Fergie Rises

by Michael Grant

  No one was generating more attention than Ferguson. He had toppled the Old Firm to win the league title aged thirty-eight, got the better of Bobby Robson’s Ipswich at thirty-nine, and beaten Real Madrid in a European final at forty-one. Around the north-east of Scotland he was constantly in demand for public appearances and promotions in schools, businesses, pubs and clubs. When programmes like Football Focus did features on what was stirring up in Scotland, there were shots of seagulls circling above Pittodrie and boats in the city’s harbour. It gave the impression that Aberdeen was detached from football’s mainstream, and resulted in a sharp contrast whenever the club’s young manager, with his captivating energy and charisma, appeared on screen.

  The first club who tried to lure Ferguson south were Wolverhampton Wanderers. An approach was made in January 1982, and he was sufficiently interested to travel to the Midlands and meet their chairman and directors. He thought Wolves uninviting and lifeless, just as Miller had felt about Sunderland. Molineux was in a state of disrepair and Ferguson was appalled to realise that no one other than a secretary was working at the stadium on a weekday afternoon. At the World Cup finals in Spain that summer Ferguson told Strachan: ‘I don’t want to leave Aberdeen.’ Wolves had been easy to dismiss. The first real test of his commitment came in 1983 when Rangers twice approached him about taking over at Ibrox. That was an opportunity which appealed to Ferguson’s heart and soul. Rangers was in his DNA, the club he had supported and the stadium which towered over the streets where he had grown up. The first approach was made after the 1983 Scottish Cup final, which Ferguson ignored out of respect for his friend and former team-mate John Greig, who was still employed as manager. If he gave a private hint that he would be more receptive if and when the job became available again, Rangers took note. Four months later Greig resigned after bleak opening results. Within hours Ferguson took telephone calls from a journalist asking if he was interested in the Rangers job and then from the club’s vice-chairman, John Paton, making the same inquiry. Paton was given sufficient encouragement to detail what sort of offer Rangers could make, and to follow up with several calls over the following few days.

  In A Light in the North, Ferguson talked of wrestling with a decision for two or three days and discussing the matter with Cathy long into the night. He called his old Rangers manager, Scot Symon, for advice. Symon had been sacked abruptly by the club in 1967. Ferguson was a player then, and he said: ‘The minute Scot Symon left Rangers they seemed to lose their greatness.’ Symon, however, was unequivocal in his view that Ferguson should leave Pittodrie for Ibrox. He then made a subsequent call alerting Ferguson to division among the directors at Ibrox. Hanging over Rangers like a bad smell was the question of whether or not the club would allow their next manager to sign Roman Catholics. Publicly Rangers said whoever was appointed would have the freedom to sign whoever he wanted. But the matter was deeply contentious and an unwritten policy of not knowingly signing Catholics divided the Rangers support.

  Ferguson’s friend Jimmy Reid, the legendary Clydeside trades union leader, tackled the issue in an interview with him for the Sunday Mail. ‘To put it bluntly, football is about football in Aberdeen,’ wrote Reid. ‘There is an absence of the religious hatred and bigotry which has scarred the otherwise generous and human face of my beloved Glasgow for so long. I am convinced this view is shared by Alex Ferguson. He is a warm-hearted, outgoing intelligent man who brings up his family in a spirit of tolerance. Any team that Fergie manages will recruit players exclusively on ability.’

  There has long been an unspoken rule that prominent figures in Scottish football say little in public about religious bigotry, and nothing at all about it being prevalent at certain clubs, or among a certain set of fans. That does not imply acceptance, only pragmatism. Ferguson had abhorred sectarianism since his youth. ‘A glance at my family tree suggests why bigotry never had any chance of spreading its pollution among the Fergusons,’ he explained in Managing My Life. Ferguson was a Protestant married to a Catholic, as was his father. ‘Through all its branches, and for as far back as we can trace, there have been mixed marriages. Perhaps it doesn’t always breed religious intolerance out of the later generations, but it certainly did so in our case.’ Such hatred troubled him when considering the Rangers job, though. ‘I was already reluctant to entertain exposing my family to the risk of a recurrence of the bigotry I had encountered at Ibrox in my playing days,’ he wrote. ‘Cathy’s religion would probably have been enough in itself to convince me that returning to Rangers was not a good idea.’

