Two days before the second leg Peter Robinson was back in the newspapers complaining again, this time that Uefa had still not revealed where that season’s final would be held. This was no attempt to play mind games with Aberdeen–there was no longer any need for that–but an indication of Liverpool’s confidence. The second leg at Anfield was about damage limitation for the visitors. Liverpool had not lost in their last seventy-five home games, a record that stretched back thirty-three months. ‘These players have the opportunity to become immortal in Scottish football,’ said Ferguson as he put a brave face on their task. ‘What greater incentive could they have than that?’ Neither Stuart Kennedy nor McMaster was available. Andy Dornan, a 19-year-old full-back, made only his second competitive appearance while Neale Cooper and John Hewitt, sixteen and seventeen respectively, went on as a substitutes. ‘I remember warming up,’ said Cooper. ‘The Scousers were shouting at me, “Make the most of this, son, this is the closest you’ll get to big-time football”.’
The Dons had one chance to level. Mark McGhee dispossessed Phil Thompson and rode two challenges before facing the Liverpool and England goalkeeper, Ray Clemence. He shot straight at him. ‘I always think I should have done better,’ said McGhee. ‘I shot too early. I shit myself a bit.’ Then the roof caved in. Willie Miller saw a ball fly off his head past Jim Leighton for an own goal after thirty-seven minutes, then a Dalglish back heel put Phil Neal through, and he curled the ball inside the far post to make it 3–0 on aggregate before half-time. As Aberdeen prepared to go back out after the interval one shout stood out among all the noisy encouragements. ‘C’mon lads, three quick goals and we’re right back in it,’ said Drew Jarvie. He had opened his mouth without thinking. Several players froze and turned to him. Three goals in forty-five minutes? Liverpool had conceded only eight at Anfield in the whole of the previous league season.
The second half was a bombardment. Johnson had a goal ruled offside. Leighton saved from Ray Kennedy, then from McDermott. When Avi Cohen hit the crossbar Sammy Lee retrieved the ball for Dalglish to bury a header. A five-man move put Hansen through to make it 4–0 on the night and 5–0 over the two legs. Ferguson watched the devastation from the stand with Knox in the dug-out. ‘I was acting as his runner that night,’ said Willie Garner, who had lost his place at centre-half to Alex McLeish. ‘Midway through the second half he says to me, “Go down and tell Archie to take Rougvie off.” I says, “Who’s going on for him?” He says, “Anybody…fucking anybody.”’ It was the heaviest defeat Ferguson suffered with Aberdeen.
Graeme Souness was the Liverpool captain, a majestic combination of midfield steel and silk who had been playing for Scotland since 1974. Nobody messed with Souness. In an Anfield dressing room full of hard cases he was the driving force and undisputed leader. He had been determined to assert Liverpool’s authority over the upstarts from Scotland. McGhee said: ‘Souness wanted to put us right in our place and to be fair he did. I don’t remember any two other games where I felt as much a spectator. There was a strength and confidence about Liverpool that was different from anything we’d faced before. Remember on Spitting Image they used to make some characters small, like David Steel? I always felt it was like we were really small at Anfield and Souness was huge. He was swatting people away. I remember him hitting a diagonal from one touchline to the other. I’d never seen a ball hit like it. Magnificent to watch.’
Ferguson had received his hardest lesson since coming into management six years earlier. Liverpool’s combination of ability, character and aggression, the noise generated by their passionate support, the psychology of their players as they hammered home Aberdeen’s inferiority, all of it registered with him. He envied it. The Anfield night had been a painful exposure to proven masters, he admitted. ‘Football is a learning process. Above all, our players had to appreciate that there is no forgiveness in such games for teams who surrender possession cheaply. Those kind of memories burn deeply and they hurt. It’s the kind of night you don’t wish to suffer again. To avoid it there is only one answer: be prepared to battle with all the traditional passion and aggression for which Aberdeen and Scottish football are renowned.’
