Scotland's beer mat maverick finally grows up

Don Hutchison holds the key to overcoming Croatia at Hampden Park

In a bygone era, when feather cuts and fancy footwork went together like Slade and silly hats, Don Hutchison might have been bracketed with other lavishly gifted, but supposedly untrustworthy players, like Tony Currie and Frank Worthington, as a maverick.

Hutchison, who agreed a £5.3m transfer from Sunderland to West Ham this week and wins his 17th cap for Scotland in today's critically important World Cup qualifier against Croatia, did his growing up in the public eye.

Now 30, his early career reads like a throwback to the 1970s. While with Liverpool, who plucked him from Hartlepool as a teenager, he was pictured on holiday by one of the more prurient papers with only a beer mat covering his modesty. In his first spell at Upton Park, he was found to have turned out for a friend's pub team on his native Tyneside (his father, a Scottish miner from Nairn, had moved to Gateshead). One Premiership manager, offered Hutchison in part-exchange, said he ''wouldn't touch him with a bargepole'', and Craig Brown seemed to be of a similar mind.

Brown had picked him for a Scotland B game against Wales in 1994, hoping he might prove a playmaking understudy to Gary McAllister. Hutchison was not asked again, even when the Scots' slender resources were stretched by call-offs, for five years, by which time it had evidently dawned on him that he was in danger of wasting his undoubted ability.

By then with Everton, who had rescued him from second-grade football with Sheffield United, he marked his first full appearance for Scotland with an away winner against Germany. Of his six international goals, however, the header which beat England at Wembley in the Euro 2000 play-off was doubly valuable since it ensured his acceptance by the Tartan Army.

''There was pressure on me from the first day I came into the Scotland squad," he said. "Coming from down there, me and Dominic [Matteo] have had to prove ourselves and show the fans we are 100 per cent committed." Hutchison once called himself "an Englishman playing for Scotland''. Not any more. Hutchinson, looking ahead to a full house and some fiercely partisan support today, said: "There's nothing better than when the national anthem ["Flower of Scotland"] is played on the bagpipes. It makes the hairs on your neck stand up and gives you great motivation.''

Those who feared the logistics of his return to West Ham might distract him this week have got him wrong, argued Hutchison. "The medical [in Glasgow] only took me an hour so I didn't have to do much other than get into a taxi. But it wouldn't have mattered if my future hadn't been sorted out – I'd still have given everything for Scotland."

Another winning goal would do nicely – Hutchinson has not scored for four matches and only one of his haul has come at home – but it is the sheer range of his talents that makes him indispensable. Not only has he taken on McAllister's old role but he has also played in the "hole", up front, and, albeit briefly, as the midfield anchor and at wing-back. "I know it's a cliché," he said, "but I really don't care where I play as long as I'm in the eleven."

West Ham fans, perhaps surprised that their club should have paid £1m more than Rangers were offering, will see a much more mature player than they knew before. Hutchison acknowledges that representing Scotland has helped in the transformation, saying: ''I don't blow my own trumpet, it's for other people to judge whether or not I'm a good player. But playing international football gives you confidence. I like to think I've improved."

Comparisons with the waning genius of Robert Prosinecki, who can ''pass through the eye of a needle'' according to Brown, should be fascinating. From Red Star Belgrade via Real Madrid and Barcelona to Portsmouth, Prosinecki has been a true maverick, with nicotine addiction, beads and earrings to boot.

Next to the great Croat, Hutchison's youthful dabbling with drink and tour of clubs look tame. He is no mood to let Prosinecki do likewise where it matters.