Indeed, his immediate aspiration had been to go as high as Scotland could offer, which entailed overcoming the fatalism ingrained in the footballing culture of this and other countries where, decade after decade, the same two or three clubs are to be found sharing the trophies. It meant, in other words, beating Rangers and Celtic on a regular basis.
This Ferguson was to do. Within two years he had made Aberdeen champions for only the second time in their existence and, by the time he had left for Manchester United after eight complete seasons, they had a total of four titles. Their number of Scottish Cup triumphs had been increased from two to six and League Cup successes from two to three. In addition they had won the European Cup-Winners’ Cup.
They had been doing pretty well before he came and under Davie Halliday, whose long spell of management straddled the Second World War, they had won each of the main trophies once. But nothing had prepared the Granite City for the frequency of celebration that jammed its main thoroughfare, Union Street, during the Ferguson era.
It would not have been possible without an enlightened board. There were three directors: Dick Donald, the chairman and owner of local pleasure palaces – cinemas, bingo and dance halls – the energetic and enterprising Chris Anderson, and Charlie Forbes. All had played for Aberdeen at one level or another. (Donald’s son Ian, who also became a director in Ferguson’s time, had been signed by Manchester United as a teenager and made a few appearances before being let go by Tommy Docherty in order to find a more appropriate level. After brief spells with Partick Thistle and Arbroath, he retired unnoticed and later took a seat on the Aberdeen board, serving for twenty-four years, four of them as chairman.)
Encouraged by the air of prosperity created by North Sea oil, and in the knowledge that the club, its nearest rivals being the Dundee duo more than sixty miles down the coast, could appeal to not only the 210,000 citizens of Aberdeen but inhabitants of the agricultural hinterland and fishing ports – again the comparison with Ipswich holds good – Anderson and Dick Donald had arranged for the modernisation of Pittodrie.
In 1980 it became Britain’s first all-seated and all-covered stadium, preceding the provisions of Lord Justice Taylor’s report by a decade, and, although the capacity of 23,000 was seldom tested in the early years despite the team’s achievements, the average had risen to a healthy 15,000 by the time Ferguson left.
With this Aberdeen could compete with Rangers and Celtic at the time. Football was less fashionable than now and even Glasgow’s big two struggled to half-fill their stadiums except when playing each other.
The historical perspective as viewed in 1978 would nevertheless have daunted a lesser man than Ferguson.
From 1904 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, only one club other than Rangers or Celtic had won the Scottish League (Motherwell in 1932). The official resumption of football in 1946 seemed to bring a more competitive environment, with Hibs taking three titles, their Edinburgh rivals Hearts two and Aberdeen one, but most observers thought those days had gone with the failures of Dundee and Kilmarnock to sustain their successes of 1962 and 1965 respectively.
For fifteen years, starting with the assembly of the Stein Machine at Celtic, the Old Firm had resumed their dominance. Ferguson and his old room-mate Jim McLean, by now firmly established at Dundee United and beginning to harvest the fruits of a youth policy similar to Ferguson’s, set about breaking it.
Making Winners
Some great managers of the 1960s, notably Bill Shankly at Liverpool and Don Revie at Leeds United, had attempted to change their club’s psychology by changing its strip. Naturally they had been influenced by the all white of Real Madrid, which Revie adopted exactly; Shankly sensibly retained Liverpool’s red but extended it to the shorts and socks. Their idea, we supposed, was to have their teams look uncompromising and substantial.
Ferguson had tried a variation on it at East Stirling, suggesting that their wishy-washy black and white hoops should give way to bold white shirts, black shorts and red socks – and been firmly slapped down by an aged conservative on the board. At Aberdeen the job had already been done, in 1966, during Eddie Turnbull’s management. The team played in all red, like Liverpool. At least they wore all red. The miracle would take a little longer.
The first tactical decision Ferguson made was to move the defensive line forward. The season before his arrival, Aberdeen had had the best defensive record in the Premier Division, but Ferguson felt the habit of defending deep, understandable because the centre-backs, Willie Miller and Willie Garner (gradually to be replaced by Alex McLeish), were not the quickest, worked against his philosophy of going on the offensive against Rangers, Celtic or anyone else.
