‘We leave Anfield for the city centre and at the hotel we get off the bus in our Aberdeen tracksuits with all the other bits and pieces you take to a match, plus our KP bags, when Graeme Souness arrives. He’s with his wife and another woman, maybe her sister, and he’s wearing a long, light-coloured raincoat with a fur collar, draped over his shoulders. So he’s got this style and swagger and two glamorous women – and we’ve got our KPs.
‘We sit down to dinner in the hotel restaurant and Souness is at the next table. He greets us cheerfully but we’re scared to have a laugh with him in case we get fined. So for Souness the champagne corks are popping and we’re just sitting silently eating, with Fergie glaring over at us from time to time in case anyone laughs. We felt like a bunch of wee boys.’
Strachan and the Shankly Tapes
It was only six years after Aberdeen’s Anfield spanking when Ferguson came down to Manchester to settle to the task of doing to Liverpool what he had done to the Old Firm. By then Aberdeen, having won a European trophy themselves, were big boys. In 1980 it had been just their bad luck to encounter the mighty Liverpool so early in a season that seemed never to recover.
In the summer they had lost Steve Archibald to Tottenham Hotspur; that is what happens to provincial Scottish clubs who win the championship, sad to say, though the £800,000 pleased Dick Donald, who always insisted on balancing the books. Though generous in spirit, he treated money in a manner that could be described as Aberdonian.
With injuries, notably to Strachan, causing further disruption, Aberdeen were beaten by Celtic to the title and won neither of the Cups. Maybe, like Dundee and Kilmarnock before them, they would prove one-hit wonders?
Not at all. Indeed, Ferguson, in that summer of 1981, was to make the second of the three signings he considered his most important for Aberdeen, giving the team a new dimension in the form of width. Peter Weir was more expensive than McGhee but proved a wise way of investing £300,000 of the Archibald money. Weir was twenty-three and had already played a few times for Scotland alongside Strachan, Miller and McLeish. Ferguson reckoned his skill and verve as a left-winger would balance the team and was emphatically vindicated.
‘Weir was the one,’ he later reflected. ‘Weir made the team. Weir brought that left-sided thing that just opened it all up. Because wee Gordon Strachan, though he was doing well on the right, kept getting bogged down – he was always heavily marked. The minute we got Weir, the opposition could no longer concentrate on our right flank, because Weir would be away down the left. He was a very good player and would have been an absolute top, top one if he hadn’t been such an introvert by nature.’ He still won plenty: a Scottish Cup in his first season, and each of the seasons after that, two championships, a League Cup and the European Cup-Winners’ Cup.
Strachan had been there from the start. He had begun at Dundee, where he became something of a teenage sensation in a friendly match against Arsenal after which he was sportingly applauded from the field by Alan Ball, a World Cup winner and England captain, who had been his direct opponent. But some considered Strachan too small and slight for the rigours of Scottish football. Billy McNeill was not one of them. He took Strachan to Aberdeen in exchange for the more seasoned and powerful midfield player Jim Shirra and £50,000. But Strachan failed to find any sort of form and, having felt the scorn of the crowd, was dropped.
McNeill’s departure, then, constituted relief and it was Ferguson under whom he thrived, Ferguson who discovered the position in which Strachan would be most effective. After various experiments, Ferguson placed him just in from the right touchline and there Strachan was not only to win titles north and south of the border but to represent Scotland in two World Cups.
All he knew of Ferguson, when McNeill’s successor arrived at Pittodrie, was the St Mirren phenomenon: ‘This incredible team. Where did these kids come from? Normally you hear of promising boys as they come through the school or youth ranks – but these seemed to come from nowhere. And they were so fit. I first came across them when I was at Dundee and they just used to run us off the pitch. But I’d never met Alex Ferguson.’
They got on well, the twenty-one-year-old and the boss fifteen years his senior. The reason was simple, said Strachan: ‘He knew I loved football and was interested in anything to do with coaching and what made people tick.’ So they travelled to night matches together in Ferguson’s car.
Strachan recalled it in 2000, when he was managing Coventry City and Ferguson, having fallen out with him, was declining even to acknowledge his presence at matches between their clubs; he missed being able to talk about the old times.
