SOME punishments should be welcomed. Graham Roberts will be forever remembered for two incidents during his time as a Rangers player. In the first, he was arrested for breach of the peace after conducting the Ibrox crowd during an Old Firm game in 1987, but the charge was later found unproven. It was the second that had a longer lasting effect. His fall-out with Graeme Souness after a defeat by Aberdeen in 1988 saw him banished to the youth team and eventually sold. His treatment is a memory and an enduring influence that he will carry into his role as manager of Clyde.

Souness signed Roberts in 1986 from Tottenham and the centre-back became a favourite with the Rangers support, captaining the side to a League Cup final win over Aberdeen in 1987. Yet when the Pittodrie team played at Ibrox the following year and Brian Irvine scored from a corner to secure a 1-0 win, Souness blamed Roberts in the dressing room. The Englishman argued that Scott Nisbet should have been marking Irvine, and as the row escalated, Souness barked “you’ll never play for this club again”. And Roberts didn’t.

By the start of the next season he had been sold to Chelsea, but the months in between were a vacuum. “It was probably the hardest thing I ever had to do,” Roberts says. “I trained for five weeks by myself, running up and down the Ibrox stairs. I went up to Fort William with the youths. We were having some cold drinks after one game and they were playing the next day, so they said to me ‘Robbo, we’re going to get you a game tomorrow. We’re going to get five injuries’. So they did that. Then Jimmy Nicholl (the reserve coach) went on, then somebody else got injured and Peter McCloy (the goalkeeping coach) went on. Then somebody else got injured and still they wouldn’t put me on. I never kicked a ball.”

Souness has never been the type to shirk a confrontation and such curdled relationships with players have regularly stained his managerial career. For Roberts, the incident was instructive. Being ostracised after a frank exchange of views, the rejection and the sense of isolation have moulded his own approach. He insists that he will never deal with a player in the way that Souness dealt with him.

“I would be upfront with everyone,” he says. “I won’t treat anybody how I was treated. I don’t think that’s fair. There are times you’re going to fall out, but once you go out (of the dressing room), you can’t have grudges. That would upset the whole team. If one player’s unhappy, he will try to get the rest of the team unhappy. If you’re honest with them, if you try to be constructive with them ... Managers are never always right, 99.9% they are but there’s that 0.1%.”

Roberts has made an impact since taking over at Broadwood last month. A recent trial attracted interest from 2,000 players and Roberts and Joe Miller, his assistant, are painstakingly attempting to put a squad together with meagre resources. Having worked as a player under Keith Burkinshaw and David Pleat at Tottenham, and then Bobby Campbell at Stamford Bridge, Roberts is not without influences. Yet, ironically, one manager he regularly stays in contact with is Souness. Despite the acrimony of their fall-out, the two went on to become close friends and Roberts can now talk about their relationship with a grin.

He has watched with interest the ongoing friction between the Newcastle United manager and Craig Bellamy, the Wales striker Souness banished from the first team and loaned to Celtic last season. Bellamy has vowed to return to St James’ Park for pre-season training tomorrow, and Roberts says wryly: “If he has anything like I had, he’ll be training with the youth team or by himself. Graeme will not let him ruin his team plans this year. I would think he’ll be sold.”

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