Fergie Rises

by Michael Grant

  On 24 February 1979, Aberdeen played St Mirren, taking Ferguson back to Love Street for the first time since the tribunal’s verdict. An hour into the game they were ahead thanks to goals from Steve Archibald and Ian Scanlon. The points looked certain. But it was a fractious afternoon; at half-time Ferguson breached the conditions of an undertaking he had given the SFA by entering the referee’s room to remonstrate. Soon after St Mirren pulled a goal back, Scanlon and later Willie Miller were sent off. Ferguson was livid and again directed his frustration at the referee. With seven minutes left St Mirren equalised for the point they needed to go top of the league. Jackie Copland, of all people, scored.

  At the final whistle Ferguson was pulled into a side room by his friend, Fred Douglas, the stadium electrician at Love Street. Douglas told him that the club had received a call while the game was going on: his dad had passed away. In fact the time of death was recorded at 4.23pm, coinciding with the spell of trouble when Aberdeen lost two men and a goal. Donald and Anderson did what they could to comfort Ferguson but it was insufficient. ‘I was completely broken up,’ he said. ‘I was beyond consoling.’

  The funeral was four days later. Ferguson got through it without any public display of grief. That evening Aberdeen had a home game against Partick Thistle. His work ethic kicked in and he decided he would take charge of the team as usual, because that was what his father would have wanted. On the long drive back to the North-East he pulled into a lay-by and cried.

  Chapter 6

  ‘DOUG ROUGVIE IS INNOCENT’

  Alex Ferguson was not the type of man to stand still or retreat into his shell while grieving. Over the following weeks there was no dimming of his relentless energy, no indication that his focus had wavered. His mourning was a private affair. His dad passed away just thirty-five days before a date the whole family saw as hugely significant. After 304 days in charge at Aberdeen, the Scottish League Cup final against Rangers on 31 March 1979 was the first national occasion of his managerial career. It felt fresh and exciting, yet his mood was clouded by some old baggage. ‘If the cup is to travel north then Aberdeen must beat the Hampden freeze,’ wrote Jim Reynolds in that morning’s Glasgow Herald. ‘That is not an amateur weather forecast but a question of doubt about Pittodrie temperaments at the national stadium. They have players of undoubted class…they have shown in lesser matches that they can beat Rangers…but they have still to prove they can do it when it really matters.’

  Reynolds was right. Under Ferguson Aberdeen had drawn with Rangers at Ibrox in September and at Pittodrie in November. They had beaten Celtic at home in the league and away in a Scottish Cup replay. They had reached Hampden having lost only one out of seven games against the Old Firm. Days earlier they had set a league record by beating Motherwell 8–0. But Reynolds’ article struck at an uncomfortable truth: the team had yet to prove to Scotland, to Glasgow, and to one Glaswegian in particular, that they could do it when it mattered. Memories remained vivid of that Scottish Cup final collapse under Billy McNeill ten months earlier. Aberdeen versus Rangers would become the sourest, ugliest fixture of Ferguson’s time in Scotland, and what happened that afternoon at Hampden contributed enormously to a rapid deterioration in relations.

  In the first minute Rangers striker Derek Johnstone cut down Steve Archibald in a tackle Ferguson called ‘disgraceful’. Archibald played the rest of the game as a subdued figure. Fifty-eight minutes in Aberdeen took the lead when Duncan Davidson’s header was fumbled over the line by Rangers’ lanky goalkeeper Peter McCloy. For nineteen minutes they had one hand on the cup. Then Johnstone accidentally collided with Bobby Clark during a Rangers attack, dislocating a vertebra in the goalkeeper’s neck. The pain was instant and Clark’s entire arm went numb. He was down on one knee and clutching his arm when Rangers began the move from which they equalised. ‘If I’d stayed down we might have won,’ Clark said, bemoaning his decision not to seek instant treatment. ‘From then on I really struggled. I had no idea what was wrong with my arm.’ Alex MacDonald struck a long-range shot which took a deflection off John McMaster and spun away from Clark. Suddenly it was 1–1 with thirteen minutes to go. Ferguson came on to the pitch to console Clark and check whether he could continue. Archibald volunteered to take over in goal, but Clark refused to go off and continued with his left arm heavily bandaged.

