THE tall sparse figure filling the door frame hadn't changed much. An inch or two on the waistline, a greying of the thatch, a stride which reflected the physical legacies of his chosen trade.

Still combative, still prepared to make the leading statement, still ready to challenge issues and fashions, it was as if time had stood still. Meeting Derek Dougan again over a bridge of many years was to discover no betrayal of old philosophies, no concession to expediency, no deviation from perceived needs to confront the establishment.

He had played 43 times for Northern Ireland, scored close on 300 goals in top class football, appeared on countless television and radio talk shows and spearheaded the Professional Footballers' Association through years of profound change in English football.

Now at the age of 58 and set down once more in Belfast after spending half his life in Britain, he has found a new crusade politics. Appropriately, for a man who enjoyed fame without ever losing the common touch, it was in a dockers' club in Belfast that he made the recent announcement that he is to stand as an independent candidate for election to Westminster next year.

As yet, there is no word of a preferred constituency or of financial backers. But the agenda is clear. "I want to show that there is a better way of life for the decent people of Northern Ireland that there is an alternative to the conventional party system which has failed them".

"If I had even a fraction of Jimmy Goldsmith's money, I'd form my own party and run candidates who have the respect and trust of ordinary men and women. And that is not a trust to which the career politicians are privy. I'm not a wealthy person. But in my own small way I believe that I can deliver and help bring about the peace, reconciliation and progress which these people so richly deserve."

Coincidentally or otherwise, the man known to millions as The Doog, has just published his life story. The Sash He Never Wore... 25 Years On is an update of the book which attracted so much interest when it first appeared in January 1972.

For the man born into the staunchly Protestant heartland of the Newtownards Road in East Belfast, co existence has never been a problem. From the time he made his first trip to Dublin and ventured for the first time into the "Free State" with a boys club at the age of 15, he has never been short of friends south of the border.

Shopping expeditions by his mother to Dundalk and Monaghan cemented that sense of unity and he recalls with some relish that it was another border town, Newry, which gave Northern Ireland two of its finest footballers, Peter McParland and Pat Jennings.

Still it was not until the Birmingham bombings in 1974 when he was playing for Wolves that he experienced - or recognised - the true feelings of his Irishness. "I was ashamed that people purporting to act on behalf of Irish people, including me, should perpetrate such an outrage and massacre innocent people. But I was saddened, too, by the reaction of some English people.

"All sorts of people with an Irish accent were forced to endure a period in England which can only have come from the Dark Ages. It seemed to those across the water that everyone from Ireland, north - or south, was fair game for physical abuse, intimidation, harassment, rejection in pubs and restaurants.

"My club chairman at Wolves, the late John Ireland, was a shining exception. But later two women broadcasting colleagues at the BBC in Pebble Mill, people I had known and respected me for years, treated me as scum. In a sense, I could perfectly understand their feelings. And yet, in an inverse kind of way, that outrage had the effect of bonding all Irish people together in a common show of disgust for the bombers and those of the English people who reacted like my two friends at the BBC."

Dougan experience his greatest triumph - and his biggest disappointment - in the early summer of 1973. Earlier, in 1958, he was presented with a gold watch by the IFA to commemorate being the youngest member of the Northern Ireland squad which Peter Doherty took to the World Cup finals for the first time in Sweden that summer.

That watch, which he still cherishes, is destined to be handed over to his eldest son. But his other boy will have to go without after the intervention of Harry Cavan, the senior vice president of FIFA, had ruined his chances of another watch presentation, made to those who win 50 caps for Northern Ireland.

Dougan recalls that it was a phone call from John Giles, followed by another from Louis Kilcoyne, then a recognised FIFA football agent, which sparked the idea of a game between an all Ireland team and Brazil at Lansdowne Road.

"I put the idea of north and south coming together to play Brazil at a meeting in London with the two senior officials of the IFA - Harry Cavan, the president, and Billy Drennan, the secretary, a gentleman and a far sighted administrator. My hands were wet with the sweat of nervous tension. Here, I thought, we were talking about history in the making ... talking about leadership ... talking about building bridges.

"THEN came the moment I will remember for the rest of my life. Mr Cavan received the news as if a bomb had hit him. In the face of what was for me a great moment in my footballing life, I was confronted by a cold stony silence.

