Fergie Rises

by Michael Grant

  The stands rose to Weir. During his first dozen games for Aberdeen there had been the inevitable criticism that comes when a player arrives for a record fee. On his thirteenth appearance he delivered the performance of his career. John McMaster said: ‘I’ve never seen a display in my life like Peter Weir’s against Mick Mills. I reckon Mick Mills was lying in his bed for a week after that with an ice bag on his heid. Peter terrorised him. What a terrific player he was. Very, very underrated.’ Mills trooped off the field, dejected. ‘Weir diddled Millsy twice,’ said Terry Butcher. ‘He just turned on the magic. We had worked so hard to win the Uefa Cup; it had been such a journey for us. Bobby Robson wasn’t happy that night…wow. Not happy at all. I think we might have stayed at the Thistle Hotel in Dyce after the game and we just got absolutely smashed because we’d lost the Uefa Cup at the first hurdle.’

  Alan Brazil was left with two abiding memories: Rougvie’s brutality and Weir’s brilliance. ‘Doug Rougvie kicked everything that moved. Launching himself at people. Fuck me, he was taking you out chest-high! Miller and McLeish were hard but fair. Rougvie was the hatchet man. He looked like he’d just escaped from Barlinnie prison. And the doing that Weir gave Mick Mills! Mills needed cartilage operations after that game, he’d been twisted so much! Weir murdered him.’

  Bill Shankly had died suddenly three days before the Pittodrie game. There was something of Shanks’ unshakeable certainty in the comment Robson made to Ferguson at full-time. He entered the home dressing room to congratulate Ferguson and Willie Miller: ‘You’ll win this cup easily now.’ Ferguson was not so sure. Real Madrid, Inter Milan, Hamburg, Valencia, Feyenoord and Arsenal were still in the competition, and so were Dundee United. The other half of the New Firm had beaten Monaco while Aberdeen were dealing with Ipswich. But both Celtic and Rangers had tumbled out. Journalist Ian Paul reflected the nation’s mood in the Glasgow Herald: ‘If a few of us in this less talented corner of the country are currently feigning North-East accents, that is only a tiny tribute to the two teams who have kept Scotland’s European interests alive.’

  Aberdeen avoided the more powerful clubs in the second round and were paired with Argeş Piteşti of Romania. Ferguson’s growing stature was reflected in the fact he felt confident enough to contact Brian Clough for information. Clough’s Nottingham Forest had beaten Argeş Piteşti home and away two years earlier. In the first leg at home Aberdeen duly raced into a 3–0 half-time lead, but did not add to it, prompting a managerial outburst. ‘That second half was dreadful,’ said Ferguson. ‘In fact it was a disgrace. Probably the worst thing I could have done was telling them that they were doing well. I praised them at the interval and then they let things slip…’ No praise came from him at half-time in the second leg. Instead it would go down in football folklore as the occasion for one of Ferguson’s most infamous performances. The Romanians scored two first-half goals to make it 3–2 on aggregate. Aberdeen were in real trouble and Ferguson erupted. Weir and especially Strachan got the brunt of it for sitting too deep. Strachan chirruped back, further infuriating Ferguson. Finally he blew his top and sent a tray of tea cups up in the air before attempting to deliver a forearm smash to a tea urn. The urn was ceramic, heavy and immovable. Ferguson continued ranting and raving while desperately trying to disguise the pain shooting through his arm. The players bit their lips to stop themselves laughing. The histrionics turned out to be more dramatic than the match. Second half goals from Weir and Strachan defused Aberdeen’s problems. In his next programme notes Ferguson airbrushed the tea urn episode entirely. ‘A half-time briefing was all that was needed to restore the players’ confidence in their work,’ he wrote.

  Aberdeen had made it beyond the second round of a European competition for the first time. But Uefa’s draws had rarely been kind to Ferguson and the pattern continued when they were paired with Hamburg, who were top of the Bundesliga and favourites to win the Uefa Cup.