‘Going to those matches seemed natural,’ he said. ‘Like him, I couldn’t get enough football. Rangers or Celtic, Arbroath or Montrose – I didn’t mind. I used to be fascinated when, after fifteen minutes, he’d analyse a game and explain the differences between the ways the teams were playing. After a year or two, Archie Knox came as his assistant and took my place in the car. Anyway, we were playing so much European football by then that opportunities were not so frequent. I remember he used to play tapes of Bill Shankly talking. “Let’s listen to Shankly”, he’d say, and shove one in.’ Less entertaining to Ferguson’s passenger was ‘a singer he liked, some awful Glaswegian singer who performed in pubs’.
Strachan observed Ferguson’s gradual self-revelation to the players. ‘At first,’ he said, ‘we didn’t see the full extent of the drive, the aggressive will. But, when it emerged, I’d never seen anything like it in my life. My dad had got angry – but it was nothing like this.’
Argeş Piteşti was a case in point. The Romanian club were Aberdeen’s next opponents after their remarkable Uefa Cup victory over Ipswich in 1981/2, when Bobby Robson’s confident assertion after a 1-1 draw at Portman Road that Aberdeen could play no better on their own ground was spectacularly disproved, not least by a rampant Weir, who rounded off a 3-1 victory by teasing Mick Mills before scoring.
Aberdeen seemed assured of further progress when they beat Argeş Piteşti 3-0 at home, but the away leg began badly and Aberdeen were 2-0 down as half-time approached. Ferguson had switched from 4-4-2 to a single-striker system for the occasion, with a basic middle three supplemented by Strachan and Weir wide right and left respectively and McGhee up front. ‘It’s a great system if you’ve got the players,’ said Strachan. ‘But it was kind of thrown at us. We’d done just a day’s training, if that, and my misfortune is that in the first half, while it was all going wrong, I was on the side nearest to the manager.
‘He was on at me all the time, yelling at me to spin and link with Mark and all the other things, but I didn’t know how to do it. Honestly, I wasn’t being cheeky – I’d never played that way in my life. And then I did the silly thing. As Stuart Kennedy used to say, you should never be the one to shout back at him just before half-time. It’s like a game of tig – you’re on. So I knew I was in trouble when I told him to shut up or said something about the tactics or whatever it was.
‘It was a long, dark tunnel at Piteşti and I was walking alone. We got into the dressing room and he hadn’t arrived yet. In situations like this, the boys would keep their heads down. He would always be wearing these shiny black shoes and, sure enough, they appeared. They were moving about. And then they stopped – and they were pointing at me. I could feel the boys on either side of me edging away. And he came right up to me and slaughtered me.
‘I stood up – I wasn’t being brave, I just had to breathe – and he turned away and, with a hand, accidentally knocked a row of cups of tea in the direction of Willie Miller and Alex McLeish. He saw me smirking and that made him knock over this samovar. It was so big and iron-hard and must have been hot – it must have hurt.’
Ferguson’s own account is that, yes, the samovar did hurt – ‘nearly broke my hand’ – but that only then did he disturb the cups of tea, hurling a tray of them against the wall above Strachan. He also noted with approval that Strachan ‘obeyed instructions’ in the rest of
the match. Strachan’s recollection is that Ferguson reverted to 4–4–2. Beyond doubt was that Aberdeen drew 2–2 on the night, winning comfortably on aggregate, after Strachan had converted a penalty. ‘When it went in, all the guys came over and mobbed me, smothered me, because they knew I might do something stupid again. They were being good team-mates, looking after me, because I was so relieved I could have gone over and said something to him.
‘I’d been so nervous walking up to the spot. Their goalie looked like the biggest in the world – as if he could tickle both posts at once – and I thought, “If I miss this pen, I’m a dead man.”’
In the next round, Aberdeen were knocked out by a Hamburg team featuring Franz Beckenbauer. They were to resume their trophy-gathering with a 4–1 triumph over Rangers after extra time in the Scottish Cup final, but the championship again went to Celtic, albeit by a narrower margin with Aberdeen again runners-up.
