A more likely factor in the outcome was the weather. It was extremely wet and Strachan, returning from the pitch after the players’ loosening-up session with water dripping from his hair, found Ferguson advancing on him as the tension rose, anxiously demanding scissors with which to trim back his fringe; Strachan insisted on doing it himself. The pitch, made heavy by hour upon hour of rain, worked in Aberdeen’s favour because, with the passage of time – and especially extra time – Aberdeen’s stamina became influential.
‘We were so fit,’ said McGhee, ‘that we would have been competitive in any era. Archie Knox is a very thorough coach and about twenty years later, when he came to work with me at Millwall and we decided to give the players a series of runs to build up stamina, we took their times and, just out of interest, compared them with those he had kept from our era at Aberdeen – my Millwall players were way behind us, even though all those years had gone by, with all the general improvements in fitness.’
The greasy, cloying conditions at the Ullevi Stadium helped Aberdeen to take the lead when McLeish, arriving to meet a corner kick Strachan had steered to the back of the penalty area, headed powerfully, the ball diverting off a defender to Black, who scored. Then they assisted Real to equalise. McLeish was short with a pass back to Jim Leighton, who brought down Carlos Santillana, conceding a penalty which Juanito converted. Yet, as McGhee recalled: ‘Physically, we were too much for Real. I played against Camacho [José Antonio Camacho, a Spanish international on eighty-one occasions who went on to manage his country as well as, among others, Real] and beat him up most of the night. We had a great battle but eventually they took him off and someone else picked me up at a corner. He immediately punched me in the face. Wasted no time. Made no pretence. I had a lump on my jaw for about a year afterwards.’
The additional thirty minutes were under way. Hewitt had come on for the injured Black, but it was Weir who threatened Real most and suddenly, after a sequence of trickery that beat two opponents, he sent the ball up the left to McGhee, whose power and skill enabled him to plough on and measure a cross that Hewitt met with a diving header into the net. A split second before, Ferguson had been cursing Hewitt for having forgotten to ‘bend’ his run in order to avoid being caught offside or easily policed by the defence, but forgiveness was assured. The Cup-Winners’ Cup was won.
Ferguson raced from the dugout, fell in a puddle and was trampled by Knox, thus losing the race to reach the players. Strachan was one of those who ran in the other direction, to Kennedy with his crutches. Although as a substitute Kennedy would receive a medal, his feelings were bound to be an uncomfortable mix. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you, Stuart,’ said Strachan. ‘It’s all right, Gordon,’ he said. ‘Just enjoy yourself.’
He did. Strachan even drank champagne at the party at the hotel; it was a night when even the light drinkers broke with habit and Ferguson did not get to bed until six in the morning. He and Cathy were among the last few revellers, although he came home swearing he had stayed sober because there was a match on the Saturday.
Flailing at Ferguson
Mark McGhee made no pretence at sobriety and, on the flight home from Gothenburg, the flow of champagne was maintained. Among the crew on the aircraft was McGhee’s wife, Jackie, who made sure everyone who wanted topping-up was looked after. The Cup was filled with champagne and passed from seat to seat, players, staff, directors and even journalists taking turns for a toast.
An open-top bus greeted Ferguson and his players at Aberdeen Airport and the procession began. ‘Union Street was jam-packed for its entire length,’ Strachan recalled. It took two hours to reach Pittodrie, where a full house stood ready for the lap of honour.
McGhee was still drunk as he and the rest of the players got changed into their red club tracksuits. Not that anyone was complaining or finding the conditions in any way anomalous, Ferguson included. The players were standing in the tunnel waiting to run out with the Cup when someone mentioned that Ferguson and Willie Miller were missing. Club employees were sent in various directions to find them and, during the delay, McGhee noticed that the trophy was lying on its side on the tunnel floor. He bent down to stand it upright but, as he laid hands on it, Ferguson suddenly appeared from behind and wrenched it from his grasp, snarling: ‘Willie’s taking that out.’
