Scott Brown: After leaving Celtic, the Aberdeen midfielder wants to 'prove you all wrong' again

Scott Brown may have a new life in Aberdeen but some things are exactly as they were - his capacity to draw steam from the ears of opposing managers being one of them.

At the weekend, it was Hearts manager Robbie Neilson's turn to take umbrage with the Aberdeen captain and coach.

Brown is 36 and still looks like he loves a battle as much as he did when he was 10 years younger and 10 yards faster. This is a man who is embracing change, but who's retained the same kind of devilment and will to win that brought him trophies in great clusters in nearly a decade and a half at Celtic .

On Thursday, another scrap. The second leg of the European Conference play-offs against Qarabag. A goal down and all to play for. A £3m-4m game. The stakes are high with this one.

No Scottish player has played in Europe as many times as Brown. From Atletico in Madrid to Zenit in St Petersburg he's appeared in more than 130 of these ties in 32 different countries across a span of 18 years.

As you run through the names of the great players he's gone up against - Xavi, Iniesta and Pirlo; Neymar, Messi and Ronaldo - he nods his head and takes aim. "Yeah, I enjoyed playing against them all," he says, deadpan. "Not getting a kick of the ball for 90 minutes was absolutely amazing."

The self-mocking humour never fails to hit the target. For an hour we'd been talking about his old life with Celtic and how it ended and his new life with Aberdeen and how it's started, but we've gone off on a side road with this stuff and it's an enjoyable detour.

He talks about one of the times he faced the great Iniesta. "The best I ever played against," he says. "He just turned and ran at me and I panicked. I thought the only way to stop him was to bring him down - and I ended up bringing him down quite a lot.

"Pirlo was 34 when I played against him. He couldn't run but, boy, could he move his hips. Nobody could take the ball off him. Incredible."

And there's his penchant for laughing at himself to factor in, too. So he tells a story about the 7-0 loss at Camp Nou on Brendan Rodgers' watch in 2016 (a hat-trick and two assists for Messi, a goal and four assists for Neymar) and the recollection of his fury at half-time.

"I was never one to run and get a strip from other players. 'Please, sir, can we swap shirts?' I've never done it. I wouldn't speak to them in the tunnel, I wouldn't help them up off the floor if I fouled them, I wouldn't speak to them after the game. That was my way of getting through. No respect," he explains.

"That time in Barcelona it was four or five at half-time (it was only 2-0 but it was an onslaught) and some of the lads were sprinting up the tunnel to try and get Messi's strip and I was losing my head. Why would you want to get somebody's strip who's just ripped you a new one? I'm looking at them. 'Messi, Messi, please, strip, strip...' I went in and lost the plot. At the end of the game, they did the exact same.

"All those great players I played against and I never asked for a strip even though deep down I probably wanted to. Until they came looking for my strip I wasn't going looking for theirs and I never saw Messi running down the tunnel after me going. 'Broony, Broony, can I swap strips with you please?'"

He laughs when he thinks about the names his young boys are going to call him when they discover in later life that the family cupboard is bare and there's not a single shirt from any of the immortals he's faced in football.

'I felt, slowly, I was overstaying my welcome'

Aberdeen have not won in three, having done so in their previous four. Following the painful League Cup exit to Raith Rovers, Thursday night is a very big deal to Aberdeen's new coaching team - Stephen Glass, Alan Russell, Henry Apaloo and Brown.

The move north was a surprise. He chatted with Rodgers - an enduring influence - last summer about it. His encouraging words weren't the clincher, but they were another layer of validation of a decision he was beginning to make in his own head. A player-coach role at Aberdeen? "Jump in, Broony. The hard work starts now," Rodgers told him.

So Broony jumped - and here he is in the boardroom at Pittodrie, recalling fondly a simple footballing life at Celtic when he'd be out of the training ground at one and two in the afternoon.

They call him The Hybrid around here. Part footballer, part coach, but leaving Celtic is the starting point. He's heard it a million times, but it's still odd seeing him in red, not green.

"I'd been there a long time and you don't want things to get too stale," he says. "You don't want to overstay your welcome and I felt like that was slowly happening. I didn't want that to be the way I finished.

