If after 40 years he gets the chance to renew acquaintance with Ted Hopkins, Emile Yagmoor is in no doubt he’d again hoist football’s most famous benchwarmer to the heavens.

Emile is the man pictured sporting the dark sunglasses and balancing Carlton’s diminutive No.7 on his broad shoulder in the moments after the siren signaled a pulsating end to the Blues’ dramatic Grand Final victory of 1970.

This photograph recently appeared on the front cover of Hopkins’ newly-released publication. When free copies of the digest were made available to winners of a competition run via the club’s Facebook page, Anthony Yagmoor emailed to advise that the man behind the shades was in fact his father, and that the aforementioned photo was Dad’s pride and joy.

The paddock that grew in Jolimont is literally half a world away from the olive trees of Asnoun in the North Governorate of Lebanon, where Emile, now 82, was born in 1928.

Emile was a young man in his early 20s when he completed his voyage of a lifetime to Australia aboard the steamship Hellenic Prince. It was 1951 and as Emile explains: “When I arrived in Australia I didn’t understand the game”

“But I’ll tell you a story,” he quickly adds. “In 1942 when I was a boy in Lebanon, my friends and I used to run around the army camp where the Australians were, and we used to watch them kicking the ball. I remember seeing a very tall man, I would say a ruckman now, taking marks, but none of us understood what he was doing.”

Emile’s appreciation of the great Australian Game and his even greater appreciation of all things dark navy were built on territorial foundations, given that Emile found early lodgings on University Lane off Lygon Street.

Fast forward to Grand Final day 1970, and Emile, together with his Australian-born wife Elizabeth and two sons John and Anthony were bobbing corks in that vast ocean of humanity - 121,696 people in all - watching on as Carlton and Collingwood contested the quintessential game of two halves.

“We were sitting three rows back on the old wooden benches near the Southern Stand at the Richmond end. We were there with some friends who were Collingwood supporters, and all of them cracked open the champagne bottles at half-time,” Emile says. “But how the fortunes changed, and when we came back in the second half it was just so exhilarating.”

On siren time, with Carlton 10-point winners in what was arguably League football’s greatest contest, Emile didn’t wait for an invitation to converge on the winner’s circle.

“I didn’t jump the fence . . . I flew over it,” he recalls. “And I couldn’t get to Ted Hopkins quick enough. At the time he was running the victory lap with the Carlton players and he was coming my way, so I just grabbed him.

“That was a great day and a great memory. It just couldn’t happen now, and if ever I got the chance to meet Ted Hopkins again I’d give him a stubby.”