When Bruce Grobbelaar signed for Liverpool in 1981, he was initially rather sceptical about something Bill Shankly had once said, all that stuff about football being much more important than a matter of life and death. After all, he had arrived on Merseyside fresh from fighting in the Zimbabwe civil war. And, almost on a daily basis, out on the front line of that bitter, bloody conflict, he had been witness to events that still make him shudder.

“I used to think that in the early days: are you kidding me? Football is not that important,” he says. “Then I thought about it and I realised: hang on here, I’m getting paid for doing something I love. I know this is not going to kill me. It is not a war. I’d been there. I was happy I was alive. Just enjoy it, man. So every single day, I wore a great big smile on my face.”

As he speaks to Telegraph Sport from his Norwegian wife’s family’s holiday home, overlooking a remote fjord west of Bergen, he says he is still grinning.

“Even today, I wake up and celebrate that I’m alive. Boom! What a bonus! I try to make every single day the best I ever had.”

This is the Grobbelaar we all remember: the eternal optimist, the upbeat joker, the class clown. Never more so than in the penalty shoot-out at the end of the 1984 European Cup final against Roma.

“As I was walking out, Joe Fagan [the Liverpool manager] said to me: ‘Try and put them off,’ ” he recalls.

And how he did. Grinning widely as he made his way towards the goal, he did a Sixties dance move, swapping his hands from knee to knee. Then, as Bruno Conti prepared to take the first penalty, before taking up his position on the line, he ostentatiously bit into the netting at the back of his goal in mock trepidation.

Conti duly missed.

“I remember thinking of the netting: ‘It’s like spaghetti.’ So when [Francesco] Graziani came up, I thought: ‘I’ll give him the old spaghetti legs.’”

His Charlie Chaplin wobbly-knees routine worked. Graziani missed too, and Liverpool had their hands on the trophy for the fourth time. Comical as it may have looked, Grobbelaar became the first goalkeeper to apply mind games to the shoot-out. Emi Martinez, Jordan Pickford: they owe it all to him.

“Actually, I’d done it before,” he recalls. “I played a game in Zimbabwe immediately after I came out of the army from the bush war. There was a penalty and I remembered that someone in the crowd had chucked this mask on to the pitch, which I’d put behind the goal. So I picked it up and put it on. It was the mask of an old man and when I turned around the striker was terrified and he missed. If that had happened today, I’d get sent off for ungentlemanly conduct. But the ref didn’t do anything and we won the game. So in that final I knew I had to do something to get into their mind. Unfortunately, there was no mask to hand, so I improvised.”

It is, he says, a part of the goalkeeper’s armoury that he has enjoyed watching develop over the years.

“For me the best performance in a shoot-out I’ve seen was Jerzy Dudek [for Liverpool in the 2005 Champions League final]. He had to make saves. I was lucky. My guys missed. I’m not sure I’d have been able to make any saves had they hit the target. I was too busy trying to put them off.”

Besides, he adds, making saves was never something he practised much when he was at Liverpool.

“I remember the first day of training at Melwood, I took my gloves out with me. And Ronnie Moran [the Liverpool coach] said to me: ‘What are you doing with those?’ We just played five-a-side. The only time we did any specialist keeper stuff was for 20 minutes on a Thursday. And that was Liverpool’s philosophy: keepers were good with their feet. I wasn’t the first. They played with a sweeper keeper from the days of Tommy Lawrence. I played with my feet every day. My God, we had a laugh in training.”

‘I saw things I wish I hadn’t – people crushed’

Being able to laugh, Grobbelaar says, is a philosophy that has stood him in good stead subsequently. It is one that has sustained him not just through the glory days at Anfield, winning six league titles, three FA Cups, three League Cups and that European Cup, but through what he describes as the dark times.

He was, for instance, eye witness to three of the worst tragedies in football history. He was there at Heysel in 1985, he was there at Hillsborough in 1989, afterwards attending many of the funerals of those who perished; a bystander to relentless grief. And he was there in Harare in 2000, when 13 people were killed in a stampede during an international match between his home country and South Africa.

“I saw things you really wish you hadn’t,” he says. “I saw people crushed just trying to get away. And at a football match.”

Personally, too, he had across his career what might best be described as issues. In 1994, he featured in a sting by The Sun newspaper, alleging a widespread conspiracy of match-fixing among prominent players. The police launched an investigation, during which he was allowed to continue playing.

After two trials failed to reach a verdict and he was acquitted of all charges, Grobbelaar sued The Sun. Initially he was awarded £85,000 damages. But the newspaper appealed, and the judge reduced the award to just £1. Moreover, he ordered him to pay all the costs involved. He was bankrupt. It was during the lengthy legal process that he came to play for Plymouth Argyle.

