Fergie Rises

by Michael Grant

  After only three months in the job there it was, the first beat of a drum that he would bang for the next eight years. Belief, belief, belief. When he spoke privately to the players, though, he worded the message more bluntly. How should they tackle the Old Firm? ‘Be arrogant, get at their bloody throats.’

  Chapter 5

  THE CULL OF THE ‘WESTHILL WILLIE-BITERS’

  The away dressing room at Ibrox Stadium is one of football’s grandest depositories for visiting teams. With its high ceiling, wood panelling and brass fittings, the sunlight flooding in through a row of windows, it creates a sense of scale and substance which can be intimidating. But at his first match against Rangers with Aberdeen, Alex Ferguson was too consumed by the task at hand to notice any of that. He had eyes and ears only for the mood of his own players. And he did not like it. Early-season results suggested they had moved on from that dreadful Scottish Cup final performance four months earlier, when they had frozen during what turned out to be Billy McNeill’s last game as manager. In fact Aberdeen under Ferguson had made a far more solid start to the campaign than treble-winning Rangers had under their new boss, John Greig. After four games the Dons were already five points ahead and Ferguson saw that visit to Ibrox on 16 September 1978 as an opportunity to lay down a marker by beating them. But, ultimately, it only crystallised the stark difference between his idea of what constituted a good result in Glasgow and that of his players.

  Rangers played well in the windy conditions and went ahead from a disputed penalty just before half-time. They had further chances and were closing in on their first league win of the season when substitute Gordon Strachan dug out a cross in the ninetieth minute which midfielder Dom Sullivan met with a headed equaliser. The game finished 1–1. Ferguson stood on the touchline and watched how his players reacted. Before kick-off he had heard them talking about slowing down the play, time-wasting, frustrating Rangers and settling for a draw. Now they bounced happily back into the dressing room. It surprised them to see Ferguson muttering and moaning. ‘The atmosphere in the dressing room was reasonably upbeat, which made the manager even angrier,’ said captain Willie Miller. Ferguson later took Miller aside and told him he was ‘sick’ at the team being so happy just because they had drawn with Rangers. There was probably an element of exaggeration in that. The result preserved Aberdeen’s lead over the champions and was a decent outcome on a day when they had not performed well. Ferguson even told reporters: ‘I’m very pleased. To come to Ibrox in these type of conditions is a good result all right.’ In fact, he was convinced that his players’ reaction symbolised the attitude that was holding the club back. He was determined to obliterate the inferiority complex Aberdeen had about Rangers and Celtic. Things were going to be different under him: his teams would go to Ibrox and Parkhead and be quick, strong, combative, aggressive, controlling and relentless. Above all they would go to attack.

  Ferguson had already demonstrated that was his style. The previous season his St Mirren, despite being new to the top flight, had lost only two out of eight league games against the Old Firm and beat Celtic twice at Parkhead. He had to instil the same confidence in Aberdeen. But the admiration he felt for the squad he had built at Love Street in itself proved to be an obstacle. It was as if the talented set of youngsters he had left behind at St Mirren were still with him, playing in front of his mind’s eye every time he looked at Aberdeen. He began to make unflattering comparisons. During training and in team-talks he kept dropping the names of St Mirren players, intimating he was more impressed with the squad in Paisley than the one he had inherited at Pittodrie. Strachan kept hearing that Tony Fitzpatrick would have been a bigger influence on the play. Joe Harper was not working as hard up front as Frank McGarvey did. If only Miller could defend like Jackie Copland. It was Copland this, Copland that, Copland the other. Miller let it go at first but gradually he began to simmer. Copland was a decent defender at St Mirren and Miller knew, liked and respected him. But Miller had played under three Aberdeen managers, captained the team to a cup victory and represented Scotland. He was in a different class. There was not much he had to learn from a guy nudging thirty, who two years earlier had been in the lower leagues. Miller recalled the prevailing, sarcastic response: ‘Tell the St Mirren boys to take their medals up and let us see them.’