  What happened next has been the subject of dispute and controversy ever since. There is no surviving television footage of the off-the-ball incident between Doug Rougvie and Johnstone, which turned the game. Today in the plush, modern offices of STV in Glasgow there is only a small grey box containing a Scotsport storage tape with brief highlights of the match. Most of the footage was destroyed years ago, as was customary for many games from that era, before there was an appetite for re-watching classic matches. The surviving tape from 1979 offers no clues. One moment McCloy is shown kicking the ball from his hand and when the camera pans across to the middle of the pitch Johnstone is already lying face down on the ground with no one near him. Referee Ian Foote had no doubt about what happened between the two big men. Rougvie had already been booked for a bad foul on winger Davie Cooper. The film shows Foote walking towards Rougvie and pointing to his own elbow before flashing the red card. Rougvie drops to his knees and puts his forehead on the turf, distraught.

  Aberdeen were incandescent. Joe Harper had been at the 1978 World Cup with Johnstone and the pair were friendly, but he can be seen rushing to the scene in obvious anger to try and haul Johnstone up off the ground. When Harper himself is yanked away by Sandy Jardine he turns to see Rougvie already trudging off. ‘Derek will swear blind that I karate-chopped him,’ said Rougvie, who has steadfastly maintained his innocence. ‘But he backed into me and dived. He just wanted to change the game and he did. We knocked fuck out of each other on the park for a lot of games before and after that.’

  Ferguson had anticipated Rougvie versus Johnstone being a big part of the match. McMaster recalled: ‘Before the game Fergie says to Dougie, “Big man, see the first couple of times, whack big Johnstone, naebody’s been sent off in the final.” So he whacks him and gets sent off! But he didn’t even do anything wrong. Big Johnstone just went down.’ Aberdeen battled desperately but could not hold on against a Rangers team sensing the kill. In the fourth minute of injury time Tommy McLean whipped over a corner and Colin Jackson soared to connect with a header which beat Clark again. Rangers had their winning goal.

  Ferguson was seething. His first instinct was to direct his wrath at Rougvie, but the uncomplicated big defender protested his innocence so vehemently, to the point he was reduced to tears, that it was clear he was genuine. As he prepared to face the media Ferguson turned to assistant Pat Stanton: ‘Don’t let Rougvie out of your sight because if he goes out there and sees Johnstone, God help him.’ The Evening Times carried a picture of Ferguson glaring at Foote as Rougvie went up the tunnel. Its football reporter, Hugh Taylor, wrote: ‘Was Rougvie unlucky? Did Derek Johnstone fall–or was he pushed? Arguments will go on. My own view was that it was too harsh a punishment.’

  Aberdeen kept a lid on their opinions at the post-match press conference, but soon their anger flared into public view. I WAS VICTIM OF A BLATANT CON TRICK screamed the headline in the Evening Express two days later. Rougvie was quoted at length: ‘I’m absolutely disgusted with what happened at Hampden. Derek Johnstone backed into me and then dropped to the ground. I was left standing there looking astonished. I was being “conned” and there was nothing I could do about it. I can honestly say that I never touched Johnstone. I wouldn’t feel so badly now if I had. But I’m absolutely disgusted that a fellow professional, a former player of the year, could behave like that. The injustice of it all has shattered me. I love football but it has suddenly gone sour for me.’

  The nature of Aberdeen’s relationship with the local media was such that both Ferguson and Clark wrote columns for the city’s Saturday evening sports paper, the popular Green Final. Even after several days when their i
mmediate bitterness might have faded, both men put their names to remarkably strong pieces. Clark’s was headlined I’D RATHER BE A LOSER THAN A CHEAT. He wrote: ‘Throughout the week, in calm, objective inquisitions, he [Rougvie] still pleaded complete innocence of violent conduct towards Derek Johnstone. The big 13-stone Rangers skipper, who remained motionless for about two minutes, made a remarkable recovery. Anyone who dropped as if pole-axed by a sledgehammer would not, I feel, be up and running about minutes later. If it was a case of acting it makes one wonder if winning at the price of cheating a fellow professional is worth it. I hope that Aberdeen never stoop to this sort of practice. But, having said that, we can’t allow ourselves again to be naive enough to think that the world is full of honest people. After last Saturday I begin to wonder if there was any truth in the joke which says, “Football is a rat race, and it looks as if the rats are winning”.’ For his part, Johnstone has always maintained that he was an innocent victim, and that the referee was right to protect him.