The second leg had been sponsored by the snack manufacturers KP. At full-time the Aberdeen players returned to the dressing room and found a bag of crisps and nuts hanging on each peg. McGhee remembered: ‘We come off the bus at our Liverpool hotel with our faces tripping us, our ridiculous Aberdeen tracksuits and our KP nuts. And then in walks Souness. Over his shoulder he’s got the raincoat with the fur collar. I think he was with his missus and her sister. They were in for a meal with his pals.’ Souness was not there to gloat–the hotel was a regular haunt–but his arrival did little to lift Ferguson’s mood. He had a face like thunder. The players were told they would get something to eat and then they were going straight to their beds: ‘If I catch anybody laughing you’ll get fined a week’s wages.’ McGhee can still recall the scene: ‘In the background was Souness’s mob popping Champagne corks. We can hear the laughter. Fergie’s swivelling round every few seconds, trying to catch us out. We’re trying not to laugh.’ Dougie Bell said: ‘I made faces at Stevie Cowan and he started laughing. Fergie caught him. “Do you think it’s fucking funny, son?” He never played again for months!’ Cowan added: ‘As we were leaving he said, “Cowan, I’ll see you in the morning.” In the morning he didn’t say anything…but for three months he never even looked my way. Nothing. And when I got back in favour, all of a sudden it was, “Cup Tie! You’re back in! You’re the man!” And it came from nowhere.’
Aberdeen flew home the following morning. Ferguson was not finished with them yet, though. Doug Rougvie recalled: ‘He’s going, “You’re a bloody disgrace, every cunt in Scotland is laughing at you.” He had us running laps of the pitch on the Thursday afternoon. All because we’ve lost 4–0 at Anfield! We’re thinking, “He’s a fucking maniac, he’s aff his heid!”’
Two days later Aberdeen went to Parkhead and beat Celtic.
Alex Ferguson soon showed that one of his managerial traits was the ability to absorb even the most harrowing setback, learn from it and rebuild. Anfield became Aberdeen’s ground zero in European competition. He felt the team’s inexperience had been obvious and players had taken the wrong options in possession. When to pass and when to run with the ball? His own managerial record in Europe extended to ten games–only three of them wins–but the Liverpool tie had shown that the levels of concentration, technique and decision-making were far higher than Aberdeen were used to in Scotland. He noted how often a game against foreign opposition might seem to be going to plan; then in a matter of minutes ‘the roof falls in’.
Willie Miller admitted: ‘Liverpool was too early for us. We didn’t feel we were going to get hammered the way we did at Anfield. It showed that we had done OK in Scotland but there was a gap to be bridged if we were going to compete in Europe.’ Liverpool came to be seen as a great lesson for Aberdeen; a clear punctuation mark in their European record, after which the improvement was startling. Though he spoke about inexperience and players making wrong decisions, what had really troubled Ferguson was their attitude going into both legs. McGhee said: ‘He recognised that we were all in awe of Liverpool. We never thought we could beat them. We didn’t consider ourselves in the same league and so we had no chance before the games even started. He hated the idea of feeling inferior. He sensed that was a huge failing. He was very, very angry about it.’ It was like an aftershock of 1978 and the lack of belief Ferguson had seen initially in his players when they faced the Old Firm. Those days were long gone domestically, but Liverpool proved that Aberdeen still had much to learn in Europe.
There would be no opportunity for another crack at the English champions, or anyone else for that matter, in the following season’s European Cup. Aberdeen’s defence of the Scottish title crumbled through inconsistency. They were unbeaten in the league until December, compiling a 30-game run without loss that included the end of the previous
campaign. They even finished with more points and a better goal difference than they had as champions. But stomach problems finished Gordon Strachan’s season in December, and with Aberdeen winning only seven out of eighteen games in the second half of the season, Celtic cantered to the league title by seven points. The League Cup campaign featured the curiosity of a Belgian goalkeeper, Marc de Clerck, scoring on his Aberdeen debut in a rout of Berwick Rangers. But, distracted by their impending visit to Anfield, Aberdeen were knocked out by lower league Dundee. Then, Morton’s maverick Andy Ritchie scored a stunning goal to knock them out of the Scottish Cup.
