Fergie Rises

by Michael Grant

  The main route to Hibs’ Easter Road ground in Edinburgh is via London Road with its bank of trees along Royal Terrace Gardens. The Aberdeen squad were startled by what they saw as the bus wound its way towards the ground: thousands of their supporters. ‘The amount of red shirts,’ said Stanton. ‘It was like an army was camped in the trees! Fergie said to the players, “Look! Look! You can’t disappoint these people.”’ They didn’t. Poor Hibs were already relegated and now became the hosts of someone else’s party. It was a stroll in the Edinburgh sunshine. Archibald scored his twenty-second goal of the season and Watson added another before half-time. Scanlon, McGhee and Scanlon again turned it into a 5–0 rout. Now they simply needed to hear the Celtic result. During the second half Clark kept turning to the dug-out or to fans, desperate to know the score. Ferguson and his players waited on the pitch for around a minute as play continued in Paisley. It had been goalless there all day, despite the brief scare of Celtic being awarded a penalty, before a linesman changed the referee’s mind. Ferguson was on the point of detonation. Then came the moment of confirmation. One of the Aberdeen Evening Express reporters gestured to him from the press box, circling his hands into two zeroes: Celtic had drawn 0–0.

  Ferguson erupted, jumping this way and that, not knowing who to go to first. ‘I sprinted on that park hugging everybody who got in my road.’ He spotted Clark and ran across the Easter Road pitch with his arms outstretched and his suit flapping and threw himself on to his goalkeeper. ‘Can you blame the man for going out of his mind?’ cheered commentator Archie Macpherson in a memorable commentary for the BBC. ‘I remember him galloping down the pitch,’ Macpherson recalled. ‘There are great images in Scottish football that you retain and that was one of them: that Forrest Gump run by Fergie towards his own support. That’s burned on the retina like some of the great goals or Billy McNeill lifting the European Cup. After the game he was incoherent. The league was what he wanted.’

  Of the players, Clark was visibly the most emotional, holding his head in his hands and unable to stem the tears. His team-mates and the supporters assumed he had been overwhelmed by the moment after so many years of expectation and failure. But that was only part of it. He had also struggled through personal tragedy. In March, in the space of a fortnight, his father-in-law and then his father had died suddenly.

  Hibs invited Ferguson to make use of the stadium’s public address system and he took a microphone and offered his thanks to the Aberdeen support. ‘If any of you want a drink later, come round to my house,’ he joked. At 3am two fans rang his doorbell. Laughing, he took them in, poured a couple of glasses and showed them a video of the game.

  Yet even on the day of his greatest managerial feat so far Ferguson showed his uncompromising streak. When Aberdeen were 2–0 up and coasting at half-time he let rip at referee Brian McGinlay in front of a scrum of onlookers in the tunnel. McGinlay’s crime? Giving a throw-in to Hibs which Ferguson saw as Aberdeen’s. While the celebrations continued on the pitch and in the stands Dick Donald broke away to visit the referee’s room and quietly apologise to McGinlay. No sooner had he left than Ferguson himself entered with a bottle of Champagne under each arm, placing them on a table. He was all smiles, and then came to the point: ‘So, can half-time be forgotten about?’ McGinlay can still remember his response: ‘I said, “No, Alex, it can’t. I’ve already spoken to your chairman and it will have to be reported to the SFA because you did it in front of too many people, too many saw it.” So off he went, mutter, mutter under his breath. He got to the door and paused. Then he turned around, came back, grabbed the two bottles of Champagne and disappeared with one under each arm. The two linesmen were ready to give me a doing, they were gasping for a drink! If I’d told him he wasn’t being reported the whole crate of Champagne would have come in…’ The SFA later handed Ferguson a £250 fine and a year-long touchline ban for his trouble.

