David Harvey on Marcelo Bielsa, Don Revie, Jack Charlton, Billy Bremner and Leeds United's Premier League return

Now 72, Harvey made more than 400 appearances for the Whites in two spells with his hometown club whom he signed for in 1965 under legendary former Whites boss Don Revie.

After leaving to play for Vancouver Whitecaps in 1980, Harvey returned to Elland Road in the mid-1980s and went on to play another 70 league games under three of his old teammates - Allan Clarke, Eddie Gray and Billy Bremner.

Three more of his former team-mates in Jack Charlton, Norman Hunter and Trevor Cherry have all sadly passed away in the last three months.

Harvey admits the deaths have been hard to take but the former Whites custodian is delighted to see Marcelo Bielsa’s Whites having finally restored the club’s top-flight status as a tribute to United’s fallen greats.

“I find it hard,” says Harvey.

“I know everyone finds it hard. But I find it really, really hard.

"When Don Revie got motor neurone’s I had always known the Boss as a fit man. He used to train with us.

"And then there was a game at Elland Road (in 1987) to raise funds for motor neurone.

"I had probably seen him about six months before this and for all he was not 100 per cent fit, he was not bad to look at.

“I saw him at this game, and he was in his wheelchair by this time.

"As usual I was late, so I was the last one there. I think he thought I was not coming. And his face when I walked in just lit up.

"But he could hardly speak. That’s my last memory (of him)."

Reflecting on his time at Leeds, Harvey said: “I was captain for a couple of seasons. You had that extra responsibility. I found it absolutely draining.

"So when I left again, I was glad in a way. That was the pressure off.

“We were under pressure.

"But they - the current team - were under serious pressure. I take my hat off to them. And it’s a great tribute to those we’ve lost.”

Harvey says he owes everything to Revie.

“My whole career,” he says.

“Him and Billy (Bremner). If it had not been for Billy I would never have played for Scotland apart from the England v Scotland games during training at Leeds.

"I was not being recognised put it that way. Bremner chipped away until I think the Doc just thought: ‘I will take a chance’.”

And then there was Charlton’s part in getting Harvey his chance at Leeds after a prolonged spell as understudy to Gary Sprake.

“It was Jack that got me into the team in the first place because he was moaning that much about Gary," Harvey recalled.

"He was one of the few people who could speak to the Boss the way he did.

"He said something along the lines of …’if you play that so-and-so again you can count me out.

"Play that whatshisname instead, that young boy’, talking about me. A few weeks later I did play.

“The very first game Jack said, ‘if you come for crosses just shout and come and get it’.

"So after about 10 minutes the ball got crossed in and I have come out for it and I have gone to punch it….he was spark out. I had hit him. I was stood there waiting for him to come round…. What a start.”

Their relationship overcame that early bump.

“He was a lovable rogue,” says Harvey.

“I used to have racing greyhounds.

"Every now and again a dog gets a rest and you take it out lamping or go shooting, just to freshen them up a bit, and Jack and I would go up Ilkley Moor.”

They did a lot together, although Charlton could not tempt Harvey to join him fishing.

“I don’t have the patience for it,” he says.

Harvey liked to get away from it all but he wanted to be active, always active.

He rode horses at the gallops at trainer Frank Carr’s stable near in Malton – while he was still playing:

“The Boss would have gone mental if he’d known," he admits.

Harvey then missed the banter of the dressing room when he finished playing, after a short chapter in the Scottish leagues with a handful of appearances for Morton and one match for Partick Thistle

He also had a stint at Harrogate Town, where he said he knew it was time to hang up his gloves when someone threw a walking stick into his penalty area.

“I used to go into a pub in Knaresborough, where I lived at the time," said Harvey.

"There were four or five lads who were postmen. And they used to have me in absolute stitches.

"It sounded to me just like a dressing room atmosphere. Knaresborough is only a small area.

"In big postal areas you might have 100-200 postmen – that would not suit me at all.

"But in Knaresborough there were only 30.”

And on Sanday, the largest of Orkney’s north isles, there were just two.

Harvey bagged one of the precious posts after moving to Orkney just over a quarter of a century ago – he originally dreamed of living somewhere on the west coast.

He could have died there – and nearly did.

On Christmas night 2009, he suffered a heart attack.

His father, a shotfirer at mining sites and part-time singer, died at 60 from the same cause.

Harvey reached 61 and felt like he had dodged a bullet.

The next thing he knew he was being revived by a district nurse handily based at his end of the island. He underwent a quadruple bypass operation in Edinburgh.

Harvey also broke his neck while playing for Vancouver Whitecaps. Because he got so nervous before games, he used to take a sleeping tablet on the eve of matches. He could not get his normal prescription in Canada and changed brand.

“At the time I was stopping at my uncle and auntie’s in Vancouver,” he recalls.

“I was living in the basement. I have taken a tablet and said goodnight to them and then gone down to the basement. For some unknown reason I have picked up my car keys – I don’t even know where I was going. I only made it 200 yards.”

He drove straight into the back of a parked vehicle.

“The surgeon said to me that most people break their neck forward – but I broke it going back the way.”

This saved his life apparently.

And then there was the car crash in 1975 that meant he missed out on Leeds’ European Cup final v Bayern Munich.

Again, it could have been a lot worse – for the club as well as Harvey, with Gordon McQueen, who was driving, and Frank Gray also involved.

Harvey broke his ankle and fellow Scot David Stewart took his place in goal.

He has no problem reconciling himself to missing out on that opportunity considering what could have happened.

“We were lucky,” he says. “The car was a write-off.”

His eyesight is another intriguing talking point.

Short-sighted in one eye, long-sighted in the other, he started wearing glasses in his mid-twenties, much to Brian Clough’s displeasure.

He tried to exchange Harvey and Hunter plus money for Leicester City’s Peter Shilton during his short reign.

With contact lens use still unusual, Harvey soldiered on, sometimes failing to compensate such as the time at Everton when he dived too early – “or was it too late?” he wonders – and watched a tame shot evade him.

“I got out the bath first rather than my usual last,” he recalls.

“In the players’ lounge was Freddie Starr. I am the first player in and he’s the first person I meet. He just burst out laughing. I have had enough of this. I am just about to get belted into him.

"How I never seen these two boys but he had two bouncers with him. They lifted me up by the elbows, my feet were off the floor.

"They took me into the corner and said: ‘are you going to be a good boy?’”

Harvey’s career is a treasure trove of stories. He was a grafter who made the best of himself and while there was luck involved, he deserved it.

“I started training at Elland Road when I was 11," he says.

"I just assumed – and this was so arrogant – that I would be taken on as an apprentice.

"I got to 15, left school – no phone call. I headed to a shoe factory. Then the lad who was goalkeeper for the junior team broke his leg. Two weeks I was in that factory.”

His football career might never have happened and in a way it didn’t.

“When people ask me if I am retired and I say aye, they’ll ask: ‘what did you do?’ I tell them I was a postman. It’s not a lie, is it?”

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Thank you Laura Collins