Once a noted Argentine author was asked why his country had produced so many fine footballers (albeit mainly for export). ‘It is simple,’ he replied. ‘Because all over Argentina, in every small town or village, there are unselfish men who see it as their role in life to teach children how to play properly.’ The Scotland in which Ferguson grew up had been reminiscent of that; he paid fulsome tribute to Douglas Smith, the founder of Drumchapel Amateurs, and, a generation on, Stark received the benefit of similar tuition at Anniesland.
Even after Stark left school to become a trainee draughtsman, he was pursued by Lindsay despite the scepticism of Ferguson, who thought the lanky lad a ‘beanpole’ liable to struggle with the demands of the senior game.
Many years later, having enjoyed a fine career and become manager of the Scotland Under-21 team, Stark chuckled at the recollection. ‘Baldy would phone the house every night or turn up at the door to badger me into going to St Mirren. Eventually I did. I signed for Ferguson on the bus home from a pre-season friendly at Selkirk in the Borders. The strange thing was that I’d had a nightmare of a match, certainly in the first half – I improved to mediocre in the second. And Ferguson signed me. I was astonished.
‘It was only the second time I’d met him. The first time had been the night I played at Love Street in a [specially arranged] game for Anniesland Waverley. All he said then was ‘You did okay and we’ll keep an eye on you.’ Later it struck me that it wouldn’t have mattered to him how well I did at Selkirk. He’d have been looking for specific things.’
And trusting Baldy Lindsay. Stark became an elegant and effective member of Ferguson’s St Mirren team before also joining him at Aberdeen and winning a championship medal.
Ferguson never pretended to have initiated the St Mirren youth policy. Already secured were the midfielder Tony Fitzpatrick, whom Ferguson, after seeking Provan’s opinion, promoted to the first team as captain at eighteen, and a central defender, Bobby Reid, who might have achieved greater things but for a knee injury. But Ferguson did make the system prolific.
‘I was forced to do it,’ he said later, ‘because there was no money to buy players. But once you get used to working with young kids and seeing them come through to the first team you know it’s a good way. It’s a great source of satisfaction.’
‘He’s done it all his career,’ remarked Stark, ‘and it takes a brave man.’
There is a saying among managers that the problem with a youth policy is that your successors get the benefit of it after you have been sacked, and it applied to Ferguson at St Mirren. He brought in the striker Frank McGarvey after being tipped off by the Rangers scout Willie Thornton that he was ‘no use to Rangers’ (in other words, Roman Catholic). McGarvey went on to play for Scotland. As did the left-back Iain Munro and centre-forward Jimmy Bone. And the production line served Ferguson’s successors such as Jim Clunie and McFarlane, whose sides included not only Fitzpatrick and other Paisley notables such as Lex Richardson and Billy Abercromby but a young Frank McAvennie and Peter Weir, yet another destined to play for his country.
When Stark arrived, the manager’s first requirement had been met. For the 1975/6 season, Scottish football was being reorganised. In place of a First Division of 18 clubs and a Second of 20 there would be a Premier Division of 10 and a First and Second of 14 each. So Mirren’s task was to get into the middle tier by finishing in the top six of the Second Division. Fitzpatrick’s precocious craft and leadership proved the catalyst for an improvement that saw them win eight times in a row to qualify with a couple of matches to spare.
Stark Improvement
Billy Stark came into all this knowing Ferguson mainly as a player. He remembered having been taken to Rangers matches by his father and appreciating Ferguson’s goals and ‘his rumbustiousness, his aggression’. And how did he now like him as a manager? ‘Well,’ said Stark, ‘I’d no one to compare him with, but “like” is not the term I would use. Anyway, would you find any manager a nice man? What you could certainly recognise in him was that drive, that almost manic desire which I think has played a big part in his success. I think he’s unique in that way and you picked up on it straight away. He was thirty-three and still had that youthful enthusiasm. You thought it was his age but, of course, he’s carried it through his career.
‘Coming from Anniesland Waverley. I was used to discipline, but he was on to you for every tiny detail. Dress code, timekeeping – he was very big on those things. And he had an omnipresence. You always felt you were being watched by him, at or around the club.