  Eventually the captain took the new manager to task. Calm and assured, Miller told Ferguson he could rely on his full support and commitment, but he resented the constant comparisons with Copland. ‘He referred to St Mirren a lot. That’s what got my nose up a little bit. I had my own way of doing things. I liked to organise at set-pieces. So when Fergie kept referring to how St Mirren did things I didn’t take it that well. Eventually I pointed it out to him. “Let me organise this, I’m not really that interested in how Jackie Copland did things.” It wasn’t eyeball-to-eyeball, not on that occasion. It was more of a “Look, gaffer, I’ve had enough of Jackie Copland and St Mirren”. The thing with Fergie is that he’s a good judge of character. I wasn’t trying to undermine his authority in any way and he knew that. He was pretty rash when he came in to Aberdeen. He was only thirty-six. He wasn’t schooled in man-management. He wasn’t the type of manager he became later. He was abrasive. He spoke his mind.’

  It was not simply a matter of wounded pride. The comparisons rankled at the level of basic arithmetic. Over the previous two seasons Aberdeen had played Ferguson’s former team six times and the results were 3–2, 4–0, 4–0, 3–1, 2–1 and 4–2. Aberdeen had won the lot. ‘He really wasn’t liked when he first came in,’ said Willie Garner, Miller’s central defensive partner in Ferguson’s first season. ‘He wasn’t that much older than a few of the players and I think he was doing a lot of things for effect. It was the whole “deal with the monster”-type thing, and he was the monster.’ John McMaster recalled the mood: ‘The boys were getting pissed off with it. He was like a bull in a china shop. Face-to-face stuff, pouncing on things, not thinking. Stuart Kennedy used to go in and say, “Boss, you’re going to lose that dressing room if you continue to talk about St Mirren players”.’

  Ferguson liked Kennedy’s style and the feeling was mutual. Kennedy was a senior and popular figure among the players and an invaluable advocate for the new manager. As resentment slowly grew, Kennedy’s role became key. After a few weeks he intervened: ‘Eventually the St Mirren thing was pointed out to him…although it had to be eased into the conversation! We were strong, proud players as well. He still had affection for that St Mirren team and players, but he realised it wasn’t the way forward.’ Perhaps Ferguson had been attempting to rile Aberdeen into becoming a new set of ‘Furies’, but he was perceptive enough to see when he had made a wrong call. The point made by both Kennedy and Miller hit home. There would be no more reminiscing about Jackie Copland.

  Yet the task of remaking Aberdeen in his own ferocious image remained. The crucial early battle of wills was fought between him and Miller. The outcome would shape the team for years to come. Both were Glaswegians. Miller, the younger by fourteen years, came from Bridgeton, Rangers territory like Ferguson’s beloved Govan, and he shared the manager’s hard upbringing and deep-rooted hunger and ambition. They were as competitive as each other, though they had different ways of showing it. Ferguson was expressive, Miller reserved. The early friction between them was down to just one factor: they had yet to appreciate how the other worked.

  At first they circled each other. Because Miller lacked pace he relied on his magnificent reading of the game, so tended to defend from a deep position. Ferguson felt that invited pressure from opponents and wanted Miller to push up and hold a higher line. Miller ignored him, not out of disrespect but because he felt Ferguson did not know enough about him or the art of defending to suggest such a fundamental change of tactic. Miller also had a sluggish attitude to training–he was one of those players who only came alive in matches–and the combination did nothing to endear him to Ferguson. A confrontation was inevitable.

  ‘
Willie kept getting booked for mouthing to the referee,’ said Garner. ‘There was this game when he’d been booked and then gave out another couple of dull ones fifteen to twenty minutes into the second half. All of a sudden our physio’s out with the subs’ boards, banging them together, clack-clack-clack. I look across and he’s holding up number six. Willie’s coming off. I’m laughing to myself, thinking, “This’ll be fun”. Willie didn’t even look across. I says to him, “You’re going off.” So he looks across, stares at it and just waves his hand at the touchline, dismissing it. A few seconds later, clack-clack-clack with the boards. Same again, Willie looks across and just waves it away again. He just keeps playing. So Fergie tells the physio to come back into the dug-out. At the end of the game, what an argument that one was! Fergie versus Willie. “You tried to undermine my authority!” They were nose-to-nose.’