  There was also a powerful reluctance to leave the club he had built. Ferguson arranged a meeting with Dick Donald, Chris Anderson and their respective lawyers. The following morning’s newspapers reported FERGIE SET TO STAY. Details of a deal were revealed in which Ferguson would receive £50,000 a year plus bonuses over a five-year contract. In fact, he had been on these improved terms since the start of the 1983–84 season but only now had he formalised them by signing a contract. Manager and chairman had believed that the strength of their relationship meant they did not need one. ‘If I asked my chairman for a contract he’d think I didn’t trust him any longer,’ Ferguson had said after the Bayern Munich game. ‘I do, so I don’t need a piece of paper.’ Seven months later, because of the Rangers approach, he had one. Donald and Ferguson’s relationship was as close as ever, but a contract protected the club and entitled them to compensation if and when the manager left. ‘It’s been a trying time but I know I have made the right decision,’ said Ferguson. ‘I’m remaining with the club who have brought me any success I’ve had in football.’ The Daily Record’s chief football writer, Alex Cameron, told his readers: ‘The very fact he is staying underlines the attraction of Pittodrie where the chance of being in Europe is at least as good as it is at Liverpool or Manchester United.’

  Ferguson’s rejection of Rangers was further confirmation of Scottish football’s new hierarchy. Previously it would have been unthinkable for a manager at another club to reject a call from the Old Firm. And Ferguson was not the only one. The following Sunday, Dundee United’s Jim McLean had three hours of talks inside Ibrox but turned them down as well. Four days later they appointed their former boss, Jock Wallace, giving him £65,000 a year and the supposed freedom to sign whoever he wanted. In fact, it would be another six years, with another manager in place, before Rangers made a point of signing a high-profile Catholic.

  The club who came closest to taking Ferguson from Aberdeen at that time were Tottenham Hotspur. Keith Burkinshaw had given notice that he would leave at the end of the 1983–84 season. Spurs targeted Ferguson. He liked the mood and ambition at White Hart Lane and was impressed by the charismatic chairman, Irving Scholar. ‘I liked the principle of the way the club was run in the sense that they admired pure football,’ he said. Wages, terms and even accommodation were agreed over a series of phone calls and two meetings, held in Paris to maintain privacy. ‘Alex Ferguson and I finally shook hands on the agreement that he would become our next Spurs manager,’ Scholar claimed in 1999. Scholar said the plan was that Ferguson would tell him when to make a formal approach to Aberdeen, and that the move would be announced early in the summer of 1984. But Ferguson got cold feet and changed his mind. Why?

  He told Scholar he felt it would be disloyal to Dick Donald to leave Aberdeen. After all the discussions they had had Scholar felt there was another reason, namely that Cathy Ferguson could not be persuaded to move the family to London. Ferguson’s own explanation was that he wanted a five-year contract and Spurs would offer only two. They improved that to three, but he needed more: ‘I was not convinced that was long enough to do the job,’ he explained later. ‘Once again I opted to stay with Aberdeen.’

  It was a close shave for the Scottish club: Ferguson and Scholar had impressed each other hugely. Spurs promoted Peter Shreeves, their assistant manager, instead. He went on to finish third in his first season, ahead of Manchester United.