‘It was the same at Aberdeen. Even though by then he’d allow his assistant – Archie Knox, or whoever it was at the time – to take training and there’d be no sign of him and at first, knowing him, you’d think it strange, and then suddenly the Merc would pull into the car park. Sometimes he’d just watch from there. It was for effect – no doubt about it. You’d know he was there.
‘It was something he tried to impose on you – that there was nothing you did that he didn’t know about. That control thing has always been a part of him. Right from the start at St Mirren – the embryonic stage.’
The sharpness of Stark’s observation was borne out many years later when Ferguson, discussing the degree of delegation that had helped him, he believed, to stay so long at Manchester United, recalled his first glimmer of understanding that it had its uses.
Archie Knox, whom he had made his assistant at Aberdeen – they were to have a long and cheerfully foul-mouthed association – was frustrated. ‘I don’t know why you brought me here,’ he complained. Ferguson expressed bewilderment. ‘I don’t do anything,’ said Knox. Ferguson replied that he looked after the players in the afternoons. ‘I’m the fucking assistant manager,’ Knox stormed on. ‘And you still do all the training sessions! It’s ridiculous.’
The only other person present was Teddy Scott, a long-serving member of the Pittodrie coaching staff to whom Ferguson always listened. Scott looked at Knox, then at Ferguson, and said: ‘He’s right.’ The way Ferguson remembered it was that Scott continued: ‘Why are you doing all the training sessions, barking and yelling and coaching all the time. You should be observing. You should be in control.’
That was when the penny dropped: when Ferguson heard the word ‘control’.
The next day he told Knox he would ‘give it a go’. Knox snorted. So he agreed to let Knox train the team on a permanent basis and Stark, when he arrived at Aberdeen in 1983, noticed the difference.
St Mirren under Ferguson had finished sixth out of fourteen in the new First Division and the next season, with McFarlane helping Ferguson to guide the first team, they achieved promotion as champions, giving Ferguson his first honour as a manager. Just as encouraging had been the presence in a Scotland Under-21 squad of four St Mirren players: Stark, McGarvey, Fitzpatrick and Reid.
By now the supporters were buoyant – they had provided the bulk of the £17,000 it cost to bring Jackie Copland, a strong and experienced defender, from Dundee United – although progress was not always smooth behind the scenes. Once Ferguson, furiously lecturing the players on the evils of drink after they had been caught in a pub, smashed a Coca-Cola bottle against a wall, showering them. ‘The quickness of my temper and depth of my anger often worried me,’ he recalled. Yet Stark, looking back, could see method in much of his madness.
‘It could have you in turmoil,’ Stark said, ‘but it made a better player out of me. There were countless episodes, but the worst I personally suffered was when we played Celtic at Love Street and eventually lost 3-1. During the game, Celtic got a free-kick around halfway. I was playing right midfield and turned to jog back. They took it quick, played it over my head to someone who crossed and they scored.
‘After the game, Ferguson went loopy. I was in a corner getting changed when suddenly he threw a boot at me. That’s why I always have a laugh when people talk about the David Beckham incident.’ This right-sided midfielder escaped injury – while Beckham was to require
a couple of stitches over an eye, Stark got away with a blow on a shoulder – but the memory remains vivid. ‘I was distraught and yet it was a defining moment. I don’t believe these incidents were off the cuff. Part of his method was to test players, to see if they had the stuff to go forward rather than buckle.
‘I resolved to prove myself to him. I never again, in my career, turned my back on the ball. If he’d just had a quiet word with me, it might have been different. But the ferocity of the message embedded it. I was about nineteen at the time – and it saw me through another seventeen years.’
The ‘hairdryer’ treatment – as Mark Hughes was to describe it at Manchester United – was often in evidence. ‘He’d come right up to players, bawling in their faces,’ said Stark. ‘But nobody ever challenged it. You just took it.’ As Provan observed: ‘Players in those days didn’t answer back. He got through to them. And we were promoted.’