The element of surprise they had enjoyed in the previous season had gone. Teams now raised their game against Aberdeen and every fixture was vigorously competitive. ‘Since becoming champions we have found that we are the side everyone is gunning for,’ said Stuart Kennedy. ‘They pull out that little bit extra against us. We don’t mind.’ But it made the team vulnerable to dropping points, a problem compounded by a lack of goals. Celtic scored twenty-three more than Aberdeen in league games alone. And no sooner had the league title been won in May than Ferguson lost Steve Archibald to Tottenham. It was the first departure of a player he would have wanted to keep, and he had no adequate replacement. McGhee was powerful and a growing influence who scored seventeen goals, but the only other player to reach double figures was Walker McCall, a squad player who Ferguson had brought back for his second spell at the club. Joe Harper only returned on the final day of the season after a knee injury that had kept him out for eighteen months.
Ferguson felt his team lacked ‘personality’ players. ‘It was brought home to me again when Joe Harper made his comeback in the reserves and nearly 3,000 fans turned up to see the game. He is a character who adds that special something to an afternoon in the same way that Bobby Clark, John McMaster and Gordon Strachan can.’ The words were generous but Harper had no future. At thirty-three, that game would be his last. The manager wanted to bring more invention, unpredictability and, above all, goals to his team. If there was any doubt about the board’s readiness to match his ambition, a declaration of intent from Chris Anderson dispelled it. ‘I want Aberdeen to be the best team in Scotland and able to compete on level terms with the best in Europe,’ said the vice-chairman. ‘We must consolidate and win the title not just again, but again and again and again.’
Chapter 9
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT UNDER THE BEACH END
At the time of his retirement in 2013 the public perception of Sir Alex Ferguson was of a managerial grandee, a greying and bespectacled figure who was still at the coalface in his seventies. That was not the Ferguson Aberdeen knew. He was only thirty-six when he arrived, and just thirty-eight when he won the league and took on Liverpool. A young, physical, robust, athletic man, Ferguson went on runs, joined in during training sessions and threw himself into five-a-sides. Nothing worked up a sweat more than the gladiatorial battle of ‘tips’.
The Pittodrie gym was a cramped, windowless box under the Beach End with a solid pillar in the middle and six painted goals around the four walls. The dust and gloom guaranteed that it would not have passed modern health and safety inspections. Players would come out of it coughing. Tips was a crazily fast and intense game of first touch attacking and defending, which could start at 20-a-side before being whittled down as players lost a ‘life’ by conceding a goal. Eventually it got down to one-v-one, though sometimes it started as a personal duel between two in the first place.
Ferguson played tips against Archie Knox every Friday afternoon. The youth players would line the walls to watch, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes conscripted. The shrewder ones knew how to make a quiet exit if it looked like Ferguson was going to lose. ‘As soon as you saw Alex getting beat you’d get out because he’d be looking for bodies,’ said Tommy McIntyre, who was a 17-year-old witness to the combat. Most unfortunate of all was the poor soul who was chosen to act as referee. Ferguson or Knox would challenge every decision. One day McIntyre was told he was in charge. ‘Fergie and Archie were knocking lumps out of each other; the sweat was lashing off them. So the final goal wins and I had to make a decision. The pressure! Fergie was looking into my eyes saying, “Well, what are you gonna do?”, and Archie was looking at me saying, “Yeah, what are you gonna do?” So I goes, “I have to say it was a goal for you, Archie…”’ That was probably McIntyre’s biggest mistake, as he quickly recognised. ‘Fergie storms out. He shouts, “Right, get your boots, you’re outside.” He took me to the track around the pitch and he ran me and ran me and ran me. Round and round the pitch. He walked away and said, “Just keep running.” So I kept running and running and running. It seemed like forever. Eventually I stopped and asked someone, “Is the manager around?”, and he said, “Oh, he’s away home, he’s away a while ago.”’
