SCOTTISH football hero Kenny Deuchar has revealed the hilarious tale of how his transfer from Gretna to Real Salt Lake could have landed him a move to Barcelona.

The former Falkirk, St Johnstone and Livingston target man, who is also a practising GP, banged in 129 goals in 354 appearance during his 15 year long career and was aptly dubbed ‘The Good Doctor’ by Jeff Stelling on Sky Sports News.

Doctor Goals, as others liked to call him, sealed a stunning move to the MLS from Gretna in 2008 after he sent over 200 emails with his CV to international clubs.

And as the 39-year-old explains he even tried his luck at the Mecca of European football, the Camp Nou.

Speaking on the Football Daft Podcast, he said: “I must have sent about 200 emails or something. I sent emails to all the teams in Australia, America, Switzerland, the German second and third tiers, Austria...

“I didn’t know who to send the emails to, I was sending it to generic club mailboxes and I never heard anything back from anybody...

“So I started typing in the managers’ names and coaches, and I got a lot of delivery failures back. 

“This agent from America phoned me – he said ‘there’s a couple of teams asking about you and I got your number from Kenny Miller’.

“I was like how the f*** has Kenny Miller got my number?

“It was obviously Kenny Miller’s agent and Kenny Miller had managed to find my number from somebody. This guy liaised with my agent and it ended up that Real Salt Lake had put in this ‘discovery ticket’ so they get first dibs on offering a contract because you sign with the league.

“They came over to watch me and the general manager was going to watch me against Rangers. I was like, you’re kidding me – that’s the worst possible game for me. This is a disaster.

“It was at Ibrox and I scored two goals, and he was supposed to be watching me midweek against Kilmarnock as well. But when I scored the two goals at Ibrox, the phone started going to my agent and other teams were sniffing about, and he was like ‘I need to get this deal done’.

“That was on the Sunday I think the game was, and I was in Argentina on the Friday at pre-season.”

Deuchar added: “I only heard back from three teams out of about 200-odd emails.

“But there was one other team that got back to me.

“My mate said ‘I dare you to send one to Barcelona’. I’ve got the email anyway and I actually emailed Barcelona.

“I got an email back from their scouting department to say... we’ve got an extensive scouting network. If we were interested, we would already ken about you.”

On the world’s battle with the coronavirus pandemic, Dr Deuchar added: “People are scared.

“Even with mild symptoms, people are scared because of the overload of information and negative and worrying stories that are coming out.

“Everybody’s anxious about it.

“The NHS has set up websites and resources to address this coronavirus anxiety, but people are still going to be anxious about it because people are dying and that’s what’s getting reported. 

“People are phoning me up and saying ‘I’ve got this cough, am I going to die?’

“You’ve got to talk them back down. 99 per cent of folk will be fine with a cough, but you’ve got to make that reassurance.”