"Harry Cavan informed me tersely that he would put the matter to the IFA. Billy Drennan, much more enthusiastic, told me that he would keep me posted about developments. But I never heard from either again. I had been captain of the Northern Ireland team for the previous four years, but after that meeting I never played again. And I never played again because Cavan told the manager, Terry Neill, never to pick me.

But, of course, that didn't stop me. I brought six or seven players down, lads like Pat Jennings, Alan Hunter, Martin O'Neill and Bryan Hamilton, and together with the southern players we gave the world champions one hell of a game. And I scored twice.

"It was a wet day, the game was live on television we still got 40,000 people into Lansdowne Road. And not all of them were from the south. To this day, I meet people in Belfast, Newry and God knows where who tell me `Yeh, I was there the day Ireland came from 4-1 down and nearly beat Brazil' and that more than makes up for the watch I nearly got."

The Doog had never been one to respect convention, not from the day he walked into a barber's shop in Blackburn in 1959 and had his head shaven clean. Much later, the first of football's skinheads would be named as Britain's best dressed man for two consecutive years, 1972 and 73. In between he was, in his own words, "whacked" by some of the hardest of the hard men in the game, had his back damaged and collected more than 200 stitches in assorted head and facial wounds.

But he never sacrificed his ambition to be colourful, to go with the risks and bring a little extra, flair to the game. "I had this attitude that if only one person in a crowd of 40,000 left the ground saying `Yeh that Dougan is a bit special, a bit of an entertainer' I had delivered on my mandate."

Like Jack Charlton and his brief flirtation with mining, he couldn't wait to escape from the Belfast shipyards when he became the third generation of his family to work in Shortt and Harlands, as an apprentice electrician.

His thoughts on Charlton are interesting. As players they often clashed head on and as fellow panellists on ITV football presentations, he came to know him well enough to realise that before his FAI appointment, Charlton was only lukewarm in his attitude to Ireland.

"As a player he was very lucky. He was big and cumbersome and I could have played against him seven days a week without losing any sleep over it. But as a manager his contribution was huge. At the end of the day, however, he just didn't have the firepower to do any better than Peter Doherty or Billy Bingham and get his team past the quarter finals of the World Cup.

"That wasn't his fault, rather an indictment of the limited resources he was working with. The World Cup finals in Italy and America were marvellous occasions for the whole country. But the harsh fact is that in each of those championships the Republic scored just twice. Measure that against the fact that when we went to Sweden in 1958 Peter McParland alone hit the target five times."

Despite that chastening rebuff by Harry Cavan, the man who describes Jimmy Hill as a nondescript player who became an acceptable public figure in the reflected glory of Cliff Lloyd, the former PFA secretary, and brands club chairmen as opportunists riding on the backs of footballers, sees an all Ireland team as the only way forward for international football in this country.

"When Pat Jennings, the last of the truly great players in the North, retired, I went on record as saying that Northern Ireland were finished. And the Republic's performance against Iceland, the worst in living memory, proves that they area now into the same scenario. Singly, neither of them may ever again reach the finals of a major competition in my lifetime. But by pooling resources, they have at least a chance."

AND what of the latest career ambition of the man whom the press once dubbed as the Arthur Scargill of football? "People tell me that football unity will only come after the bigger issue is solved, but in all honesty I don't believe there will ever be political unification in this country.

"It won't happen because there is no real desire for it to happen. And if John Major and John Bruton believe in democracy they will go to their people and ask them to decide in a referendum with just six words on the ballot paper - Do you want a united Ireland?

"No ifs or fancy phrases. Just as simple as that. Do you want unification? Like many Irish people on both sides of the border, I know the answer to that one. And if it comes, it will defuse the political situation in this country for ever".

And his choice of constituency? "People assume that because I come from East Belfast, I'm targeting Peter Robinson's seat. My mother used say that if you put an orange jacket on a donkey he'd be elected in East Belfast. Now, that's unfair to the donkey.

I never was an Orangeman - and neither was my father - and I've no doubt that I've enough support across the political divide to be given the chance of making a meaningful input to the debate.

I met a sitting MP the other day who wanted to know where I was standing. And I was delighted to be able to assure a somewhat nervous Joe Hendron, a man I very much like, that it won't be in West Belfast. But I do have specific plans which I will announce shortly."

Ever optimistic, ever pushing on, ever challenging.