Other young ‘refs’ would be accused of being corrupt and ordered to wash the manager’s car. Ferguson and Knox were so competitive the scores of these weekly tips games were carried in Aberdeen’s match programme. Tips bred an atmosphere of brutal rivalry which sometimes bubbled over from fun to brief animosity between players. ‘It could be ten people trying to kill each other,’ said Stevie Cowan. ‘One time me and Simmy [Neil Simpson] fell out and were rolling around. I went home but Fergie sent for me, told me I had to come back to Pittodrie. I was expecting an absolute mauling from him. He said, “You need to rein in your aggression…”’
When Ferguson took on anyone in the Pittodrie snooker room the game would end only when he was winning. If he lost the first frame he would demand it be the best of three. The floor was tiled and the wooden cues had no rubber plug at the end. When his opponent was about to take a shot Ferguson would loudly bang his cue on the ground, hoping to put him off. ‘I can’t be 100 per cent certain,’ said Pat Stanton, ‘but I reckon when the other player was putting his score up on the board Alex would move the white. Especially if he’d had enough of the guy.’ Ferguson and Knox would borrow trainer Teddy Scott’s tartan bunnet and compete at throwing it on to a peg on the dressing-room wall.
Everyone on the staff took an interest in whether the manager or the assistant had won the weekly tips. From the administration workers, ground staff, and management to the coaches and players, the club employed about fifty people. It felt like a family operation. A few pensioners came in for daily voluntary work, proudly keeping Pittodrie spick and span. Ferguson made it his business to be familiar with everyone. He knew names, wives’ and husbands’ names, children’s names, where people had been on holiday, whether someone’s relative was ill. Hand-written cards from Ferguson turned up on their birthdays and at Christmas. Everyone was made to feel important. Ferguson believed that if everyone felt involved and appreciated they would give that little bit more. He would tease and torment them: ‘These boots aren’t clean, look at the state of them!’ ‘What kind of soup’s this today? It’s rotten.’ But such little digs were delivered with a huge smile.
The Pittodrie canteen was the social focal point of the club. Before training every morning one of the ground staff boys would go around the players and management asking if they were staying for lunch. He would write their names down and collect 50p each for a two-course meal and glass of orange squash. There was no pasta in those days: the menu included soup, sausages, mince and tatties. After lunch Ferguson, Knox, Teddy Scott and maybe one or two of the senior players would sit around telling stories over a cup of tea. No one had a treasury of anecdotes to match Scott’s. Ferguson once jokingly threatened to sack him for packing the wrong socks. Gordon Strachan quipped: ‘And where will you get the six people to replace him?’ Scott represented decency, tireless service and loyalty. He was streetwise, too. Willie Garner, who played for Ferguson, left to manage Alloa and then returned as assistant manager in December 1983–when Knox left to become a manager in his own right at Dundee–remembered Scott asking him to help pace out 100 yards on the training pitch before the players arrived for running exercises. Garner got to the required s
pot only for Scott to shout, ‘Keep going to 110 yards, the buggers always stop at ninety.’ The players reckoned Scott had his various training drills written into the lining of his bunnet. He would deny it and point to his head: ‘It’s all in here. Army training!’ He was kind and helpful to the players and they adored him. Not that he was a man for extravagance. ‘Trying to get a pair of boots off Teddy was incredible,’ said McIntyre. ‘You would get wind that there were new boots in, Copa World Cups or whatever, and you wanted a pair. You’d ask Teddy and he’d say, “Let’s see the pair you have.” The toe would be hanging out of them but he’d say, “Ach, you’ve got a couple of games left in them.” He looked after the pennies as well!’
Deep in the heart of the stadium was ‘Teddy’s room’, a den which was part football museum, part bric-a-brac shop. Scott gathered all the souvenirs and gifts Aberdeen accumulated and stored them in his Aladdin’s cave. Strips, pennants, caps, medals, salvers, gloves, boots, balls, scarves, books, flags, scrapbooks, cuttings, autographed man-of-the-match Champagne bottles and assorted memorabilia from all over the world. There were hidden gems everywhere, even a cricket bat signed by Ian Botham and Allan Lamb. Mischievously he added to the mystique by restricting access. ‘He wouldn’t let you into his room where the boots were,’ said Garner. ‘He’d make you stand outside like a schoolboy while he handed you what you needed.’ One day Ferguson turned to Stanton: ‘You know, I’ve never been in Teddy’s storeroom. What’s in it?’
Fergie Rises Page 10
