IN DEPTH WITH...Duncan Shearer

But not every Shearer is down your road lurking in a darkened saloon, accompanied by ghostly apparitions of figures from his youth as he waits to pounce at your front door to hand you tickets to a Premier League fixture.

Shearers love goals, but some define their careers by shining spells at the County Ground, ensuring their dominance of the record books by coming top of the goalscoring charts in every season they slipped on the red shirt of Swindon.

Duncan Shearer was precisely that kind of goal-getter.

He rose from the depths of the non-leagues to earn seven international caps for Scotland, playing both under and alongside a host of footballing greats, whilst regularly cracking the ball into the back of the onion bag on both sides of Hadrian’s Wall.

‘Postman Dunc’ delivered the goods more often than not, especially during his four seasons at the County Ground.

He arrived in Wiltshire from Huddersfield Town for a then-club record fee of £250,000.

He formed one half of one of the most deadly strike partnerships ever seen in this parish, Steve White providing a fearsome foil as Swindon infamously won a second division play-off final against Sunderland, only to be demoted for illegal payments to players.

His name sits proudly amongst the list of Swindon’s all-time top-scorers, with 98 strikes from 199 appearances.

But it could have all been so different.

As injuries and the unrelenting physical demands of manager Lou Macari took their toll, Shearer struggled to find his feet during his first season in Wiltshire.

Ossie Ardiles may have taken over before the beginning of the 1989/1990 season and the Scottish striker may have gone on to cement his place as one of the club’s very best, but on the eve of that campaign, Shearer was close to walking away.

“I’ve got to say that the best time I had in my club career was there at Swindon. But I didn’t get off to the best start,” he remembered.

“Dave Bamber and Jimmy Quinn had moved on and Lou (Macari) shelled out £250,000 for me. I scored 10 goals in seven games in pre-season but when the season started, I was struggling to find the net.

“I was feeling lethargic in games, particularly in the second half of matches. I was getting booed and that’s hard because when people, particularly supporters, get an opinion of you, it can be hard to shift it.

“At the end of the season, I was planning on handing in a transfer request. I was on my way back home from America in pre-season and some lad on the plane tapped me on the shoulder and said to me ‘your manager’s changed’.

“It wasn’t as if I didn’t like Lou, because he brought me in and did well with the team, getting to the play-offs. But I struggled under Lou.

“But when I heard that there was a new manager coming in, that put the transfer request on the back burner.

“Things were different under Ossie. He played that diamond formation, with me and Steve White up front and Alan McLoughlin at the point of that diamond, and we weren’t running for five or six hours in training on a Thursday.

“We had some success under Ossie. I think the play-off against Crystal Palace (the second division play-off semi-finals in 1989) showed that we weren’t quite ready but obviously, we then got all the way to Wembley in his first season.

“I can safely say that I don’t think Swindon will ever have two strikers that will score 27 goals each between them again. A lot of teams are playing 4-2-3-1 nowadays and they do have the one striker that sometimes gets 31 or 32 but there are never two.

“Me and Steve White were both on 27 going in to the play-offs and we both wanted to beat each other and get that 28th goal. It helped push us on.

“But it wasn’t as though what the team did wasn’t more important – if I’d have been one-on-one with the keeper at Wembley and he was in a better position, he would have got the pass.

“After the demotion, Ossie left and Glenn (Hoddle) came in. I left the season after that.”

In the end, Shearer’s time at Town was brought to an end when Kenny Dalglish utilised the new-found financial clout afforded by steel tycoon Jack Walker to steal the striker away to Blackburn Rovers in March 1992, a move still believed by many to have been made by the Lancashire club solely to end Swindon’s challenge for the final second division play-off spot.

Town ultimately fell away that season whilst Shearer was sold to Scottish giants Aberdeen after just six league appearances for Rovers.

But his career continued on an upward trajectory and he shone at Pittodrie, scoring the goal that won the 1995 Scottish Cup whilst playing alongside some local legends.

However his mind always harks back to his days at the County Ground.

He said: “To this day, I still think that the Swindon team I left was better than the Blackburn one that I joined. If it had been Swindon against Blackburn in the play-off final, Swindon would have beaten them - there’s no doubt about it.

“I wasn’t at Blackburn for very long. Aberdeen found out through a friend of mine that I would be prepared to leave and Blackburn went for the other guy called Shearer (Alan) instead.

“A reporter from the Scottish Sun asked me to name a best-ever side of players that I’ve played with a little while ago and there were some great names in there that I’ve been lucky enough to play alongside.

“There was Ossie and Glenn, Alex McLeish and Colin Calderwood – those two were two of the best centre-halves I’ve ever seen - then there was Pat Nevin, David Speedie and Gary McAllister.”

At the turn of the century, Shearer was at Inverness Caledonian Thistle and his career began to point towards the dugout, rather than the pitch.

He was part of the management team when Caley Thistle famously dispatched Celtic to win the Scottish Cup in 2000, a victory win that inspired perhaps the most famous football headline of all time - ‘Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious’.

Inverness ironically repeated the feat in this year’s semi- finals.

Shearer has been an assistant manager at both Aberdeen and Caley Thistle, where he even had a spell as caretaker-boss at the tail end of 2013.

The former Town ace is still at the Caledonian Stadium as the U20s coach and when the prospect of managing again is thrown up, Shearer is unequivocal on which side his bread is buttered.

“Obviously, I’ve been an assistant manager before and a caretaker. I have the greatest respect for managers but is it for me? No. The answer is an emphatic no,” said Shearer.

“I think there are people that are made for management and there are people that are made for coaching.

“I’ve seen too many managers struggle under the pressure of it. If you just look at John Carver (Newcastle United interim manager), you can see that he’s not handling that pressure and I’m sure he’d be a lot happier just being down at the training ground, handing out the bibs and setting up a session.

“Now that I’m a coach, I have a little thing that I say to people. If they don’t like what I’m saying, I tell them ‘then you don’t like what Ossie Ardiles, Glenn Hoddle and Kenny Dalglish would say, because they’re the guys that taught me’.

“I think that the kids come around when they recognise those names. Nowadays, they can look up what you did as a player too and respect what you did.

“I’ve done U13s and U14s in the past and now I’m taking care of the U20s, which is a great age group.

“As a striker, you always say to youngsters: ‘go on, be a striker’ but people are different – defenders are proud of keeping clean sheets and midfielders can be proud of winning big tackles or setting someone else up.

“The U20s play in a development league and it’s coaching that I enjoy.”

On May 30, Shearer will take his seat at Hampden Park to watch Caley Thistle bid for Scottish Cup glory against Falkirk.

In the meantime, he will continue to strive towards developing young players into ready-made first team troops.

The aim will be to teach those youngsters to deliver as efficiently and as regularly as he did during his time at Swindon Town.

Shearer owed a lot to his strike partners over the years – after all, it takes two to tango – and he can thank his most famous County Ground sidekick for that nickname.

“I think Steve White came up with ‘Postman Dunc’. He used to call me Postman Pat because of my red hair but I prefer to think that it’s because I always got that ball to the goal,” he said.

“He called me that to someone once and the name just stuck.”