“I was at Southampton after Liverpool,” he recalls. “Because of the allegations, there was a lot of pressure on them not to sign me. But Alan Ball, the manager, and Lawrie McMenemy asked me straight up three times if I had done it. I said no, they believed me and I signed and was really happy there.”

But Ball and then his successor Dave Merrington left the club. And the new manager was less accommodating.

“I went into his office with my contract and said: ‘I want to sign up for another year.’ He said: ‘No sorry, there’s too much going on with you,’ ” he recalls. “It was Graeme Souness. Yeah, my old Liverpool team-mate.”

From being ‘blackballed’ by Man City to signing for Neil Warnock

So Grobbelaar went back to Zimbabwe, thinking his career in England was over. Then, a week before the season started, he received a phone call.

“It was Alan Ball, he’s now at Manchester City,” Grobbelaar recalls. “He said: ‘I want to sign you. Can you get to Manchester tomorrow at 10am?’ It was about 10pm and I’m in Africa, but I say: ‘Yes, I can.’ I jump on a plane and get to Manchester on time. I walk out into the terminal and see Alan Ball standing there, shaking his head. He says: ‘I’m sorry, the chairman has blackballed you.’ ”

So, stuck in Manchester Airport, he did what every player in need of a club does: he rang Neil Warnock, who was then at Plymouth Argyle.

“I said to him: ‘Do you need a keeper?’ He said: ‘Give me two minutes.’ He rang me back and said: ‘Can you get to Bristol by two o’clock?’ It had to be done by then. So I got there, met the chairman, shook hands and signed for Plymouth. And it was one of the best things I did.

“We won my first match 1-0. I went into the directors’ box afterwards and said to the opposition chairman: ‘That was for you.’ It was Manchester City.”

News of his arrival travelled fast.

“About a week later, I got a call from my cousin in Johannesburg. ‘What’s all this about you signing for Plymouth?’ He’s a mechanic and he’d gone into his local branch of Rotolok, the company the Plymouth chairman owned, and there on the wall is a picture of me shaking hands with the boss. My cousin says to me: ‘I hope you’ve got image rights.’ Not that it mattered. He took the picture off the wall and took it home with him.”

For just one season, Grobbelaar had the time of his life in Devon.

“I had a great relationship with Neil. The whole staff were fantastic, the fans were brilliant.”

Though it took him a while to convince his team-mates that he was not going to let a shot through his legs for a pre-arranged betting scam.

“You must understand I was going through court cases, it was all over the papers. It was a dark time of my life. Some of them would say things. They weren’t sure if I was innocent or guilty. I knew where I was standing, but they didn’t. To be fair, they were very respectful once we went on the field.”

And he recalls they all came round to him after a match against Doncaster.

“There was a big fight in the [penalty] area. The ref ended up booking 11 players. I came out of the ruck with the ball. I gave it to the ref saying: ‘You’re going to need this.’ He looked at me and went: ‘I haven’t booked you yet,’ and showed me the yellow card. I just laughed and the lads loved it.”

‘Clubs would get nervous, so I’d have to move on’

At the end of his one season, Warnock moved on and Grobbelaar found himself obliged to up sticks once more. So followed a road trip across England, to Oxford, then Sheffield (Wednesday), Oldham, Chesham, Bury, Lincoln and Northwich. He never stayed long anywhere.

“It was the court case,” he says. “I was all over the papers. Clubs would get nervous, I’d move on. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. But they worried.”

In between he had a couple of spells in charge of the Zimbabwe national team.

“I’m quietly confident I will have one little dance with them again,” says Grobbelaar, now aged 67. “They are in the Africa Cup of Nations [being staged in Morocco in December]. I’m planning to be there as a spectator. But there could be a little surprise. Who knows?”

Before then, however, there is the small matter of two of his old clubs meeting this weekend in the FA Cup fourth round. Though as he watches on the television in his Norwegian hideaway, he insists there is only one team he wants to see win.

“I have a huge passion for Plymouth. I still have friends there. And beautiful memories. I’m not saying who I blame for their current predicament in the league, but I suspect you can guess. I hope they give a good account of themselves. My loyalties, though, are with Liverpool FC. I want them to win every game they play.”

And not simply because of the silverware he accumulated in his 13 years at Anfield.

“No, it’s because they gave me my life back,” he says. “I was homeless after coming out of the army. I was in a dark, dark place. Liverpool gave me my sense of being, my first home. I am forever grateful to the Liverpool people. It has to be Liverpool I’m with. That’s where my heart is.”

He pauses for a moment before adding: “Always.”