JIM Leighton had hoped to be carried shoulder high out of Hampden after the final match of his glorious 23-year career. Instead, he was carted out of the place on a stretcher after just three minutes.

Rather than a goalkeeping colossus with more than 600 appearances, 91 caps and four World Cup finals appearances under his belt, Aberdeen’s fate for the remaining 87 minutes of the last time they played in a Scottish Cup final was in the hands of a man who hadn’t played between the sticks since he was primary-school age and down the swing park with his pals.

That man was Robbie Winters, and his was the most unlikely goalkeeping cameo from an outfield player in Scottish football this side of Ryan Stevenson actually getting the start for Raith Rovers against Ayr this season.

Winters is now defying the years as a 42-year-old striker for Junior grandees Pollok but the memories all came flooding back about his bizarre piece of Scottish football history when The National caught up with him this week. This was back in May 2000, when cup final managers had just three subs to choose from, and not the luxury of seven which Brendan Rodgers and Derek McInnes will have up their sleeves on Saturday.

Aberdeen manager Ebbe Skovdahl liked the odds of his goalkeeper remaining unscathed – his opposite number Dick Advocaat at Rangers also named three outfield players on his bench – but the Dane’s gamble backfired when Rod Wallace, attempting, eye on the ball, to get on to a low cross, caught him flush on the jaw with a sweep of his right boot. T he task facing Aberdeen was hard enough on a day which expectant, the orange-clad Rangers fans had christened ‘Oranje day’ in honour of their Dutch manager. But for half an hour, Winters gamely succeeded in keeping vicious strikes from the likes of Jorg Albertz and Lorenzo Amoruso at bay. His clean sheet duly fell to a Giovanni van Bronckhorst strike, though, before Tony Vidmar, Billy Dodds and Albertz killed the game off before the hour mark.

“It had been mentioned by Ebbe a couple of weeks before to everybody,” Winters says. “‘Would anyone like to go in if something happened?’ There were only three subs at the time so I put my hand up, no problem. It is one of those things that you just do, but I never thought it would come true.

“I had never played in goal, other than at the swing park when I was nine, 10, 11 years old and playing with my mates. I always liked to go in goals and dive about, just when we were messing about.

“We had started the game pretty well,” recalls Winters. “But you just can’t account for what happened. It was a bad injury. Jim would obviously have pictured leaving the scene with a winner’s medal, but instead after just three minutes he was carried off.

“To be fair, I made one good save at 0-0 which I touched on to the bar and one or two in the second half but obviously Rangers were a very strong team at that time. It was hard enough to play against them if you had 11 fit men, almost impossible if you don’t have a goalkeeper.”

If 17 years feels like a long time for Aberdeen to return to the showpiece match of Scottish football, the 27-year wait since their last win is literally, for some, a lifetime. Once again the Dons are major underdogs for a match which could see an invincible Celtic side complete only the fourth treble in the club’s history, but Winters feels that they, too, should be confident – even if they could do with a bit more luck than he got back in 2000.

“We were confident going into it, we knew that if everybody had a very good game we had a chance of winning it,” he added. “You go with purpose and the attitude of winning it, as Aberdeen will do when they go into this cup final. Celtic are unbeaten, very strong, having a fantastic season. They are coming down with a good team this year, everyone will have to play to their best of their ability and they need a wee rub of the green but why not?”