  Miller asserted himself more than once. Several minutes into one of Ferguson’s longer dressing-room post-mortems he got up, protesting he was cold, walked to the shower room and said he could listen from there, if necessary. In a match at Partick Thistle he was unhappy about Aberdeen playing five at the back and at half-time told Ferguson it had to change. Other players were startled by the open challenge to the manager. Ferguson told him to be quiet, Miller continued to rant. The tension was palpable. Ferguson was furious but, revealingly, the confrontation petered out. He would take it from Miller–and no one else–because he knew the captain was as committed to improving the team as he was. He had no interest in usurping the manager’s control. Indeed, it was soon clear to Ferguson that Miller had exactly the qualities he wanted in his team’s leader. If anything it was Ferguson who compromised as Miller’s relentlessly impressive performances rendered their initial clashes irrelevant. In time he would hail Miller as ‘the best penalty box defender in Europe’. In the meantime the captain was about to prove himself as indispensable to his manager off the pitch as he was on it.

  Though Aberdeen’s early results under Ferguson were satisfying, including progress past Marek Dimitrov of Bulgaria in the European Cup Winners’ Cup, they disguised the on-going friction with the players. The disaffection was heightened by a geographical divide. The Ferguson family had yet to move north and the manager was often absent when the team bus made the long journey home after away games, returning instead to Glasgow to see Cathy and the boys. Not travelling with the team encouraged dissent. On the journey back from Aberdeen’s first league defeat of the season, against Hibs at Easter Road on 23 September, the players discussed the tactics Ferguson had employed. There were complaints. His approach had been uncharacteristically conservative, playing Joe Harper up front on his own in a 4–5–1 formation. Hibs had won 2–1 and could have scored more.

  When the players arrived for training the following Monday they were told to get changed and then sit in the centre circle at Pittodrie, where the manager would address them. Ferguson emerged from the mouth of the tunnel and strode purposefully on to the pitch. None of them knew what was coming and most assumed they were in for some shouting and bawling. Instead he declared an amnesty: they could raise their complaints to his face. Whatever they had to say, they could say it then without fear of repercussion.

  Joe Harper was the first to pipe up: ‘I don’t think the tactics worked, boss,’ he said. Harper was a dominant character among a small clique of first-team players who lived within a few streets of each other in the pleasant little suburb of Westhill. Harper, Dom Sullivan and Ian Fleming often shared lifts to training and they harboured early reservations about Ferguson. All of them had thought the world of either Turnbull, MacLeod or McNeill, and in Harper’s case all three. They did not think much of their successor. After Harper, another player had his say, then another. Ferguson could take only so much before his temper boiled over and he spat out a response: ‘Fucking Westhill Willie-biters.’ The unusual line stuck. ‘We were nicknamed “the Westhill Willie-biters”,’ said Sullivan, laughing about it more than thirty years later. ‘We were apparently openly conspiring against him and we all lived in Westhill! That’s what he called us. It wasn’t true. Not at all. It just came off his tongue one time and it stuck with the boys. It became banter to the rest of them in the dressing room.’

  Apart from provoking that memorable phrase the summit in Pittodrie’s centre circle seemed to pass without any strong reaction on Ferguson’s part. In fact, it was the calm before the storm. After the training session, Harper was summoned to the manager’s office. ‘Bloody sit down,’ Ferguson barked. He then castigated Harper for questioning his tactics in front of the team. As he wagged a finger in Harper’s face, the player’s anger rose up. He snapped and grabbed Ferguson’s finger, momentarily bending it backwards. ‘Don’t you ever point a finger at me like that again,’ he snarled. ‘I was brought up to show good manners. I would never do that to anyone. If you don’t want my opinion, don’t ask for it.’ Then he stormed out of the office. Though Ferguson took the incident no further, his mind was made up about Harper. Their relationship would never fully recover.

  As a city, Aberdeen is a goldfish bowl. Inevitably, people heard rumours that things were not going well behind the scenes and gossip circulated about mutinous players and their antipathy towards the new manager. It did not help that they lost four games in a row including a 3–0 collapse in the first leg against Fortuna Düsseldorf in Germany on 18 October. After that match Ferguson allowed the players to drown their sorrows, but was irritated when his generosity was abused and some of them embarked on a heavy session which ended in a nightclub. His anger intensified when they played poorly and lost at home to Hearts three days later. On the day of the second leg against the Germans local reporter Andy Melvin wrote a comment piece for the Evening Express: ‘During the past fortnight rumours have swept through Aberdeen like a fire through a forest. Stories of mass transfer requests and even physical confrontation between Alex Ferguson and a player have been born, cultivated and allowed to mushroom by those characters who always claim to be “in the know”…Three Premier League defeats and Pittodrie is looked upon as a cauldron of hate. Three wins and I suppose all is well again. Alex Ferguson and his players are deeply worried about the situation and that is not doing their Premier League and Cup Winners’ Cup preparations any good at all.’