He also resolved to phase out the local hero. Joe Harper, the fellow striker with whom Ferguson had toured as a player on the ‘Scotland’ trip in 1967, had been taken to the World Cup in Argentina by MacLeod, appearing against Iran, but his chubby face did not fit with Ferguson, who disapproved of his drinking and general attitude to fitness.
Inevitably, Ferguson addressed youth development. ‘My experience with St Mirren,’ he was to say, ‘strengthened my belief that youth was the way forward. At Aberdeen the likes of Willie Miller, Alex McLeish, John McMaster and Doug Rougvie had already come through the ranks so all I did was strengthen the scouting system. We scoured the country and found Neale Cooper, Neil Simpson, Eric Black, John Hewitt, Dougie Bell, Bryan Gunn and the rest.’
Almost mischievously, it seemed, he arranged for a satellite academy to be set up in Glasgow; in truth this was less a gesture of defiance to the Old Firm than a reflection of Ferguson’s belief that West of Scotland youngsters tended to have more of the necessary devil in their make-up.
He worked closely with the chief scout, Bobby Calder, but went to see countless prospects for himself, sometimes more than once because he wanted to assess them in adversity – against a stronger side, say, or in wind and rain – as well as favourable conditions. He liked to meet the parents too, in order not merely to judge the boys’ backgrounds but to estimate how much they might grow physically.
As well as the serene and thoughtful Pat Stanton, there was the assistance in those challenging early days of Teddy Scott, a popular piece of the Pittodrie furniture who did far more than fulfil his basic function as reserve team coach – Ferguson called him ‘indispensable’ – and, of course, the highly supportive Dick Donald and Chris Anderson.
The chairman ran the club informally, doing much to foster its family atmosphere with his avuncular manner. Donald was always on hand to offer advice and Ferguson, relieved to be away from the strife of St Mirren, appreciated it. Some people even thought he had mellowed.
They were wrong. When he arrived, he had been thirty-six, only a few years older than some senior players, who were suspicious of him: quite naturally, for the club had been doing well under the previous regimes of MacLeod and McNeill. They objected not only to changes he made in training but the manner in which he demanded them and his explanations, which he admitted later could be ham-fisted in that he often compared players unflatteringly with former charges at St Mirren from whom, understandably, they felt they had little to learn.
There were men who had played for Scotland – Harper, the right-back Stuart Kennedy, the veteran goalkeeper Bobby Clark and Willie Miller, a leader from the back who, though only twenty-three, had been club captain for two years – and others who would go on to represent their country and earn even wider fame such as Gordon Strachan, Alex McLeish and Steve Archibald. There was also the goalkeeper Jim Leighton, who would succeed Clark and eventually be taken by Ferguson to a World Cup and then Manchester United, where his omission from an FA Cup final replay scarred him so deeply that a quarter of a century later he preferred to maintain a dignified silence about it.
Like Leighton, McLeish was on the fringes of the first team and once, when Ferguson directed a post-match tirade at the young defender, Miller brusquely intervened, asking why the manager didn’t pic
k on someone senior. The ensuing exchange did nothing to dispel rumours of trouble between Ferguson and leading players – managers in such a position were later said to have ‘lost the dressing room’ – and it was certainly not the first row he had had with Miller.
Gradually they began to forge a relationship, Miller coming to accept that Ferguson was right to insist that he defended less cautiously, indeed expressing gratitude for the adjustment that turned a fine career into one of Scotland’s most distinguished ever.
The relationship with Harper was never to improve. Ferguson thought the player unprofessional and tactically one-dimensional; Harper deemed the manager a finger-wagging bully. So it was natural for Ferguson to number the days of the one player who would never absorb his ideas. Whether or not Harper sensed this, he continued to score goals in that first Ferguson season, 1978/9. He had claimed eighteen in a mere twenty-three League matches when Ferguson made a striker his first purchase for Aberdeen. Mark McGhee arrived from Newcastle United and appeared in all eleven matches thereafter, scoring four times.