The summer of 1982 indicated how Aberdeen had put themselves in football’s forefront, Strachan and Miller taking part in Scotland’s World Cup adventure (with their old friend Archibald) against such renowned players as Brazil’s Zico, Socrates and Falcão and Oleg Blokhin of the Soviet Union, watched by a proud Ferguson. There was no disgrace in coming home early.
Fooling Bayern
Nor was there any drudgery for Gordon Strachan and Willie Miller in the return to work at Aberdeen. By now the players were getting used to Ferguson’s ways: the nervous cough that was to recur for the rest of his career, often as the preliminary to a diatribe; the speech imperfection that caused him to say bwuddy when he meant bloody (as in hell); the rants that made ‘Furious’ a natural as well as alliterative nickname.
A former manager of Derby County and long-time aide to Kevin Keegan, Arthur Cox, once said he enjoyed the biographies of generals and had noticed that it did them no harm to be considered a little dotty by their men; Montgomery was mentioned. The men of Aberdeen were scarcely sold short in this respect. Yet they had the highest regard for Ferguson’s management. They were inspired by him. He brought out their professionalism. They worked hard at the game and enjoyed it.
There was attention to detail in Ferguson’s preparation for any match – even the humblest opponents would be watched and analysed at a team meeting – but it was the Old Firm he relished meeting most, as McGhee confirmed. ‘Dominating them was a massive thing for him. And, since most of us had been brought up Rangers or Celtic supporters – apart from Gordon, who was a Hibs fan – we enjoyed it too.
‘We used to talk about “first blood”. I was under instruction, when the first ball went forward, to make contact. We were told to be physical. After I joined Celtic, Roy Aitken told me that, when we came to Parkhead and stood in the tunnel, he used to think we were on something. We looked mental. That’s how much the big games meant to us.’
McGhee grinned. ‘I remember someone living in Germany sent us a cutting from Süddeutsche Zeitung after we’d played Bayern Munich in the Cup-Winners’ Cup winning season of 1982/3. There was a quote from their substitute goalkeeper at the time, Jean-Marie Pfaff, which the fellow had translated, and Pfaff was saying they knew they were in for a hard game when they looked at us in the tunnel and saw that hardly any of us had any teeth!’
That season, though, they went through the entire European campaign with just one yellow card; Ferguson’s team did not thrive without discipline.
‘We had incredible professionalism,’ said Strachan, ‘and imagination.’ Once he and John McMaster bumped into each other during a match while trying to decide what to do with a free-kick and it gave them an idea that was to win the famous encounter with Bayern. ‘It was pure acting. We pretended to bump into each other.’ While faking remonstration with his team-mate, Strachan suddenly turned and chipped the free-kick to where he knew Alex McLeish would be waiting. ‘It’s hard to turn and hit a ball without looking at it, but I had to do it and big Alex headed a goal. In fact the ploy brought us two goals because almost immediately, before Bayern had recovered their composure, John Hewitt scored and the match was won.
‘We’d practised the trick in training. We used to make up all sorts of things like that. We all joined in and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many people from that team have gone on to become managers [notably Strachan himself, McGhee, McLeish and Willie Miller]. At half-time we used to have eleven managers. We wouldn’t be shy with suggestions. You don’t get that so much in the game today. People are scared to upset each other. But in our dressing room there were eleven managers – only one boss, though.’
No one ever addressed Ferguson as anything other than ‘Boss’. Only when out of earshot did he become ‘Furious’.
The 1982/3 season saw another close call for the domestic title, which Dundee United took for the first time ever, Jim McLean’s team sealing the achievement with victory over their local rivals Dundee on the concluding day. But Europe was thrilling enough for Ferguson as he and Aberdeen made history of their own in the Cup-Winners’ Cup. It was only the third time a Scottish club had won a European trophy (Rangers had lifted the same trophy in 1972, five years after Celtic’s European Cup triumph) and, as on the other occasions, the team consisted entirely of Scots.