Among those taking notice was Ally MacLeod, by now at Aberdeen but preparing to take charge of the Scottish national squad. As Willie Cunningham had done at St Mirren, he asked Ferguson if he fancied being his successor at Pittodrie, but on this occasion Ferguson put his own interpretation on Jock Stein’s advice. Although Aberdeen were a bigger club with room for expansion – under MacLeod they had finished third in the League and won the League Cup, and plans were already under way to develop their ground into a 23,000-capacity all-seater to take advantage of the North Sea oil boom – he told MacLeod he preferred to try to take St Mirren to the same level.
It was never going to happen. Although crowds had risen at St Mirren, money remained tight and Ferguson’s young team struggled in the Premier League, especially after Christmas, winning only four of their last eighteen matches (and losing twice to Billy McNeill’s championship-challenging Aberdeen). The threat of relegation was kept at bay, but the atmosphere at the club became inimical to progress of the sort envisaged by Ferguson a year earlier.
A Nest of Vipers
Every account makes Love Street sound like a nest of vipers. Not least Ferguson’s, which portrayed Willie Todd, the director who had taken over from Harold Currie as chairman, as an ego-driven megalomaniac meddler with a constant need to be put in his place. Todd’s ally on a quarrelling board was John Corson, whom Ferguson dismissed as a footballing ignoramus unable to recognise Fitzpatrick when he was club captain. Michael Crick’s book offers a balanced picture of Todd in quoting the former director Tom Moran: ‘Bill Todd was one of those guys that, once you got on the wrong side of him, there was no dealing with him . . . he and Fergie were at each other’s throats.’
So much for the office politics, which were to become so bitter that Ferguson’s secretary, June Sullivan, was drawn into a conflict of loyalties that led to Ferguson first speaking sharply to her and then not speaking to her at all.
That the club, despite an increase in the average crowd from 2,000 to 11,000, had been unable to keep pace with Ferguson’s ambitions was emphasised by reports speculating that he might succeed Jock Wallace at Rangers. Nor was he in any mood to disbelieve his own publicity. At one stage towards the end of that 1977/8 season, he demanded not only a Mercedes car but a salary of £25,000 which St Mirren clearly could not afford (to put it in perspective, at that time McNeill had Aberdeen challenging for the championship on £11,500 a year). Something must have told him he was in a position of strength and everyone who was at St Mirren then – except Ferguson – says it was an indication that Aberdeen would offer him McNeill’s job when the former Celtic captain returned to Parkhead to take over from Jock Stein.
The exact sequence of events is hard to define. All that seems plain is the implausibility of Ferguson’s claim, both to the industrial tribunal and in a subsequent book, A Light in the North, written while he was at Aberdeen, that the approach from Aberdeen came on the evening of the day on which St Mirren sacked him.
He writes in his autobiography of a 1-0 victory at Ayr that eased the club’s relegation worries and adds: ‘Willie Todd and I were no longer talking to each other and when Aberdeen made another approach to me there could be only one reaction.’ The length of time between the Ayr match and the approach is not specified, but the match took place on 18 March and he was not sacked by St Mirren until 31May – nearly eleven weeks later later and a full month after the end of the season.
Not only that: ‘My position [in deciding how to receive Aberdeen’s advances] was complicated by the fear that St Mirren might have enough of a contractual hold on me to encourage them to sue. So I foolishly delayed announcing my decision to leave and thus gave Todd a chance to implement his plans to get rid of me.’ This last sentence removes any doubt that both Todd and Ferguson correctly believed the end was nigh before the ugly formality of dismissal confirmed it.
But for how long? Given the uncharacteristic vagueness of Ferguson’s recollection, the best hope of precision went to the grave with Jim Rodger in 1997.
In A Light in the North, Ferguson wrote: ‘This time contact was made with me through one of the most powerful and influential sports writers in Britain ([Rodger] . . . a man of the utmost integrity and one you can trust with your life.’ In his autobiography, he calls Rodger ‘an invaluable friend to me’. But Rodger was also a friend to Todd and St Mirren, whom he just as discreetly tipped off not only that Ferguson was planning to leave – and take the bright young Stark with him – but that Aberdeen were hoping to avoid paying St Mirren compensation for the three years left on Ferguson’s contract.