  The Aberdeen players were blissfully unaware of this comical little episode. Outside their celebrations continued. For the older heads like Clark, Willie Miller, Doug Rougvie and Stuart Kennedy the significance of what they had done was immediate. ‘Winning the title was the big breakthrough for us,’ said Kennedy. ‘I felt I had arrived.’ At just twenty-one, Alex McLeish was one of the calmest amid the euphoria. ‘I didn’t see winning the league the way the older boys did, the tears and all that,’ he said. ‘I’m thinking, “What are they crying about, this is natural evolution.” I’d been used to winning at boys’ club level. Since I’d come to Aberdeen they’d won a League Cup and reached cup finals.’ When the Aberdeen party eventually left the ground for a joyous bus journey home Gordon Strachan, born and raised in Edinburgh, stayed in the city with his wife and young son. ‘There were lots of Hibs fans there,’ he said. ‘People came crowding around to congratulate me and to say how glad they were that a club like Aberdeen had at long last cut in on the Rangers-Celtic monopoly. They were sick of it.’

  The season was not quite over: they had one final match to play, at Partick Thistle four days later, but the title race certainly was. Their superior goal difference meant Celtic could snatch the league from them only if Aberdeen lost to Partick by ten clear goals. It finished a low-key 1–1 draw. Aberdeen formally entered the record books as champions by one point. After just two seasons, Ferguson had delivered. ‘Winning the league gave us total confirmation that what he was doing was right,’ said Willie Miller. ‘Whatever it is that changes you from being a loser in cup finals to being a winner, being league champions gave us that.’

  The celebrations lasted for days. One night Ferguson was asleep in bed when his telephone rang at 2am. He answered it to hear a chorus of singing and good-natured abuse. The players were having a party at Miller’s house. Ferguson joked that they were all fined and suspended for irresponsible behaviour, which only provoked further derision. He hung up and put his head back on the pillow. ‘I lay back and reflected how satisfied I was that my relationship with the players was close enough for them to have reacted like that.’ The players feared Ferguson but generally they liked him, working within his boundaries and often enjoying the theatre of how unpredictable and volcanic he could be. There was never a dull moment. Behind his back they came up with nicknames. Sometimes he was ‘The Dark Lord’, but more often it was a shortening of his frequent description as ‘Furious Fergie’ at the start of newspaper reports. To them, he was usually just ‘Furious’.

  He struck a masterful balance between ruling with a fist of iron while also appearing generally fair, interested and often good-humoured. After the Westhill Willie-biters had been weeded out there was no real dressing-room dissent at Aberdeen, certainly nothing so premeditated. There was plenty of laughter around Pittodrie. Players would gossip about Ferguson when he was not there, like pupils discussing a stern headmaster. They talked about the little nervous cough he would develop as matches drew nearer, which often acted as an early warning that he was about to enter a room. ‘You could laugh with Fergie,’ Strachan recalled. ‘He’d get on the team bus and have fun with you, or he’d have a quiz, or he’d play his shitey music. Somebody chucked his tape out of the window one day. To this day he thinks it was me, but it wasnae me. I would have wanted to but I wasn’t brave enough.’ In one match programme there was a news snippet about the groundsman’s dog chasing Ferguson and club secretary Ian Taggart until they escaped by jumping over the perimeter wall into the Beach End. It could only have been printed with the manager’s approval.

  The full extent of Ferguson’s red revolution was yet to be seen, but Aberdeen’s championship victory represented a major unsettling of the established order. And it seemed to mirror deeper shifts in Scottish life, with the newly affluent North-East providing a stark contrast with Glasgow’s industrial decline. The once proud city was struggling, and with hardship came division. At the end of the 1980 Scottish Cup final the two sets of Old Firm supporters leapt the Hampden fences and hundreds went at each other like savages. Live television coverage showed the fa
ns charging each other, running battles on the pitch, punches, kicks, bottles and cans being thrown and frightened children cowering from the trouble. It was all played out to a soundtrack of sectarian chanting. Condemnation poured down on the two clubs from all over Britain. ‘The Old Firm’s meetings next season will begin as they ended on Saturday, with violence and shame,’ said the Glasgow Herald.

  The following day, when Aberdeen were presented with the Premier League trophy, the riot was a major talking point. Supporters revelled in the Old Firm’s disgrace and the stark contrast it made with their club’s joyous ascent. Aberdeen had played Rangers and Celtic thirteen times over the season, winning nine and losing only twice. Now their supporters’ newfound sense of authority was enhanced by the images of rioting Glaswegians. The sun shone and 24,000 packed into Pittodrie in noisy appreciation, a jubilant cauldron of red and white. The Old Firm felt like Scottish football’s dark past, Aberdeen its progressive future. Ferguson stood in the centre circle and soaked it all in. This was the Pittodrie he had wanted all along.

