song

“Sheffield United has been two-thirds of my life. It's everything,” Currie admitted, when asked to sum up what the South Yorkshire club means to him. “It's saved my life, really. I was in a bad way in the mid-1980s and probably for a while before that as well. It's been a life-saver, put it that way.”

That, Currie goes on to insist, is no exaggeration. After his playing career came to a premature end due to injury, and an ill-fated spell in Canada ended in disaster, Currie was divorced and working in a video shop, after a spell driving a mini-cab ended when his car packed up. All a long way away from a time when he will have felt he had the world at his feet on the football pitch.

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The saving grace was a testimonial at Bramall Lane, before an offer to rejoin the Blades and head up their football in the community scheme materialised. Currie has fulfilled a number of roles since and is still, as a club ambassador, active. This week he joined current stars Iliman Ndiaye, Chris Basham and Charley Docherty at Meadowhall for a meet-and-greet fundraiser event for the Bluebell Wood charity; still giving back to those who once adored him.

“I had an affinity with the crowd and thank God I did,” Currie added. “It's fantastic. There’s a well-known United song, about not having a barrel of money and Woodward and Currie, and I thank whoever came up with that line. Brilliant. I still hear it now and it's lovely.

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“I still get lots of people coming up to you. When I came back in the 1980s, there were people bowing to me in The Moor. I'd say: ‘Get up you fool!’ Gary Sinclair still does it now! They talk about things I can't even remember sometimes and you get little kids looking up at you now, because their dads - and grandads more now - have told them all about me and the good times. That's nice. That's nice. Some memories.”

Currie’s autobiography – Imperfect 10, The Man Behind the Magic – was published in paperback form earlier this year and saw the 72-year-old speak with admirable candour about the contrast between his extrovert personality as a player, and introvert as a person.

“I didn't like the fact that people were judging me as the same person off the field as on it,” Currie admitted. “I wasn't. I was totally in control on the field, of my belief in my own abilities, but off it I was shy and private. Jekyll and Hyde. Extrovert, introvert.

“Looking back it was obviously a problem for me, off the field. Dealing with things at home throughout the 1970s, maybe that was the biggest part of my career. It was hard work.

“Everyone likes to be loved and cared for and that wasn't happening off the field. I was never in trouble as a kid and can't relate to any problems there. Not having a father perhaps didn't help but I got all the love and attention from my uncles, especially Bert, who took over as my knight in shining armour. He was the best uncle you could ever want. He was there for me, everywhere.

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“It was lovely to do the book, great. It wasn't a thing of getting off my chest, but it was lovely to talk about old times and remember things you'd forgotten about.”

Currie’s co-author was former Blades media manager Andy Pack, who has known the man officially voted as United’s greatest ever player for over 30 years. “First of all, it was an honour,” Pack said. “And something I'd wanted to do for quite a while, and I didn't think it was going to happen.

“It didn't come around in the end because of any cajoling from me. Tony knew of my interest and one or two other factors were involved in his changing his mind about doing an official autobiography. There had been one or two biographies before, that weren't biographies in the true sense.

“They were elements of his football life but it wasn't Tony's own story. I'd known him for a long, long time, or I thought I did, but he was ridiculously honest about how much he wanted to reveal about himself. That led to him revealing a lot of his weaknesses, I suppose.

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“Everyone has them but not everyone commits them to print and I have to say that took me aback. How much he was prepared to say about the difficulties in his life. It's easy to find accounts of his comments about games and playing, they were all over the papers. But I wasn't prepared for the amount of stuff he told me that I suspect very few people had heard before.

“For me, that was going to make the book. I was immediately struck by how he was on the pitch and how he was off it. Overall, to sum it up, I found out that he was possibly only really happy when he was on a football pitch and how much of a struggle it was off it.”

Imperfect 10, by Tony Currie with Andy Pack, is published by Sheffield-based Vertical Editions and is available in paperback now.