  Ernst Happel’s team was home to German internationals Felix Magath, Manny Kaltz, Horst Hrubesch and the peerless Franz Beckenbauer. At thirty-six, ‘The Kaiser’ had returned to German football after a spell in the United States. Such was his stature at the club that he also did scouting work on Happel’s behalf. The weekend before the first leg Beckenbauer was among a delegation from Hamburg who watched Aberdeen play Hibs at Easter Road. Afterwards he spoke effusively about Neale Cooper, who reached his eighteenth birthday three days later. ‘He said I was possibly the closest he had seen to a player like himself at that age,’ said Cooper, who has cherished the anecdote ever since. ‘That was quite a compliment. But I always say that it just goes to show, even Franz Beckenbauer can talk some amount of shite…’

  If Aberdeen had been taught a lesson by Liverpool, Hamburg continued their education. The result was one of the most frustrating they experienced under Ferguson. They took on an outstanding German team and scored three times against them through Eric Black, Andy Watson and John Hewitt. A handful of other chances came and were allowed to slip away. A penalty by Strachan was saved. ‘I was very impressed by this young Aberdeen side,’ said Beckenbauer. ‘Their work-rate was tremendous.’ Ferguson was also effusive about his team and felt the scoreline could have been five or six–nil. Kaltz went further: ‘They could have scored seven.’ But they hadn’t, and that is where the lesson lay. Aberdeen had twice switched off and handed Hamburg two goals. Leighton and Kennedy had got into terrible trouble and given the ball away, and Hrubesch was left with a tap-in. Three minutes from the end, as an injured Rougvie was carried along the trackside, Aberdeen naïvely left themselves open again and Hrubesch scored another. For all their domination Aberdeen were travelling to Germany with only a 3–2 lead and two away goals conceded. ‘The Germans must be going back to the Continent truly amazed that they got off so lightly,’ wrote the Glasgow Herald.

  Ferguson was bold in Hamburg, not only throwing in Black and Hewitt as his attack but announcing on the day before the game that the two 18-year-olds would start. He also gave McLeish, twenty-two, a blunt warning via the media. ‘If Alex can’t handle Hrubesch then he shouldn’t be thinking about the [1982] World Cup, because somewhere along the way he is going to be asked to look after Hrubesch or someone like him.’ The jibe proved prophetic. Tall, strong and commanding in the air, McLeish had emerged as a defender of outstanding potential alongside Willie Miller, but he could not contain Hrubesch on the night. The German scored the opener with a first-half header, his third goal over the two legs, before Hamburg rattled in two more in the second half. McGhee struck a lovely goal with eleven minutes left and another would have levelled everything, but Hamburg held on to progress to the quarter-finals 5–4 on aggregate. The tie had been scuppered by those two away goals at Pittodrie.

  Ferguson singled out Gordon Strachan for not doing enough: ‘Great players don’t accept man-for-man marking. I could have wept watching a man with his ability being marked out of things.’ He said Strachan was a good player but had still to become a great one. ‘I’ve made these points to Gordon. Now it’s up to him.’ But there had been no repeat of the collapse at Anfield and no disgrace. Their opponents had been formidable–eight of Hamburg’s second-leg team played in their European Cup final win over Juventus at the end of the following season–and the Dons had looked comfortable in their company.

  Aberdeen still had much to prove, though, at home as well as abroad. It was December and they were fourth in the league. Ferguson warned that unless the team’s concentration and focus improved there would not be any Hamburgs to worry about the following season. While they were in the Uefa Cup they won only seven of their opening fifteen league games and went out of the League Cup to Dundee United. Post-Hamburg, they lost only two of their remaining twenty-one league games and finished two points behind the champions, Celtic. Strachan and Hewitt had stepped up as goalscorers, and by the end of the season Aberdeen had scored forty more goals than the previous campaign. But Liverpool, Ipswich and Hamburg had been exciting distractions from the fact th
at Aberdeen had gone nearly two full seasons without a trophy. The sense of progress and momentum was there, but there was little silverware to show for it. Ferguson was still asking his team if they wanted to be thought of as ‘one-trophy’ players. The same question could be put to the manager.

  There was still the Scottish Cup, though. The campaign began on 23 January when Hewitt put the ball in Motherwell’s net 9.6 seconds after kick-off, setting a record which still stands for the fastest goal scored in the tournament. It turned out to be the winner. Celtic, Kilmarnock and St Mirren were seen off in the following rounds. Aberdeen were in the Scottish Cup final for the first time in four years, and the first time under Ferguson. Yet again the team waiting for them were Rangers.