  Chapter 8

  LIVERPOOL

  A mob of angry Aberdeen supporters awaited Alex Ferguson when he arrived for work at Pittodrie on Saturday, 11 October 1980. It was shortly after 10am, and about thirty of them were crowding around the players’ entrance. ‘Disgruntled fans hurled abuse at the Dons boss, who had to force his way into the stadium,’ reported the Press & Journal. The mob’s problem was not Ferguson, it was Liverpool.

  Aberdeen’s reward for winning the league was entry to the European Cup for the first time in the club’s history. After a narrow win over Austria Vienna they were handed the most ominous draw of all. Aberdeen versus Liverpool instantly captured the imagination on both sides of the border. ‘This is what the public want,’ said the Liverpool full-back Phil Neal. In Scotland the hysteria was feverish. It was the biggest clash between the best teams in Scotland and England since Celtic versus Leeds in 1970. The novelty of someone other than Rangers or Celtic winning the league had made the rest of Britain sit up and take notice of this new, vibrant Aberdeen team and its brash young manager. Liverpool were European aristocracy, English champions in four of the previous five seasons and European Cup winners in 1977 and 1978. To drizzle further spice over the tie the Liverpool machine was propelled by Scotsmen: Kenny Dalglish, Graeme Souness and Alan Hansen. The demand for tickets for the first leg at Pittodrie was phenomenal. The ground’s record attendance had been set at 45,061 in 1954, but the capacity was now just 24,000. The club calculated that around 60,000 wanted to see Liverpool. Within minutes of the draw being made, the Pittodrie phone lines were jammed. Both of them.

  When tickets were put on sale the first supporter began queuing at 3.15pm the day before. Fans brought sleeping bags, deck chairs, radios and heaters to see them through the night. The numbers grew until at one point the queue snaked more than a mile away from the stadium. Police estimated that at least 15,000 were in the line. When faced by a level of demand they had never encountered before the club’s management made the mistake of allowing supporters to buy up to four tickets each on the basis of first come, first served. The entire allocation was wiped out in forty-five minutes and those more than a few hundred yards away when the gates opened–regardless of whether they went to every home game or not–got nothing. Some milled around to protest, angrily voicing their frustration at Ferguson when he arrived. The ticket distribution had nothing to do with him, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He could do nothing but sympathise.

  A bigger headache was how his team were going to cope with a unit as strong as Liverpool as he tried to introduce Aberdeen to football fans south of the border. He knew the English inclination to disparage Scottish football and he would be damned if they saw anything to snigger about when they watched Aberdeen. Willie Miller spoke for the players. ‘We all get reports up here of how the English players rate our football,’ he said. ‘They call it the “funny half-hour” when snippets of our games are shown on television. That gets under my skin. The crazy moments in our games always seem to be shown on the box. But everybody here knows the standard of our game is rising.’

  Neither club was happy about being drawn against strong opposition so early in the tournament. ‘Thanks very much, Uefa,’ said Kenny Dalglish. Bob Paisley’s powerful team was packed with seasoned England internationals–Phil Neal, Ray Clemence, Phil Thompson, Terry McDermott, Ray Kennedy and David Johnson–but they were wary of their opponents. Paisley had the Dons watched in all four games between the draw and the first leg. ‘The moment we knew it was Aberdeen the mood around the dressing room changed,’ said Dalglish. ‘Scarcely had the draw been made than all sorts of noises flooded out of Scotland about what Aberdeen would do to Liverpool and about us Anglos being sent homeward to think again. We had to win. Graeme, Al and I kept telling each other that if we didn’t get a result we were going to be crucified, completely slaughtered, every time we went back to Scotland. They would rub it in forever.’