  Stories about tensions between Harper and Ferguson reached supporters. The striker was a hero to those fans in the cavernous, noisy Beach End who Ferguson himself had yet to impress. By the time he left the club Harper was Aberdeen’s top goalscorer of all time. But Ferguson saw problems beyond the goals. Harper was no natural athlete and had little enthusiasm for fitness training. He would duck and dive to get out of training runs, or look for cheeky shortcuts. Ferguson also thought him disruptive. Though Harper went on to contribute thirty-three goals that season, he was too much of an individual and refused to follow the manager’s instructions. Ferguson was intent on building a team who defended from the front, with strikers constantly moving and closing down opponents. That was not Harper’s style. Stuart Kennedy, who enjoyed Harper’s company, was clear-sighted about Ferguson’s dilemma: ‘A lot of managers might have buckled down to wee Joe. He might have dominated them because he’s a dominating wee guy. He was the top scorer and all top scorers have an ego. He was “The King”. The fans loved him. But Fergie looked at the team. Maybe at Pittodrie you weren’t being asked to run so much but he looked at playing in Europe, playing away games. Joe would score goals, that was a guarantee, but he wasn’t going to run out to the flanks and shut down a full-back.’

  Years later, in his 1999 autobiography, Managing My Life, Ferguson described Harper as a long-term problem for him at Aberdeen: an artful dodger; a player with weight problems who lacked discipline. He even claimed to have lapped him on a training run. Harper responded in his own book, King Joey, in 2008, concluding that Ferguson hated and despised him. ‘I cannot help wondering if Fergie considered my hero status as some sort of threat to his authority.’ He denied being unsupportive
but accused Ferguson of showing him little respect and pursuing a vendetta. ‘I do not wish to speak to Sir Alex Ferguson ever again,’ he wrote. True to his word, in 2014 Harper declined to be interviewed for this book because it would involve discussing Ferguson. Ferguson, meanwhile, has never publicly responded to Harper’s book.

  Harper’s Westhill pal Dom Sullivan was a skilful and smooth midfielder who had made a major contribution to the club’s 1976 League Cup win. Unlike Harper he was one of the fittest players at Pittodrie. Among the Aberdeen squad he had a unique history with Ferguson. They had once played against each other when Ferguson was coming to the end of his career at Falkirk and Sullivan was a young lad starting at Clyde. During that match Ferguson had smashed in two of Sullivan’s teeth. ‘There was a corner kick five minutes in,’ Sullivan remembers. ‘I was back covering, picking up Fergie. Thirty seconds later I was picking up my teeth. He swung an arm and broke two teeth. I got off the ground, the ball’s at the other end of the park, I’ve got blood everywhere and didn’t know where I was. That was Fergie: win at all costs.’

  Their reunion at Pittodrie got off to a bad start. Sullivan’s version of events is that Billy McNeill made an offer to take him to Celtic soon after moving there as manager. Ferguson interpreted it as collusion and a lack of commitment on the player’s part, and Sullivan found himself dropped to the reserves. He insists he knew nothing about Celtic’s bid and did not deserve to be marginalised. ‘I went to Fergie and asked about it. He said, “You’re no’ for sale.” I said, “But I’m not playing in the first team, you’re no’ giving me a chance.” But I was dismissed. I kept coming in and out, being put back into the reserves. Playing well, but in and out. He was fucking me about, to tell you the truth. He admitted it in later years. Eventually I decided, “Ach, I’m not putting up with this”, and I asked to see the chairman, Dick Donald. I said to him, “Mr Chairman, I’m really unhappy, I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know what I’m doing, I don’t seem to be getting a game and I’m training with the reserves.” He said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Dom, hold on a minute.” He phoned down for Fergie. Fergie came up. Dick says, “Alex, Dom isn’t happy. What’s the situation?” Fergie says, “Well, he’s in my squad, he’s not for sale.” So Dick goes, “If he’s in your squad surely he should be in here training?” Fergie didn’t like it. Dick Donald was very straight. So Fergie says he needs a certain number of players for set drills and so on. Dick says, “I don’t see how another one would upset that.”