McGhee was nearly twenty-two and, although Newcastle’s manager, Bill McGarry, had offered him the opportunity to stay, he chose a £70,000 move to Aberdeen instead because Ferguson had earlier tried to sign him for St Mirren. ‘I was with Morton at the time,’ McGhee said, ‘and the fact that he’d now come back for me made up my mind, even though I didn’t know much else about him and had never even been to Aberdeen, let alone played there.
‘He was also different from other managers in that I wasn’t asked any questions – I was told what he wanted from me. I almost signed the contract without seeing it. While I was listening to him, he slipped the pen into my hand. He was in total control.’
McGhee joined Aberdeen in the hotel near Glasgow Airport where they were preparing for the League Cup final against Rangers. It was late March, nine months into Ferguson’s time as manager and a month after his father’s death. Rangers won, giving John Greig his first trophy as manager, but Ferguson’s team remained a work in steady progress.
By the time the next season began, he had changed the midfield, moving Strachan, a gifted but unfinished twenty-two-year-old, to the right-sided position he was to occupy for the remaining eighteen years of his career and temporarily introducing the steel of McLeish in the middle, to complement the passing technique of John McMaster.
Up front with Archibald in the early phase of that 1979/80 campaign was the familiar figure of Harper. He had made eleven League appearances, scoring three goals, when injury struck him down and beckoned McGhee back into the side, this time to stay. McGhee’s time had come and Ferguson had been preparing him for it, developing the player whose potential had been discerned at Morton and Newcastle into the player he would become.
‘I’d always been pretty much off the cuff,’ McGhee recalled, ‘and people had allowed it because I was good at getting the ball and taking people on. But I wasn’t great at the more fundamental aspects of being a centre-forward. He taught me straight away that, even if I wasn’t playing well, I could make a contribution.
‘That wasn’t the case before. If I wasn’t playing brilliantly, I was no use whatsoever. He showed me that middle ground where I could contribute to the team by holding the ball up, winning headers and putting defenders under pressure. If I did that, I could do all the stuff I liked doing and it would be more effective. It changed me from being a ‘nearly’ player who could do the spectacular from time to time, beating three men and scoring a goal, to a proper team player.’
When Harper limped out of the 1979/80 season, giving McGhee his second chance, Aberdeen lay third, having lost five of their first fourteen League matches. They lost again at Morton in the new year and slipped to sixth – but suffered only two further defeats in the rest of the season. After McGhee had joined Archibald up front, they gained momentum, overtaking McNeill’s Celtic in the last couple of weeks with the help of a 3-1 victory at Parkhead in which both McGhee and Archibald scored and striding on to bring the club its first championship since 1955.
In eight matches against the Old Firm, they had lost only an early season home encounter with Celtic. Rangers, managed by Ferguson’s old friend Greig, had been beaten three times. Aberdeen under Ferguson had conquered ‘provincial’ Scottish football’s endemic inferiority complex.
‘Suddenly,’ Gordon Strachan recalled, ‘after eighteen months of working with Alex Ferguson, we’d seemed to explode. I don’t know what happened in those eighteen months. The main thing I remember is suffering from incredible nerves in the last few games. I was always going to the toilet and people thought I was ill, but it was just the stress of realising we could win the League.’
They celebrated by winning with a flourish, 5-0 at Hibernian, in front of 10,000 of their supporters who had made the journey to Edinburgh. Not that Ferguson could let the day pass without a storm; for having insulted the referee at half-time he was to incur from the Scottish FA a second banishment to the stands of his Aberdeen career (the first had followed the scenes at St Mirren on the day of his father’s death), thus maintaining the bad habits of his time at Love Street. But it was still a day of glorious sunshine.
Ferguson had earned the first major honour of his career – and more. He had won his battle for Pittodrie’s hearts and minds. ‘I finally had the players believing in me,’ he said. And with the refashioning of McGhee he had shown they were in judicious hands. Ferguson was to describe McGhee as one of his three key signings for Aberdeen. And to conclude, as he analysed that first title triumph: ‘Sadly it must be stated that the misfortune for Joe Harper brought a breakthrough for the team.’