  Ferguson wanted to improve Aberdeen’s European record, which he had described as ‘abysmal’. They had first competed in the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1967, and in nine previous campaigns on the Continent had been scuttled out at the first or second hurdle. The bookmakers did not expect that to change: Liverpool were 1–4 to go through and Aberdeen 7–2. The tie represented the biggest examination of Ferguson’s managerial career so far. What he said about the games publicly contrasted sharply with the reality. ‘Liverpool will present perhaps the most formidable task Aberdeen will undertake for many years,’ he said. ‘Yet in no way are we worried about the game.’ Years later he candidly told an entirely different story: ‘The fixture dominated and interrupted everything. It was nothing less than a nightmare. It got to us, it got to everyone.’

  Pat Stanton had stepped down as Ferguson’s assistant in May. He wanted to go back to live in Edinburgh, and the pair parted as firm friends. His replacement was Archie Knox, an uncompromising disciplinarian in the manager’s own image. Knox had been a midfield journeyman with Forfar, St Mirren and Dundee United before becoming player-manager at Forfar, just fifty miles south of Aberdeen. He was only thirty-three when he arrived at Pittodrie as a formidable, barking assistant manager. Ferguson liked his style and also admired the quality and variety of his training drills. The pair travelled to watch Liverpool beat Middlesbrough on 7 October and met Bill Shankly in the Anfield directors’ box. Shankly had already been quoted in the newspapers describing Aberdeen as a credit to the Scottish game. He said their performances in the previous round had reminded him of Inter Milan in the 1960s and the current European Cup holders, Nottingham Forest. When he bumped into Ferguson and Knox he gave them a genuine, warm welcome and then smiled. ‘So you’re down to have a look at our great team? Aye, they all try that.’ Ferguson recalled ‘stuttering my thanks’ and that he and Knox had ‘behaved like groupies’ in the presence of managerial royalty.

  Bob Paisley’s own intelligence-gathering on Aberdeen had him questioning ‘whether they have enough up front’ without Steve Archibald, who had departed for Tottenham Hotspur in the summer. The Liverpool manager went out of his way to praise Gordon Strachan, identifying him as a major talent and a threat to his team. The phrase Liverpool had for this was giving ‘a little bit of toffee’, in other words lavishing public praise on an opponent with the intention of placing the spotlight on him and affecting his game. Strachan was quiet over both legs.

  Liverpool intended to fly home straight after the first leg but encountered trouble. The local council’s refusal to allow an extension to Aberdeen airport’s opening hours prompted Liverpool’s general secretary, Peter Robinson, to remark: ‘We have had more difficulty on this than we have when going behind the Iron Curtain.’ On the night, there would be no mistaking Pittodrie for some Soviet outpost. With the floodlights on and the stands packed to capacity–including the away allocation of just 500 from Liverpool–the scene was set for a quintessential Battle of Britai
n. Outside, touts sold tickets for ten times the cover price. Inside, the atmosphere was hostile. ‘The Beach End ferociously booed everything that Liverpool did,’ reported the Press & Journal. ‘Horrendous, real vitriol spitting from the terraces,’ Dalglish recalled later. Liverpool’s three Scots attracted the worst of it, but to no apparent ill effect. In fact, they opened up Aberdeen after only five minutes. Dalglish played a ball square to David Johnson and he played an instant through ball for Terry McDermott to float a sumptuous chip over Jim Leighton. It was the only goal of the night. Liverpool had done a job on Ferguson’s team and everyone knew it.

  John McMaster remembered: ‘The Liverpool boys came up the tunnel at half-time, cocky. Dalglish, Souness, all of them. They’re going, “Game done”. “Half-time in the first leg!” “Game done”. “What a result”. “That’s it finished”. They’re clicking their fingers in the air. They were doing it for show. We were raging but they hammered us 1–0.’ McMaster himself barely got his shorts dirty: he suffered serious knee ligament damage in a tackle by Ray Kennedy at the very start of the game that put him out for the rest of the season. Despite the beating Aberdeen had taken, Ferguson’s admiration for Paisley’s team remained undimmed. ‘The Liverpool players had a bit of grit and nastiness about them–good qualities when you need them–and they were well armed in the psychological war department.’ He spoke like a young manager who had taken copious mental notes.