  In his own article Ferguson chose his words carefully to ensure he would not be disciplined by the SFA. The manager’s piece–headlined WHEN YOU LOSE RESPECT, YOU LOSE GREATNESS–lambasted Johnstone without referring to him by name. ‘Every now and then a player emerges who looks set to become one of football’s greats. We have a young man who has all the opportunities to make himself a football great. He is made captain of his side at a very young age. He is treated like a hero by the fans. Then suddenly something happens which knocks him off his pedestal. And we all realise that the player isn’t really the man we thought he was. We see him as a child who has just had his rattle taken away and who cries until he gets it back and gets his own way. Well after last Saturday I have lost all the respect I had for one player whom I felt was really going somewhere. I needn’t explain myself further.’

  The letters page showed Aberdeen supporters had been whipped into an unprecedented level of anger by Foote and Johnstone. This would carry through games against Rangers for years to come. Each letter had its own little headline: ‘Foote left without a leg to stand on’. ‘Despicable act against a fellow pro’. ‘Biggest farce of the season’. ‘Action needed to stop faking’. ‘Rangers should get Oscars’. ‘System loaded in favour of Old Firm’. ‘Bring in an English referee’. ‘I saw it–nothing happened’. ‘I nearly kicked in my radio’. Only one made a different point: ‘Excuses–for the second year running.’ But for once that was not the general view. Aberdeen were seen as victims, not losers. Ferguson was as satisfied as he could ever be in defeat and praised the team for competing hard even when the cause looked lost. ‘The most important thing for us at the club to realise is that it’s all over,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it now. We must rise above the disappointment and become greater. It is my ambition to build a side who can beat Rangers and Celtic consistently even when faced with adverse circumstances like last Saturday. We now know we can match Rangers. I am quite confident of beating them the next time we meet in a cup final.’

  When Rougvie and Johnstone next faced each other at Pittodrie there was derision towards the Rangers man. A supporter stood with a home-made T-shirt declaring: ‘Doug Rougvie Is Innocent’. Rougvie came on as a substitute and got two enormous cheers: one for scoring in a 3–1 win, the other for booting Johnstone into the air. The pair eventually made peace, the process helped by a brief period as team-mates at Chelsea. ‘Derek is a nice bloke,’ said Rougvie. ‘I was fuming at the time, though. I still hear boys saying, “That fucking Johnstone…”, but I say to them, “Ach, me and Derek get on different class, we’re good mates.”’

  Ferguson’s first season had amounted to an incredibly turbulent and uncomfortable trial: the ‘Willie-biters’, the industrial tribunal, the upheaval of moving his family north, the death of his father, and the stuttering form of his team. They knocked Celtic out of the Scottish Cup at Parkhead in March but finished eight points behind them in the Premier League. Reaching the League Cup final was the modest highlight. Aberdeen lost to Hibs in the Scottish Cup semi-final and eventually finished fourth in the league, two places and thirteen points lower than they had been a year earlier under McNeill. ‘My first season at Pittodrie was terrible for me, it couldn’t end soon enough,’ Ferguson admitted in a television documentary years later. ‘But then I decided to stop worrying about my predecessors, their past records and all the rest of it, and be myself.’

  In the summer of 1979 he allowed himself a proper holiday and plenty of thinking time. He now credits this as the turning point: ‘What made Alex Ferguson and brought me success at Aberdeen was getting a summer break. Going away to rethink. Not once did I doubt my own ability.’ He was also overcoming his initial doubts about his players. Clark, Kennedy, Miller, Strachan, Archibald, even Harper: they were strong. For all the friction with Harper, the striker still delivered thirty-three goals. Archibald weighed in with twenty and in the closing weeks of the season Ferguson added Mark McGhee from Newcastle United, his first signing for Aberdeen after ten months in the job. He had given debuts to an intense, focused young goalkeeper, Jim Leighton, and to the combative midfielder Neil Simpson. And he had turned the effervescent young central defender Alex McLeish into a regular.