  Ferguson cleared
his head and prepared for 1984–85, his seventh season at Aberdeen. The campaign, without Strachan, McGhee and Rougvie, included a return to the European Cup for the first time since they lost to Liverpool four years earlier. They went into the competition this time without the injured Peter Weir and could not play Frank McDougall because he carried a European suspension from his time at St Mirren. In the first round they were drawn against Dynamo Berlin, the East German champions six years running. Aberdeen were coasting in the first leg at Pittodrie on 19 September 1984, when Berlin pulled a goal back eight minutes from the end to lose only 2–1. Two weeks later in Germany, with Dougie Bell added to the injury list, another late goal gave Berlin a 2–1 win, which took the game into extra-time and then penalties. Aberdeen were 4–2 up in the shoot-out, but Miller and Black had their attempts saved, and the East Germans converted their last three for a stunning win. A crack at the European Cup, the one tournament in which Ferguson was desperate to make an impression, had been tossed away cheaply. There was not even the consolation of going out to a good side. All of Aberdeen’s previous European runs had ended with huge credit. Any team who beat them rubber-stamped their credentials: Fortuna Düsseldorf went on to reach the Cup Winners’ Cup final in 1979; Eintracht Frankfurt won the Uefa Cup in 1980; Liverpool were European Cup champions in 1981; Hamburg reached the 1982 Uefa Cup final; and beating Aberdeen took Porto into the 1984 Cup Winners’ Cup final. Berlin, meanwhile, were immediately knocked out in the next round. ‘It’s particularly disappointing to lose to a side who were inferior to us,’ said Ferguson.

  There was trouble at home, too. Aberdeen had crashed in the League Cup against lower-league Airdrie on 22 August. Airdrie were managed by Ally MacLeod, Ferguson’s larger-than-life predecessor at Pittodrie, and inflicted a 3–1 defeat at their Broomfield ground. ‘Aberdeen were made to look an ordinary side,’ wrote the Glasgow Herald. Peter Weir, Eric Black, Neale Cooper, John Hewitt, John McMaster and Frank McDougall had been unavailable, but it was still a heavyweight team: Jim Leighton, Stewart McKimmie, Alex McLeish, Willie Miller, Neil Simpson and Dougie Bell all started. ‘I have to hope that what the young players saw in the dressing room after Airdrie, when top men were shattered by the result, will teach them something,’ Ferguson told the newspapers. ‘They have had a nice, easy baptism here. Now they have to turn into men.’

  Aberdeen had lost three of their key players to other clubs, been robbed of Cooper, McMaster and Weir through worrying injuries, been knocked out of the League Cup by a team of part-timers, and had gone out of Europe at the first hurdle. The season was eleven games old and already two tournaments were dead. MacLeod was sympathetic to his former club: ‘When you lose the players they have through injury and transfers you can’t be the same team.’ After six years of Fergie momentum it looked as though Aberdeen had stalled.

  Chapter 18

  ‘THIS SEASON’S TARGET IS TWO TROPHIES…MINIMUM’

  Anyone who suggested Aberdeen’s power was on the wane was liable to be put right by the manager in no uncertain terms. Alex Ferguson was eager to assert that it was business as usual at Pittodrie. If he thought someone was sowing doubt, he sorted it out. Just before the 1984–85 season started, the experienced television commentator Jock Brown heard from friends in the game that Ferguson was unhappy with him. ‘They were saying the same sort of things,’ Brown recalled. ‘“Ooh, Fergie’s gunning for you”. When I asked what the problem was they said, “Your cup final commentary.”’ Brown had no qualms about telephoning Ferguson to confront him. Ferguson got straight to the point: the issue was indeed his commentary for STV during the Aberdeen-Celtic cup final at the end of May. ‘He said to me, “Aye, aye, you were biased in favour of Celtic. And I can prove it. Did you or did you not say that it was against the run of play when Eric Black scored the opening goal?” I said that yeah, from memory, I think I had. He said, “I can tell you that it wisnae.” I was getting more intrigued. I can’t remember the exact numbers now, but he said something like, “In the first half of that game we were in their box for fourteen minutes twenty-two seconds, they were in our penalty box for nine minutes sixteen seconds, so that proves it, we were on top.” So I said, “But what was the count after ten minutes when Eric Black scored?” There was a pause. He goes, “Oh, you smart bastard…how are you doing anyway?”’

  Brown later discovered that Ferguson had also filleted Archie Macpherson for his cup final commentary for the BBC. ‘What that told you is that he had recorded both outputs, studied carefully both outputs, so that he could identify “the west of Scotland bias”, and then he could tell all his players, “What about those cup final commentaries? Even when you win the cup they don’t give you any credit.”’