Something in McGhee snapped. He had never had any intention of usurping the captain’s place at the head of the team and was consumed by outrage. He seized Ferguson by the lapels and, before Knox or any startled team-mate could react, ran him back up the tunnel to the door of the boot room, which was half open and through which he propelled the manager before taking a first swing at him.
At that opportune moment, the peacemakers arrived to grab McGhee’s arm just before his fist could connect and drag him away – though not before Ferguson had got in a retaliatory blow (had he wished, the manager could have claimed both self-defence and, because the swing found its target, victory on points). A still seething McGhee was taken to the boardroom, where family members and the chairman, Dick Donald, helped to calm him down in time for the second lap of honour. He had missed the first and a photograph of it in a book commemorating the season records, by way of explanation, that McGhee had been ‘too overcome by emotion’ to join his team-mates at the outset.
He kept his distance from Ferguson for the rest of the day and woke the next morning at dawn. You can imagine his feelings as those bleary eyes opened: ‘What have I done? Did I really do it? And what do I do now?’ He decided it was best to face the music: to apologise and take whatever punishment was coming.
Knowing that Ferguson would be at Pittodrie before anyone else – a day off was out of the question, given that Hibs had to be faced the next day in the final League match of the season, one that could, given an unlikely combination of circumstances, end with Aberdeen champions – McGhee went straight to the ground to wait for him.
Although it was barely eight o’clock, the metal shutters on the main door were already open. McGhee walked through and there was Ferguson in the foyer. McGhee started to apologise, but Ferguson cut him short. ‘It was my fault,’ he said. ‘I behaved badly.’ McGhee continued down his own road of penitence, adding that he had been drunk and . . . ‘Forget it,’ said Ferguson. ‘It’s done. Now you and I are going down to the car ferry.’
And they did. Ferguson and McGee drove down to the harbour to meet the St Clair with its cargo of fans returning from Gothenburg and brandished the Cup at them as they lined the decks. Ferguson had promised to do that and there he was on the quayside, he and McGhee with a hand each on the ears of the trophy. It was as if nothing had happened between them. The tunnel episode was to remain inside Pittodrie’s walls.
McGhee respected Ferguson more than ever. Far from losing credibility, the manager had surprised his men once again, and pleasantly.
Great Stuff, Lads
Yet Ferguson contrived to fill them with dismay only ten days after the glory of Gothenburg. They still had to play the Scottish Cup final against Rangers, which they won, through a goal from Eric Black in extra time, but hardly graced. ‘There was nothing fresh about us,’ said Strachan. ‘Even the build-up to the final had been dead. We’d won the Cup-Winners’ Cup but lost the League and now we had to go again – it was one game too many for our minds and bodies.’ Ferguson seemed not to understand. He stood on the pitch at Hampden Park and told a television interviewer that the performance had been ‘disgraceful’ and his team, with the exceptions of Willie Miller and Alex McLeish, were ‘the luckiest in the world’.
He was even more scathing in the dressing room, after ordering Strachan to stop trying to open a bottle of champagne as the tirade began. In his autobiography Ferguson said he had tried to ‘bully and cajole’ a performance from the players. For once it had not worked and the reaction was ‘foolish’.
The sullen silence he had created had been broken only by the late arrival of McLeish, who, unprepared, gave vent to a celebratory roar of ‘
Great stuff, lads!’ As winning a Cup usually is.
Perhaps the most noted instance – and there are not many – of a manager criticising a trophy-winning display occurred when Bill Nicholson lamented the manner in which his great Tottenham team had completed the Double by beating Leicester City 2-0 at Wembley in 1961. But Nicholson made his point in a measured way. Ferguson went too far and an apology was inadequate; the players, upon hearing it the next day, metaphorically shrugged. He had truly hurt them, Strachan said, because they would never have let him down on purpose.
They had left Hampden for the reception at St Andrews, a congenial stop on the journey from Glasgow to Aberdeen, without their wives and girlfriends – the irate Ferguson had broken with custom by making the women travel separately – and the journey needed the levity provided by John McMaster when he teased Miller and McLeish about their having been exonerated by Ferguson: ‘Maybe we’d better cancel the open-top bus – you two can just ride along Union Street on a tandem.’