  Chapter 11

  THE GLASGOW PRESS, THOSE HATED CHARACTERS

  Scotland has always been fertile territory for newspapers. More than 730,000 people bought the Daily Record every day at the start of the 1980s, the equivalent of one in every five adults in the country. The Record was the leader in a voracious and plentiful daily market. Readers who did not fancy it could instead buy tabloids like the Sun, Daily Mail or Daily Express, or broadsheets such as the Glasgow Herald or The Scotsman. In Aberdeen there were the Press and Journal, selling more than 100,000 copies per day, and the Evening Express.

  The Record marketed itself as a national paper but many saw it as the quintessential Glasgow title, its pages reflecting the interests and agendas of the central belt. The foundation of its huge appeal was Scottish news, entertainment and sport. And the Record’s definition of sport was Scottish football, which ultimately meant Celtic and Rangers. Those who supported, played for or managed any other club often found the coverage in the Scottish press immensely frustrating. Aberdeen, Dundee United and the rest had their space–and the newspaper men travelled with them on European trips–but the default position was that Old Firm stories tended to lead the back pages. Commercially that made perfect sense because most readers lived in the populous central belt and Celtic and Rangers mattered far more to them. Ferguson knew all of that but refused to accept it nonetheless. He bridled against the cosiness between national newspapers and the Old Firm.

  When he played for Rangers he was impressed by the skill and cunning shown by Celtic manager Jock Stein in manipulating press coverage to his club’s advantage. When Rangers seemed to have a comfortable lead towards the end of the 1967–68 title race–with Ferguson as their top scorer–Stein used the newspapers to insist they could only throw away the championship. The comment seemed to wobble Rangers. They won only three of their last six matches, and Celtic snatched the title by two points. From the infancy of his own managerial career Ferguson tried to use the press to his advantage. He told the East Stirlingshire players that the Falkirk Herald favoured Falkirk FC. At St Mirren he would point out to his team that they were not getting the column inches they deserved. He would phone national reporters with stories to increase St Mirren’s coverage. From his earliest days Ferguson recognised the role of the media. He used the press to drum up interest in his teams, and privately seized on negative coverage–real or imagined–to tell his players the reporters had it in for them. ‘You remind yourself of the number of people who don’t want you to win,’ he said. ‘It fires you up, it gets you going, so we use it to our advantage.’

  Ferguson had not been at Aberdeen long when he began to tune into a long-standing local complaint about reporters favouring the Glasgow clubs. Soon it became a grievance he exploited to his benefit. He began talking to his players about ‘the West of Scotland press’ as a group that resented Aberdeen and was inclined to preserve the status quo. All they wanted to write about was triumphs for Rangers and Celtic, he said. What’s more, they disliked having to travel long distances to the cold North-East to report on the upstarts at Pittodrie. His captain, Willie Miller, enthusiastically echoed the message in the dressing room: ‘He believed every word that he said. And he was absolutely right. Some might argue that a bias towards the Old Firm does not exist but it is palpable.’

  When the Scottish Football Writers’ Association voted Gordon Strachan their player of the year in 1980, Ferguson gave the decision a cynical welcome: ‘It’s a mark of Strachan’s ability that he has earned the respect of fans throughout the country and the admiration of a Glasgow-orientated press which at times seems to have difficulty recognising ability when it’s parcelled in a red shirt.’ Ferguson’s apparent suspicion of the press verged on the obsessive. Every morning he would insist on having all the main daily titles ready for his forensic inspection. If there was a story or comment which he perceived as negative about himself or Aberdeen the point was noted. Sometimes his response was to ban the journalist responsible from his press conferences. Other times he would simply tear out the page and stick it on the dressing-room wall so he could use it to anger and motivate his players. Midfielder Neil Simpson explained: ‘It was that siege mentality: the press are against you. Things would go up on the board. “Look at this, look at what they’re saying about you guys, about us”. You would get angry about it! We totally bought into it.’