Ferguson had fashioned his mainly by enhancing his inheritance, developing the home-produced Jim Leighton, Alex McLeish, Neil Simpson, Neale Cooper and Eric Black, adjusting the roles of Strachan and John McMaster and blending them all with the established Willie Miller and Stuart Kennedy. That Cup-Winners’ Cup triumph took place five years after he had joined Aberdeen – yet, of the twelve players who appeared in the final, including the match-winning substitute John Hewitt, only McGhee and Weir had been bought.
They had been knocked out of the Scottish League Cup early by Dundee United, which did them no harm as the European campaign got serious. After an 11-1 aggregate win over Sion, of Switzerland, they squeezed less convincingly past Dinamo Tirana, Hewitt scoring the only goal at Pittodrie, then beat Lech Poznán 2-0 at home and 1-0 away.
The quarter-finals brought Bayern and again Ferguson’s team kept a clean sheet in Germany, which was remarkable as their hosts, featuring Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Paul Breitner, had put four goals past Tottenham Hotspur in the Olympic Stadium in the previous round. Reality seemed to hit Aberdeen early in the second leg when Klaus Augenthaler beat Leighton. Neil Simpson equalised, before Hans Pflügler, a left-back moved forward because the Bayern coach, Pál Csernai, thought his height would trouble Kennedy, restored Bayern’s lead.
It looked as if Ferguson and Knox, for all the scouting trips they had undertaken before this pivotal match, would be outmanoeuvred. Then Ferguson sent on Hewitt, and the free-kick to which Strachan and McMaster applied their fiendish trick: ‘We reckoned that, although our double act was well enough known in Scottish football by then, the Germans probably wouldn’t have heard of it.’ Even the Scottish television commentator was fooled as McLeish’s header brought the sides level. Almost immediately the German goalkeeper, Manfred Müller, dropped a Black header at the feet of Hewitt, whose winner caused Pittodrie almost to explode. For many years to come, experienced locals recalled that moment as the most emotional the ground had ever known.
Müller recalled it ruefully, mentioning the speed and toughness of the match and the ‘rather weak floodlights’. He could see enough, however, of Strachan: ‘There was this small blond guy in midfield who made everything happen. It was obvious that he was a brilliant player.’ He laughed when told of Pfaff’s remark about Aberdeen’s scary appearance, but agreed that they did have ‘typically British’ characteristics epitomised by the quick one-two that took them to the semi-finals.
Though Aberdeen lost 1-0 to Waterschei in Belgium in the second leg, they could afford it, having won 5-1 at home, and the return to Scotland was clouded only by an injury Kennedy had suffered that was to end his career.
Such was Ferguson’s regard for Kennedy that he named him as a substitute for the final against Real Madrid in G
othenburg even though he was on crutches and unable to take the field even in an emergency. Many years later, Ferguson was to make apparently sentimental decisions in both the 2008 and 2009 finals of the Champions League, choosing first Paul Scholes for Moscow even before it was known that Manchester United would take on Chelsea, whom they beat on penalties, and then Park Ji-Sung in Rome against Barcelona, who utterly outplayed them.
Beating Real Madrid
Among the vessels used to take some 14,000 Aberdeen supporters to Sweden was a ferry, the St Clair. The official party went on a charter flight and a most distinguished guest, there at Ferguson’s invitation, was Jock Stein.
By now Ferguson was rather more than a star pupil. He knew how to behave in the build-up to a match. If it were a routine fixture, he might affect anxiety in order to jolt his players out of any complacency. For this occasion, he instructed his entire staff not to betray a hint of nerves about the prospect of taking on Real Madrid, and himself avoided any praise of their players, even though, having flown from Belgium after Aberdeen’s second leg to see Real complete their victory over Austria Vienna, he had deemed them distinctly beatable.
Stein, the professor of psychology, approved. He made a few suggestions of his own and one which Ferguson took up was to buy a bottle of good Scotch whisky for his counterpart, Alfredo Di Stéfano, upon whom he had first clapped awe-struck eyes during Real’s dazzling victory over Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960. Stein’s idea was to get over to the Real camp an impression that Aberdeen were honoured just to be in the final, thus, perhaps, putting the favourites off their guard.
Football – Bloody Hell! Page 11
