THOSE who watched David Farrell play football during what, in his own words, was a journeyman career must have thought they’d misheard that the clogger had become a blogger.

No matter, the aforementioned blog has become something of an online phenomenon over the past 18 months. It shows the former Hibernian and Partick Thistle player to be one of the most articulate, witty and intelligent writers on the Scottish football scene.

A disclaimer: he was actually better than a mere clogger; as a writer, Farrell leaves every other former professional in Scotland, given any sort of voice in the media, trailing in his wake.

He is honest, maybe too honest, and indeed this refusal to bite his tongue when something needs said might just be about to get him into a lot of trouble with the upcoming release of his autobiography. Not that he cares a jot.

We meet in a Glasgow hotel and he asks to sit at the window in order to keep his eye on the black cab he’s been driving for three years – “it’s a more secure job than football” – and we begin to discuss why he thought the world needed to hear what an ex-pro without much of a cv had to say.

“It was the week before the start of last season,” he recalled. “I thought I could do better than some of the guys, ex-players I mean, who are writing stuff in the newspapers,” Farrell says. “For me, a lot of it is just clichéd crap. It’s PR for themselves. I was fed up seeing the same s****. I believed I could do better than that. I always felt I had a decent grasp of the language, so I spoke to a few people who nudged me to go for it.

“Being honest was key. I’ve always had decent morals. When I played, I had this hard-man image but that’s not me. People would meet me and think I was an entirely different person to the one who they had just been up against on the park.

“It was important that when I started the writing, I wasn’t going to do what the guys in the papers did. It’s just flannel, if you ask me. Then the blog really took off. A lot of journalists became interested in it and at that point, I thought there might be something in this. The fans loved it. They were able to relate to it. I think they like the fact I took away all the bull**** and told people what it’s actually like.”

And out of the blog has emerged a book, which he promises to be a completely honest account of football away from the fame and fortune. These tend to be the best autobiographies from a sport which has not produced too many classics of this genre.

Indeed, with very few exceptions, footballer’s books are actually worse the more famous the player.

Farrell said: “I am well aware that I’m not a big name. I know Frank Lampard can write that he got up in the morning, had a slice of toast and then went to training. I need to be able to tell a proper story, something people are going to be interested in and keep reading it.

“They are not going to buy it because it’s written by Davie Farrell. They are going to buy it because it’s a decent story.

“It’s my career and me telling how it was. It’s about agents, dealing with managers, dressing-room fall-outs. It’s not the stuff people normally talk about. I am going to specifically name people. I am going to tell you what I did with him, this is what happened when me and this guy fell out.

“I think I will ruffle a few feathers to be honest with you. But, again, when I started out I decided that I wouldn’t hide and go down the road of not naming people. This is part of what people have appreciated in the blog. You can’t then write the book in a different way.

“I am as proud to have written the book as I ever was being a footballer. I could have got a ghost writer, that would have been the easy thing to do, but I found I had a talent for writing. When I spoke to the publishers I made it clear that I was writing it.”

Farrell will name names. The protagonists are on the pages. He’s from Denniston in the east end of Glasgow. Those from that area of the city tend to be straight to the point. This is perhaps why a quote from Irvine Welsh about Farrell is splashed across the front cover.

“I talk about being on the dole after being sacked by Dundee [he was a coach beside Alex Rae] and then keeping my head down in the unemployment office because I didn’t want anyone to notice me.

“I tell people how much I was earning. Most people don’t. You will find out what I earned in the Premier League at Hibs, what I earned at Albion Rovers when I finished my career. There is nothing about what happened on a night out. It’s just about the fitba’.”

As a writer, the man is class. “I don’t really read books,” is a surprise admission. But how would he describe himself as a player?

“I was hard, I was fair,” he says without hesitation. “I probably pushed the limits a bit at times. I couldn’t play nowadays. A lot of my game was about aggression and intimidation. The way I tackled, if I did that now, there would be red cards all over the place.

“What I mean by intimidation is that I liked the idea that people, who knew I was tough, wouldn’t come near me. That was all part of being a winner.

I was never intimated by anyone. Not in terms of a fear of getting hurt in a tackle, but really good players, in a way, intimidated me, so I had to make sure they knew they were in a game.”

One of the subjects Farrell touches on is how he went from being the best player at his school to joining Hibs and having to wait three years before becoming a first-team regular. There is also a chapter on gambling in football. He laughs at any attempt to extract a bit of information on it. “It’s definitely a ‘wow’ moment.”

Farrell’s career came to an end at 34 when, after his umpteenth injury, he found himself running around a track on his own in the dark in an attempt to get fit for Albion Rovers in the old third division.

He and Rae did pretty well at Dundee and at Notts County and the book details what went wrong at both clubs. “It’s not just a case of losing a few games and you’re out.”

If Farrell’s book is going to be honest, then it would be something of a first. Even the way it was written has to be unique.

“I wrote it on my Blackberry,” Farrell says, showing me all the documents which still exist on his phone. “On average you get 30 minutes in a taxi queue so it was done outside Central Station and Queen Street.”

The boy’s thumbs done good.