ONCE the Mouldmaster was attached to my feet. Now it looks as if it has been shoved up my jumper.

I am no stranger to the cruelty prompted by body shape. There have been calls in the swimming pool that I face the threat of being harpooned by whalers. Though what whalers would be doing in a pool in Milngavie when there is a perfectly decent one in Shettleston I just don’t know.

There was also the constant baiting when I worked at Herald Towers when the young members of the staff shouted "Fatty" and threw biscuits at me. I retaliated viciously by eating them all. The biscuits, that is.

I was once small and slim but had big feet. In first year at secondary I was a wee skelf with size-nine boots. I was called Coco for my resemblance to a clown.

So I have sympathy for those who are called out on body shape. The jibes of past and present all flooded back like the effluent from a burst sewage pipe when I read of Gordon Strachan’s comments about Leigh Griffiths, now star of Honey, I Shrunk the Striker. As Griff ponders a career in Subutteo, it may be worth remembering that fitba' has always been a game for all shapes and sizes.

Indeed, the jannie would pick the first team purely in deference to size with the odd nod to personality. The big fat boy was a goalie or a centre half, the wee guys played on the wing and the genuinely scary, those who saved and planked their own snot, were placed at full-back. It may not have been the sort of system that Henry McLeish and others would have promoted but it worked.

The unspoken theory at primary school was that everyone could play football. The much-shouted theory that everyone should play football followed at secondary school when PE teachers, on work release from the State Hospital at Carstairs, forced everyone to scramble about on the killing fields, sorry, playing fields of Scotland.

Of course, the generously proportioned and some of the smaller boys were culled as they progressed up the age groups, but there was always room for the belligerent giant and the tricky wee guy.

As the tribal cultures of the world have various initiation rites to manhood, the Scottish boy would face his on the bleak landscape of a Coatbridge pitch or one in Wellshot Road where one peered through driving sleet to pick out just who you were up against on a Saturday morning so woe-begottten it could have served as the first scene in Ingmar Bergman film.

At under 15 level, one would look at the number 5 who was so big and hirsute that it gave the lie to any notion that pandas could not breed successfully in Possil. He looked at you as if measuring you for a coffin. I always made a quite recce of the area to see if it was amenable for access by ambulance.

Then there was the wee guy. You just knew he was going to extract so much from you that he should be nicknamed catheter. The only way a small boy was surviving at decent under-15 level was because a) he was so brave that bomb disposal officers had his poster on the wall and b) he could manipulate a ball with such skill that he was auditioning both for professional scouts and representatives of Billy Smart’s circus.

Between the giant and the wee guy, there was a variety of body shapes. The main one lost to modern football is that most kindly called burly. There are no real chunky players any more, especially as Kris Commons seemed either to have joined a Trappist monastery or been the victim of an extravagant disappearing act by David Copperfield. When he arrived at the Celtic fanzone in George Square the other day, there were cries of jubiliation that he was stil alive never mind still at Celtic.

But the wee guy is the one who has benefited most in modern football. Does anyone believe that Lionel Messi would have survived the 1970s or 1980s when tackles routinely broke ankles, legs and spirit? Does anyone believe that a small forward three of Messi, Suarez and Neymar would have been deemed practical in the recent past when strikers were treated as if they were cattle entering an abattoir?

The modern football player has as much body fat as vegetarian’s pencil and can be as small as Jimmy Krankie standing in a ditch. There is still room for the muscular in modern football but there is ample opportunity for those who are small, quick, athletic and skilful. Indeed, there has never been a better time to be vertically challenged in regards to fitba’.

They are protected by the refs. They are playing on perfect pitches, regularly against slower defenders. They have perfected their tricks without the fear of awful retribution. They are as fit as a butcher’s dug with a Davina DVD.

They are blessed to play in such an era. And they don’t even have to have a Mouldmaster at their feet. Or aimed at their upper thigh.