Miller and McLeish were already embarrassed; they had even seen fit to plead on their team-mates’ behalf to Ferguson, pointing out that, as central defenders, they could let play come to them, rather than make it, which demanded more mental and physical energy.
The reception was, Strachan said, ‘more like a wake’, and he and his wife Lesley walked out. He was later fined £250 by Ferguson.
The rants went on. The following season, in which Aberdeen picked up the European Super Cup with a 2-0 aggregate win over Hamburg (as Cup-Winners’ Cup holders, they had taken on the European Cup holders), they began the defence of their trophy by overcoming Akranes, of Iceland, and Belgium, before travelling to meet Újpest Dózsa in Budapest in the quarter-finals. They lost 2-0 and, said McGhee: ‘I missed a chance. It was a horrible muddy night. Gordon had a shot, the goalkeeper punched it on to the bar and it came down and stuck in the mud about two yards out. The goalie’s fallen back and got tangled in the net and I’m following up for a tap-in. I’m already turning away to celebrate when the goalie somehow sticks out an arm and stops the ball on the line. Then, as I turn back to try to nudge it over the line, he flips it away. It’s a terrible miss and sure enough I get the treatment from the boss. “That’s the worst fucking miss . . .” It’s not so much a hairdryer as a pyrocrastic blast [as in the gases coming out of a volcano]. He was actually touching me as he roared.’
Back at Pittodrie a McGhee hat-trick sent Aberdeen through on a 3-2 aggregate. Who knows if the volcanic blast helped? But most players got it at some stage or another, even the mountainous Doug Rougvie. Once Ferguson, after thrusting his face up at the defender’s and delivering the customary abuse, let Rougvie leave before winking at Strachan. ‘If he ever hits me,’ he said, ‘I’m dead.’
Ferguson behaved as if aggressive behaviour was just another tool of management, to be used for effect and not taken personally. McGhee remembers getting it at half-time in a match which Aberdeen were winning by three or four goals. ‘It was against my old club Morton and I’d been tearing them to shreds, dribbling and beating people and laying on goals. And yet he slaughtered me, calling me greedy and selfish and asking, “Who do you think you are?”
‘I put it to Archie and he came up with a theory about not wanting me to think I could do it in the harder games and so on. But I was still livid when I walked into the tearoom at Pittodrie to meet my wife and she told me Ferguson had just come up to her and Lesley Strachan and asked them out for a Chinese meal that night with Gordon and me and another couple of people. So he would disarm you. He’d knock you down and pick you up again.’
And they would respond. In the 1983/4 season, they took the League leadership in late October and never relinquished it, losing only one of eight matches to the Old Firm and only one of four to Dundee United, from whom they wrested back the title. They also won the Scottish Cup, beating Celtic 2–1 after extra time in the final.
There was a disappointment in the European semi-final in that they lost to Porto, but to be champions again and triumphant in a third consecutive Cup emphasised Aberdeen’s predominance in the Scottish game. Ferguson had reduced Rangers and Celtic to the status of also-rans. He was not finished with them either. And that he was not to be deflected from his mission in the north had been underlined by two refusals to leave for Rangers to take up a post in which his friend John Greig, after five years without a championship, was struggling to live up to expectations.
After Strachan and McGhee
The first call had come from a Rangers director a few days after the triumph in Gothenburg. Ferguson said he would have nothing to do with any ‘ousting’ of Greig. Two months into the following season, Greig resigned and soon he received a call from Ferguson. ‘He obviously felt for me,’ said Greig. ‘He said they had offered him the job. He didn’t want me to hear from someone else and think he’d gone behind my back. He asked if he could speak to me for fifteen minutes. “On you go,” I said, “but don’t ask me if you should take the job or not – you’ll have to decide that for yourself.” And so we had a conversation and, at the end of it, he said he wanted me to be the first to know – he wouldn’t be taking the job.’