"I was on the bench and I was always thinking what else I could be doing. My wee brain works overtime now and then. It takes a lot, but it does. I saw [chief executive] Peter [Lawwell] leaving and I saw Lenny [manager Neil Lennon] leaving - two people I've a lot of love for - and I didn't want to be the one who stayed. I was always looking over my shoulder thinking what else could I do."

He had options beyond Celtic. Retirement was one. Go travel, see the world, relax. Then coronavirus hit and a carefree trek around the globe was off the table.

A return to Hibs was another. "I could have went back to where it all started for me, but a lot of people there remember what you were like when you were 17, 18, 19," he explains. "I was hyperactive, I had a red mohawk. Could bomb up and down the pitch. Fit as a fiddle."

In his head, going back would have put him at risk of being compared to his first incarnation at Easter Road and he wanted something different. Something very different as it turned out.

"When Stephen asked if I'd be interested I thought, 'dunno. There's a lot of Aberdeen fans that don't like me'," he recalls. "I don't know how many times I've played at Pittodrie for Hibs and Celtic [24 times] but I used to get out as quickly as I could. I never had a holiday up here. Never had a night out or a dinner or anything."

Of all his visits to Pittodrie, one stands out above all others - the day in 2018 when he got emptied by young Aberdeen striker Sam Cosgrove and responded with a little dance. The memory of it brings a smile.

"I took a bad touch and he's just lunged at me, nowhere near the ball, smashed me and then I got the ball smacked off the back of my head from whatshisname... [Shay] Logan... or whatever he was," Brown recalls. "He smacked the ball off the back of my head and did a runner as he usually does.

"All the crowd were cheering, so I got back up. 'Here we go again, nice and fresh'. It's just something I do. I get hit and I get up and go again. I enjoy the fight.

"I've had some good ones here. I had one with Barry Robson. Fighting and scrapping and then after the game the two of us were high-fiving. Niall McGinn got me sent off here once. I still bring that up with him."

'Had Brendan not arrived, I'd have probably retired'

Gordon Strachan, Neil Lennon and Rodgers all had big parts to play in making Brown the force he was at Celtic, but you sense that it's Rodgers that wowed him the most. It was the current Leicester City manager who explained to him how it needed to be as a coach.

Football had been his hobby. Now, it was his job. There's a difference. Longer hours, more responsibility, more frustration. The two men talk pretty regularly. Why wouldn't they? That's a lot of knowledge he can tap into.

"Had Brendan not arrived at Celtic when he did, I'd have probably retired," admits Brown. "The way Ronny [Deila] was and the way the football was going wasn't great.

"Brendan was like a breath of fresh air. He asked me what was wrong with the club and I said we don't work hard enough in training and the lads aren't fit enough and he said, 'well, that won't be happening'.

"He got out all his notes from Swansea and Liverpool and showed me what he was going to do at Celtic. He went deep into it and I loved it. He took responsibility for everything. He had a vision of how he wanted us to play."

It was an education that Brown has brought with him to Aberdeen. It's all in notebooks. He wrote down every session. Late at night he'd remember things Rodgers had said - 'This is not a Robbie Williams training session, we're not here to entertain, we're here to work' - and so he started putting a pad at the side of his bed for when things came back to him.

"I wrote down Lenny's stuff as well," Brown says. "I forget things so I'm better writing it down. Gordon, Lenny, Brendan - there's a lot of stuff."

It's impossible to know where all of this is going to take him but he sounds like a man who's been re-energised by the challenge and by the young players around him at Aberdeen.

Lewis Ferguson is one of those. With talent, comes rumours of interest from elsewhere and that's where the young midfielder - who earned a first Scotland call this week - is at right now. "He'll go to a top club at some point because he's a top player," Brown says.

"He scores goals, he's a strong, strong boy and a fit laddie as well and he wants to learn. He's a 21-year old in a man's body. Everybody wants a midfielder who scores goals. He'll go eventually but it has to be the right deal for the club and the right place for him."

Ferguson could do worse than listen to Brown, a man who's still driven after all these years.

Rodgers used to say focus on the game in front of your face, a mantra he's adopted. He doesn't care about next week or next month or when he's going back to Celtic Park or when he's going to Ibrox. It's all about Thursday in Europe and restoring momentum. It's about bouncing back. It's what Brown has done his entire career.

"A lot of people think at 36 you're done," he states. "A lot of people at Celtic probably thought I was done. Just one more time I want prove you all wrong."