So Todd did indeed start plotting and, on the last day of May 1978, Ferguson was summoned to Love Street, sacked, and read a list of thirteen supposed offences from a typewritten sheet to which St Mirren were to allude in claiming that he had broken his contract. Ferguson laughed, saying the only reason to get rid of a manager was incompetence, but cleared his desk and the same evening was speaking to the Aberdeen chairman, Dick Donald, accepting his offer and promising to drive north the next morning. A whirlwind romance and no mistake.
The Paisley public, of course, and St Mirren squad were shocked but, said Stark, the players had little chance to dwell on the news because it came in the close season and the nation was preoccupied with Scotland’s prospects at the forthcoming World Cup.
As Ferguson hit the road, his old mentor Ally MacLeod, whose bullish prognostications about what the Scots could achieve in Argentina had caused much excitement in the land and curiosity farther afield, was supervising one of the last training sessions before the match against Peru that was to burst the bubble. Scotland lost 3-1 and, by way of complication, were obliged to send Willie Johnston home for failing a drugs test. Then they held Iran to 1-1 only with the help of an own goal. The final match was against mighty Holland and, with MacLeod’s men requiring to win by three to reach the knockout stage, one wit famously asked: ‘Where are we going to find three Dutchmen prepared to score own goals?’
At one stage, Scotland did in fact lead 3-1, Archie Gemmill’s memorable solo providing false hope. The match ended 3-2. By then Ferguson was in the United States with the Aberdeen vice-chairman, Chris Anderson, ‘studying the commercial initiatives associated with the North American Soccer League’ (yes, the pace of life had certainly quickened since he encountered Aberdeen) before taking a family holiday in Malta.
Not that he forgot his farewells. Stark remembered taking a call from him.
St Mirren rose from eighth to sixth under Jim Clunie, then a heady third, then, under McFarlane, fourth, fifth and fifth again. But Aberdeen were always ahead of them; in the year St Mirren finished third, Ferguson’s Aberdeen were champions. Nor did the Love Street crowds quite match the levels of the Ferguson era. Players were lost, some of them, such as Weir and Stark, to Ferguson. The dream had died – or moved to Aberdeen.
Rancour and Defeat
Behind was left rancour and bewilderment. Rumours often accompany the departure of a football manager and this was a classic case as the Scottish football community buzzed with talk of illicit payments an
d tax evasion that was, to an extent, borne out by the tribunal hearing a few months later.
Some of St Mirren’s allegations against Ferguson were risible: that he had gone to the European Cup final, which was in London that year (Liverpool beat Bruges through a goal by Kenny Dalglish and, Ferguson pointed out, he saw it at his own expense); and allowed Love Street to be used free of charge for a Scottish Junior Cup semi-final (the club pettily argued that a fee might have been charged).
Others were dubious: that he had been paid for giving advice to a bookmaker (the man was an old friend); that he had taken £25 a week in expenses without the directors’ knowledge (Ferguson later produced a letter contradicting this).
Further allegations, including those of unauthorised bonus offers to players, did indeed indicate an unacceptably cavalier attitude to relations with the board – and were to conspire in his painful defeat at the tribunal.
Ricky McFarlane was at his side throughout those final months at St Mirren. ‘As someone who worked more closely with him than anyone,’ he said, ‘I would simply not countenance the idea of any serious financial irregularity. There were a few occasions when he did things without the authority of the board, with players and so on, but it was never to do with his own personal gain. I know him well enough to be utterly certain about that.’
But the rumour mill, McFarlane implied, had been even more unkind to Willie Todd, who was held responsible for undermining Ferguson – ‘there were others on the board trying to do that’ – and deserved better. ‘Willie got a bad name and has had a bad name in Paisley ever since. I feel sorry for him and I think it is very sad, because Willie loved the club and put a lot of his own money into it, and did some super things for Alex.’ Including sanction loans; more than £3,500 was owed to the club by Ferguson in accounts published, to Ferguson’s mind mischievously, after his departure. ‘Willie was good to Alex,’ said McFarlane. ‘And was a good man.’
Football – Bloody Hell! Page 8