In his autobiography, Ferguson talked of being ‘reluctant to expose my family to a risk of a recurrence of the bigotry I had encountered at Ibrox in my playing days’, and of being suspicious of the continuing boardroom politics (he had taken the advice of, among others, Scot Symon, who had encouraged him to take the job, but with this caveat). ‘There was a battle for power,’ said Greig, ‘and Fergie had such a great chairman in Dick Donald at Aberdeen.’ A chairman, moreover, who increased his salary to £60,000 a year, or about twice as much as the club’s best-paid players.
So he stayed, also rebuffing overtures from England, and dealt with players who wanted to better themselves, or at least their own bank balances. One was Strachan, another McGhee. Both were to go in the summer of 1984, to Manchester United and Hamburg respectively. Doug Rougvie also left, for Chelsea. And yet the ensuing season saw Aberdeen retain the championship with a slightly improved points total.
Ferguson had done it by judicious replacement – Billy Stark and Frank MacDougall for Strachan and McGhee as he continued to plunder his former club St Mirren, from whom he had already taken Weir, the midfielder Doug Bell and the striker Steve Cowan – and brilliant squad management, in the process proving himself more influential on a club’s fortunes than any individual footballer could be. Even the footballer he had himself aspired to be, in those boyhood daydreams of bulging nets for Rangers. It was a point that may or may not have entered his mind at the time, although he certainly became aware of his worth when he did it all over again with Manchester United.
New faces, meanwhile, kept coming through the Pittodrie ranks. ‘Aberdeen’s young players continue to thrive,’ remarked Rothmans Football Yearbook, ‘and to show a class which must give Alex Ferguson much satisfaction.’ Satisfaction? Not quite. He grumbled that an injury to MacDougall, whose first season had brought twenty-two goals in the League alone, caused Aberdeen to lose to Dundee United in the Scottish Cup semi-finals and thus miss an opportunity of a fourth successive triumph in that competition, a feat not even Rangers or Celtic had ever attained.
Again they made little impression on the European Cup, losing their first-round tie to Dinamo Berlin on penalties, but retention of the domestic title had earned them another tilt.
Early in the season, Aberdeen had lost 2-1 at Celtic Park. Billy Stark had missed a penalty and in training the following week Ferguson mentioned it. ‘Quite casually,’ said Stark, ‘he said to me, “I hope that doesn’t cost us the League.” It wasn’t a conversation – he just walked on. And it was a while before the significance hit me. But it was quite a dramatic thing to say to a player. I went on to have my best season [from midfield, Stark scored twenty goals, fifteen of them in the League] and we won the championship. Maybe he was giving me that wee bit extra impetus.’
His wiles were never far from the surfac
e. Ferguson used the ‘West of Scotland press’ to wind his players up, said Stark. ‘He told us they wanted to see us get beat because they were all Rangers and Celtic supporters.’ And referees? ‘I don’t remember him telling us the referees were against us. It was just the press. I think he preferred to deal with the referees himself! I remember way back at St Mirren, when we’d easily won a Cup tie against Alloa, he was banging on the referee’s door afterwards. I don’t think it was about the game. I think he was lodging something in the referee’s mind for further on. He went on to do it in England as well with the wee sound bites and so on.’
Stark, like McGhee, had been recruited unceremoniously – ‘he just told me the money I was getting and that was it’ – but he did notice significant modifications in Ferguson since St Mirren. One was that he let Knox do training. Another was more subtle. ‘I think the biggest compliment you can pay Alex Ferguson,’ Stark said, ‘is that, for all the changes that have taken place in football, he has always adapted. There were signs of that when I got to Aberdeen. He hadn’t changed in terms of volatility or drive. But I noticed in the first day’s training that he was learning how to manage international players.
‘At St Mirren he’d expected nothing less than flat out from everybody. So I watched Willie Miller . . . and then I looked at Fergie. And there was nothing. And that was significant. Because Willie was the worst trainer in the world. Fantastic player, consistent, second to none. But he just didn’t train at all and Fergie seemed willing to accept that because of what he did in matches. He was kind of on a pedestal along with Alex McLeish and maybe even Jim Leighton. That’s not to say he wouldn’t criticise them – but not to the degree that the rest of us got. Including the likes of Strachan and McGhee.’
Football – Bloody Hell! Page 12