  The bigger the match, the more likely Ferguson was to draw on some aspect of the newspaper coverage to find a little edge. In the spring of 1979 Aberdeen drew 1–1 with Celtic in the Scottish Cup quarter-final at Pittodrie and faced a daunting replay at Parkhead.

  Stuart Kennedy said: ‘We went down to Glasgow on the Wednesday night. The Glasgow press wrote, “The replay is a waste of petrol money for Aberdeen”. We pinned this stuff up in the dressing room. Basically it was not worth our while turning up.’ Ferguson milked it for all it was worth. Aberdeen won 2–1.

  Doug Rougvie said: ‘The press didn’t want Aberdeen doing well. Oh aye. They hated us; they hated Fergie with his arrogance and his power, his power to ban people. “You, you cunt, you wrote something I didn’t like, you’re no’ getting in”.’ When Rougvie made his one and only appearance for Scotland, he was one of six Aberdeen men who played in the match against Northern Ireland. ‘It was an Aberdeen Select that night. The only thing wrong was we got beat, so the Glasgow press didn’t like that. It didn’t matter how good we were they didn’t want a Scotland team of sheepshaggers, they wanted Rangers and Celtic players in so they could write about them and sell their papers.’

  Not all of the players believed what Ferguson was feeding them. Mark McGhee drew his motivation from elsewhere: ‘I don’t know if it was a conscious decision by Fergie to start doing it, to use it as a ploy, or whether it was just something that developed. But he used to say, “They hate driving all this way up here”. I don’t know if that was true or not. He gave us the impression that the Glasgow press were all Celtic or Rangers supporters and didn’t want Aberdeen to achieve things. I don’t think from the players’ point of view we particularly cared. We didn’t give a toss what the press men thought. It was more a west of Scotland thing: we didn’t like the idea of the fans, the people there, being disrespectful to people from the north and thinking less of us. Thinking of us as yokels.’

  Ferguson would indoctrinate his players with the same message about the Glasgow press for the entire duration of his Aberdeen career. He never let it go. One of his last signings for the club, Robert Connor, arrived only six months before the end. Connor said: ‘If you were to ask me what he went on about the most, that was it. Especially when we were going to Parkhead and Ibrox. “All the press are against you, they want to write about how great Rangers are, or how great Celtic are”. He just built and built on that. The likes of Miller and McLeish had heard it a million times and it was ingrained in them. But for people like me coming in it had to be drummed into us, just in case we hadn’t realised!’

  Hammering home the message about the press being biased in favour of the Glasgow clubs had one consequence that even Ferguson might not have imagined: it unsettled some of the Celtic and Rangers players. It was uncomfortable for them to be portrayed as favoured or indulged while another team was supposedly resented. Billy
McNeill spoke of the impact it had on his Celtic team: ‘Alex’s thing about this “bias”, and always being in the press about the bias that his team experienced against the Old Firm…that unsettled your players, it annoyed them. It maybe disturbed their concentration. Undoubtedly it did at times.’

  There is a hierarchy of football reporters on every newspaper. The chief football writers were nearly all based in Glasgow. Ferguson demanded that they abandon the Old Firm more often and come to Aberdeen matches instead. The club tended to be covered by the regional men who lived within travelling distance of Pittodrie. He began berating reporters in front of their colleagues at post-match press conferences, aggressively challenging them about how many times they had been to Pittodrie that season. On one occasion, after Aberdeen had dropped points at Motherwell, he walked into the press room simmering with anger. The first reporter he saw was the Glasgow-based Hugh Keevins. ‘You fucking cunts!’ he shouted, unprovoked. ‘You don’t know anything about Aberdeen. We never see you up at Pittodrie.’ In fact that season was only a few weeks old and Keevins had already been to Aberdeen four times. When that point was quietly made to Ferguson later he said: ‘I know. He just happened to be the first in my line of vision.’ He let the football writers know he was keeping a notebook recording how many Aberdeen games each of them attended. Who covered the games was the newspapers’ decision, the sports editors’ decision, but Ferguson made it his business. Did the fabled notebook actually exist? Or was it, as some maintain, an early example of Ferguson’s ‘mind games’? The answer is: it doesn’t matter. Ruse or not, what counted was the threat.