  Ferguson was bitterly disappointed, in particular, by the European Cup exit to Berlin. ‘I began to feel that events were piling up on top of me,’ he admitted in Managing My Life. ‘I was actually beginning to think that maybe I should have taken one of the recent job offers I had received from Rangers and Spurs.’ He said his mind was reeling. A calm look around the dressing room would have reassured him. He had built a squad and an ethos that could survive the loss of Gordon Strachan, Mark McGhee and Doug Rougvie and overcome the early setbacks as their replacements settled in. ‘It still felt like a winning machine,’ said Neil Simpson, who was only twenty-two at the time but in his fifth season as a first-team regular.

  A ‘winning machine’ was an apt description of their form in the Premier Division. The first eighteen league games brought fifteen wins, two draws and one defeat. A little wobble at the end of 1984 offered the chasing pack some hope. Over nineteen days they drew against Dundee and St Mirren and lost home and away against Dundee United. ‘One or two people think we’re crumbling,’ said Ferguson dismissively. Sure enough, they came again, finishing with eight wins and a draw from their last nine league games. Aberdeen’s three previous championships, in 1955, 1980 and 1984, had all been clinched by a result in the central belt. In 1985 there was the pleasure of crossing the finishing line at Pittodrie. When Celtic arrived on 27 April they needed a victory to maintain any hope of catching their hosts, while a draw was enough for Aberdeen. Just before half-time Celtic were awarded a penalty when Billy Stark nudged striker Mo Johnston as they went for a cross. Willie Miller led an instant delegation berating referee George Smith, but the decision stood. Roy Aitken thrashed the penalty straight down the middle to give Celtic the lead. In the sixty-first minute Aberdeen were awarded a free-kick on their right wing. Ian Porteous swung the ball into the area and Miller connected with a downward header which went in off the post for the precious equaliser. ‘All credit to Aberdeen, they have done the business,’ said Celtic manager Davie Hay.

  Aberdeen had lost just four of their thirty-six league games and their fifty-seven points were a Scottish Premier Division record. The former Newcastle, Arsenal and England striker Malcolm Macdonald was a guest at Ibrox when Aberdeen won there in November. Later he was effusive: ‘Aberdeen are the best British team I’ve seen in the last five years, with the possible exception of Liverpool.’ That day he had watched a winning goal from the player who lit up Aberdeen’s 1984–85 season. Frank McDougall was a former amateur boxing champion from a tough Glasgow housing scheme. He played snooker, liked a pint and was not averse to the odd cigarette. He worried that Ferguson would be turned off by his reputation as a lad who enjoyed a night out. But what Ferguson saw was an instinctive, cool and fearless finisher who could score with either foot or head. The most goals McDougall had scored in a season had been eighteen for St Mirren; Ferguson told him he wanted thirty. He went pretty close. Despite a slow start, and later missing eight games because of injury, he scored twenty-two times in the league, including a hat-trick at Pittodrie against Rangers. There was a run of goals in eight consecutive league games and his final total earned him third place and a trip to Paris to collect a bronze boot in the European Golden Boot awards.

  Supporters embraced McDougall as a vibrant new force in their team.
He was a natural who reminded them of Joe Harper. McDougall revelled in playing on the biggest stage of his career, and produced superb football, but he remained a street fighter who could test Ferguson’s patience. Whenever his lifestyle caused strain between them, Ferguson would say: ‘I’ll put you on the dole, McDougall. You’ll be signing on if you don’t get your act together.’ The potential for conflict was constant and it boiled over when McDougall disguised a groin injury because he was desperate to face Hearts in the Scottish Cup quarter-final. When he took a free-kick in the first half Ferguson saw him grimace in pain and immediately realised what was going on. When the game ended in a draw all the players were ordered in for Sunday morning training. Ferguson burst into the dressing room and marched straight up to the striker. McDougall panicked and the old boxer in him emerged: he swung a punch which caught Ferguson on the face and knocked him down. When he published his autobiography, McDougall wrote: ‘Of all the stupid things I had done in my life, putting Fergie on his arse had just stormed straight into the charts at number one.’