How Raith Rovers boss Dougie Imrie took an 80% pay cut to start his senior playing career at Clyde FC

Imrie went on to have a stellar 500-game SPFL playing career with The Bully Wee, Inverness Caledonian Thistle, Hamilton Accies (in two spells), St Mirren and Greenock Morton – scoring a total of 75 goals and providing 69 assists – until hanging up his boots in 2019 to embark upon his coaching career.

Imrie, now 43, told the Fife Free Press: “I was a landscape gardener, a company I worked for were excellent with me, certainly on a Saturday. I worked 12-hour shifts every day, Monday to Friday, working on a Saturday morning and then would get away to go to my games (for Lanark United).

"I can always remember one game I was playing for Lanark and I had turned up at 1 o'clock and the game kicked off at 1 o'clock.

"I walked onto the pitch and the referee was blowing the whistle! But that's what you had to do, you had to fight.

"But then I took a massive gamble when I got the opportunity to go to Clyde. I gave up my full-time job - which was a good paying job – for basic pennies, because I wanted to be a footballer.

"I wanted to give it a chance, I wanted to be able to give it a go. The rest is history, but I might have turned around back then and gone: ‘No, I'm not doing that because I'm losing 80% of what I'm getting paid Monday to Friday to go full-time’.

"That was a gamble I took, I'm not so sure other people would do the same. But I had a good career, thankfully. The biggest thing I had was a desire to get to where I wanted to get to.”

When asked if he’d felt a tremendous pressure to succeed at Clyde as failure would be disastrous for him, Imrie added: “I didn't care. I knew what I wanted to do. You’ve got to make sacrifices and the sacrifice worked.

"I'm not so sure you get a lot of that now, but that's the world we live in.

"I was a big enough boy to make my decisions. I knew what I wanted in life, I knew I wanted to be a professional footballer.

"Graham Roberts and Joe Miller gave me that opportunity at Clyde.

"Don't get me wrong, after a few months my money went up, because I knew it was coming.

"But in the first six months, I was on minimum wage. I'm sure you can work out what I was getting paid.

"Everybody's built differently, everybody's got their own agenda, everybody's got their own way of thinking.

"I wanted to be a professional football player. I worked my backside off, didn't come through any academies.

"I was an amateur for three or four years, then got an opportunity at junior, played there for six years, had a few trials here and there then went to Clyde for a week.

"Sandy Stewart was at Stirling Albion with Alan Moore. I went there for a trial game and I scored two goals, a couple of days before I was going to Clyde. Stirling Albion wanted to sign me but I said: ‘Listen, I'm going to Clyde this week, but if I don't get signed there, I'll come back and sign for you’. So thankfully I did well enough at Clyde to get a contract.”

Imrie’s Raith return to William Hill Championship action tomorrow (Saturday) in a 3pm kick-off at Arbroath.