Harper played one further League match for Aberdeen at the end of the 1980/81 season before becoming manager of Highland League club Peterhead for a season. He then became a newspaper columnist and broadcaster, a regular attender at Pittodrie, where he acted as host in the Legends Lounge.
Chastened by Liverpool
That to be champions of Scotland hardly equated to conquering the world was brought home to Ferguson and his players when they took part in the competition later known as the Champions League. The European Cup draw sent them first to Vienna, where a scoreless draw protected a single-goal lead McGhee had secured at Pittodrie, but then came a chastening experience at the hands of Liverpool.
Liverpool and Ferguson: their fortunes were destined to be intertwined. Just as Real Madrid had inspired his affection for attacking football on a broad front – in their 1960 final against Eintracht Frankfurt at Hampden Park, there had been dashing wing play from Canario and the lightning Gento on one side, Kress and Meier on the other – Liverpool had heightened his awareness of the game’s power as theatre.
In 1977, as manager of St Mirren, he had been fortunate enough to visit Anfield on one of its greatest occasions and confessed himself intoxicated by the atmosphere of a European Cup quarter-final second leg in which St Etienne were eventually overcome by a goal from David ‘Supersub’ Fairclough. ‘I didn’t walk away from the ground after the game,’ Ferguson remarked. ‘I floated. I had been caught up in the most exciting football atmosphere.’
Liverpool went on to win the trophy that year. They beat Borussia Moenchengladbach 3-1 in Rome. It was the first of their four European triumphs in the space of eight years. The second Ferguson saw, albeit without St Mirren’s permission, in 1978 at Wembley, where Bruges lost to a goal from Kenny Dalglish, one of three Scots who had been introduced to the team by Bob Paisley; the others were Graeme Souness and Alan Hansen and Ferguson was to have interesting relationships with them all.
But on the first of two visits to Anfield in the autumn of 1980 he just watched them from the stands. He came to the fortress where Liverpool had not lost a League match for nearly three years, where they had scored no fewer than ten goals on average for every one the opposition were brave or foolish enough to put past Ray Clemence, and watched Middlesbrough go the way of all flesh, albeit by a relatively creditable four goals to two.
/> Ferguson saw the match with Archie Knox, the former manager of Forfar Athletic, who had become his assistant during the summer when Pat Stanton went into management at Cowdenbeath. At Anfield they met Shankly, and Ferguson, in his autobiography, recalls the great man’s greeting: ‘Hello, Alex, good to see you – you are doing a terrific job up there.’ He was uttering awe-struck gratitude when Shankly went on: ‘So you’re down to have a look at our great team?’ Yes, said Ferguson, they were indeed. ‘Aye,’ said Shankly, ‘they all try that.’
Ferguson’s spying mission was in vain. Liverpool won at Pittodrie through a goal from Terry McDermott and tore the Scots apart at Anfield, a Willie Miller own goal being the first of four without reply. The full-back Phil Neal quickly got the next. At half-time came the immortal rallying cry from Aberdeen’s Drew Jarvie: ‘Come on, lads – three quick goals and we’re back in it.’ He would not have been joking. Not with Ferguson present. At any rate, Dalglish struck next and finally even Hansen came up from the back to score.
It left Ferguson no happier than you might imagine, even though his team had been facing a side destined to become European champions again, this time by beating Real Madrid. ‘He came in after the match,’ McGhee recalled, ‘and slaughtered us. Slaughtered us.’
McGhee then smiled. ‘I always remember that the match was sponsored by KP, the snack foods company, and they had put a plastic bag on everybody’s hook in the dressing room containing all these various nuts and cheesy crackers. After the manager had come in and had his go at us, we were all looking down and then we got quietly changed and climbed on the bus with our KP bags – nobody was leaving them behind – to go back to our hotel.’
It was Strachan who broke the silence. ‘I asked if anyone wanted to swap their chocolate dippers for salt and vinegar crisps,’ he recalled, ‘or something like that.’ Ferguson immediately snapped that, if he heard anyone laugh – then, or for the rest of the night – they were all fined a week’s wages. ‘So we’re all like this,’ said McGhee, pursing his lips, ‘just about keeping it in.
Football – Bloody Hell! Page 10