  One game stood out for Ferguson in the closing weeks of that season. When Aberdeen drew 1–1 with Celtic in the Scottish Cup quarter-final at Pittodrie no one fancied their chances in the midweek replay. Parkhead was at its brooding, intimidating worst, with play interrupted in the second half as beer cans rained down from the home supporters on to the pitch. The game was an ugly battle. ‘Some of the tackling by players of both sides had those of us in the press box ducking,’ wrote Ian Paul in the Glasgow Herald. The report was headlined: IT’S MAYHEM AS CELTS GO OUT OF THE CUP. Aberdeen were 2–0 up in thirteen minutes and survived an onslaught which yielded only one second-half goal for Celtic. Ferguson saw it as the night his team proved their steel. ‘For many of the players that certainly was the most important game of their lives because it proved they could beat the Old Firm and they could beat them in an atmosphere which was at the very least intimidating. It was the measure of them. It made them as men.’

  The victory came two-and-a-half weeks before the ugly League Cup final. Those two games gave Ferguson what he wanted: belief in the players he had, and the realisation he could take them to another level. A Glasgow referee inexplicably showing a red card in the cup final? Glasgow fans throwing missiles at his players? Ferguson hoarded injustices as ammunition. ‘It gave him something to work with,’ said Willie Miller. ‘It helped him build up this “west coast bias, they’re all against us” mentality. He had us believing that not only did you have to deal with the fans and the referees in Glasgow, but that everyone including the press was against us. He built that up and he gave us a helluva resolve. He knew exactly what he was doing.’ Ferguson had another seven-and-a-half years at Aberdeen. Neither Rangers nor Celtic beat him again at Hampden.

  Chapter 7

  ‘YOU’RE TOO QUIET’

  Pittodrie has never been one of those grounds which thrums with noise and electricity. Aberdeen’s old home falls into lulls of funereal silence during games, not helped because it is so exposed and open. With the North Sea only 300 yards away supporters are often too cold to sing. When bracing winds whip through even the seagulls overhead can make more noise than the chittering fans. Alex Ferguson once observed that he could tell when Aberdeen fans were unhappy: ‘You hear them rustle their sweetie papers.’ He was joking but the natural reserve of the Pittodrie support niggled at him. The backing of a large, passionate, vociferous crowd was a constant accompaniment for Rangers and Celtic, and Ferguson believed it lifted their players and gave the Old Firm a major advantage over his own team. At the start of the 1979–80 season he decided to do something about it. Again his platform was the club programme. Those fans who read his column at home games would soon feel they were being nagged into noisy obedience.

  Whenever Rangers or Celtic came to town, he
urged, the home supporters should compete for decibel levels just as the team had to do in battles on the pitch. When Rangers visited on 15 September 1979, he wrote: ‘Get behind the team from the start and compete vocally with the Rangers support and we’ll do our best.’ When Celtic came a week later: ‘Our support once again, as they did last Saturday, must drown out the Celtic support.’ When Rangers returned in the League Cup: ‘Our players will be going out there tonight to die for us so I hope you, the supporters, will remember that. Sometimes you get carried away and criticise one or two players when they are not doing too well but please try and get behind the whole team.’ When Celtic returned: ‘Tonight will also be a test for our support. Let’s hear you!’

  Ferguson was openly envious of Rangers and Celtic for the huge followings they enjoyed. He liked the warmth and decency of people in the North-East and the affection and pride they felt for their club. But he was a Glaswegian and when it came to football that meant unbridled fanaticism. He wanted volume and passion that could intimidate visiting teams. Only the dark, yawning Beach End, home to the more boisterous fans, delivered what he required. The rest of the home stands were often a source of frustration. He developed a tactic of being demanding with them before major games and praising them afterwards. ‘I still feel that you are too quiet and don’t get behind the side enough,’ he said. ‘People say that it is impossible to change the personality of the support but I certainly do not believe that. Our support always matches the Rangers and Celtic crowds when they are visiting so there is no reason why this cannot be the case every week.’ Eventually he became blunter: ‘Get rid of your inhibitions this afternoon and let yourselves go.’ He had taken it upon himself to manage not only his players but the fans too.