Football – Bloody Hell!

by Patrick Barclay

  Next he went to address the players and staff. As they filed on to the bus outside Ninian Park, he kept remembering Stein’s plea for dignity, and it was observed. Although thousands of supporters waited outside the ground, there was near-silence.

  Aberdeen, Itchy Feet and Scotland

  Ferguson assumed responsibility for the job of completing Scotland’s qualification for the World Cup – he remained part-time, on the understanding that he and the Scottish FA would review the position after the finals, if Scotland duly got to them – and they succeeded, beating Australia 2-0 at Hampden Park with goals from Cooper and Frank McAvennie in the first leg of the play-off and then drawing 0-0 in Melbourne.

  That was in early December. The 1985/6 season, the last Ferguson was to complete in Scotland, was not quite halfway through, but already Aberdeen had a trophy on the sideboard: the League Cup, oddly their first under Ferguson. Two of the goals in a 3-0 triumph over Hibs in the final came from Eric Black. They were also to win the Scottish Cup, rounding matters off with a 3-0 victory, this time over Hearts, as the national squad prepared to head for Mexico, but by now Black was missing.

  Rumours that he had been privately negotiating with overseas clubs had proved true; he had told Ferguson near the end of the season that he was joining Metz in France. Ferguson’s reaction was to banish him from the squad and Billy Stark recalled coming in one afternoon for treatment: ‘There was Eric sitting in the dressing room having done a full day’s training while the rest of the players were away preparing for the final. He was doing his penance for having gone behind the manager’s back.’

  Ferguson later began to review his behaviour – he had been no gentler towards Black than Davie White had been towards him at Rangers – in the light of a realisation that his feet, too, had been getting itchier from the moment he joined Stein and started working with the likes of Souness and Dalglish. For the players, he recognised, it was mostly a question of money (none got as much as him). ‘Looking back,’ he said, ‘the thing that changed things for Aberdeen was winning the Cup-Winners’ Cup. Because the players got restless – Strachan, McGhee, Rougvie and then Black – and although at the time I was angry with them for wanting to leave the ship, so to speak, in fairness to them they weren’t being paid what they were worth. Aberdeen couldn’t afford it.’ When he had accompanied Archibald to Tottenham in 1980, he had been shocked to discover that the player would receive nearly £100,000 a year.

  Yet in that 1985/6 season Aberdeen remained a match for most. The defensive triangle of Leighton, McLeish and Miller seemed eternal, Stark and Weir remained on the flanks, MacDougall still scored goals and the midfield had been lent class by the third of Ferguson’s favourite Pittodrie signings, Jim Bett.

  Ferguson, who still clung to the belief that he could emulate Stein by bringing the European Cup back to Scotland, had seen his team dispatch Akranes, their old friends from Iceland, and Servette of Switzerland to reach the quarter-finals, in which they drew IFK Gothenburg. Ferguson had made his first European appearance as a player in Gothenburg – and won his first European trophy as a manager there. ‘I really did believe we could go on and take the big one,’ he said. ‘But, when we were 2–1 up in the first leg at home, Willie Miller, of all people, decided to beat men going up the pitch and lost the ball. It ended 2–2 and after a 0–0 over there we went out on away goals. We even hit a post in the last five minutes.’ IFK went on to secure a 3–0 advantage over Barcelona in the semi-finals, only to lose it at Camp Nou and go out on penalties.

  It’s Barcelona or United

  Barcelona were managed by Terry Venables and, at the Englishman’s suggestion, joined a disparate list of clubs which had taken an interest in Ferguson. Around this time, when it was assumed that Venables would be moving on at the end of the season, officials of the Catalan club came to London to interview Ferguson along with Bobby Robson, by then in charge of England, and Howard Kendall, who had guided Everton to the first of two English titles in three years. In the event, Venables opted to stay at Camp Nou and his decision was accepted despite Barcelona’s massive disappointment in that European Cup final, played on the familiar ground of Seville: a team featuring Steve Archibald, whom Venables had brought from Tottenham, lost on penalties to Steaua Bucharest.

  Aberdeen were left with their two domestic Cups. Although they had been top of the League when Ferguson, Leighton, McLeish and Miller returned from Melbourne, they finished fourth after winning only eight of twenty matches. Before the start of the next season, he decided he needed a more assertive assistant than Willie Garner. He brought Knox back from Dundee and, in recognition of the status acquired there, made him ‘joint manager’.

  Despite this, Aberdeen had slipped to fifth by the time Ferguson left for Manchester United three months into the season, taking Knox with him. They had also succumbed to an instant knockout from the Cup-Winners’ Cup by Sion, their first victims on the road to Gothenburg in 1982/3. The first home match after Ferguson’s departure was against St Mirren. The ground was half empty and there were no goals.

  For two years he had been in a deepening rut. But the requests for his services had been coming in for longer than that. In 1981 he was offered £40,000 a year by Sheffield United, who had just been relegated to the Fourth Division. He took more seriously the advances of Wolves, partly because of their history – they had been champions three times in the post-war period and taken part in memorable, pioneering contests with top European clubs. They had also shown signs of renewed ambition after John Barnwell’s arrival as manager. Barnwell had not only broken the British transfer record in signing Andy Gray from Aston Villa for £1.175 million but kept the true cost to (he gleefully calculated) a mere £25,000 by selling the relatively mundane midfield player Steve Daley to Manchester City.

  Barnwell, though he nearly lost his life in a crash during which the rear-view mirror of his car became embedded in his skull, had recovered bravely enough to lead Wolves to victory over Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest in the League Cup final of 1979/80, Gray scoring the only goal. But he could not keep the club from the jaws of relegation and was obliged, in early 1982, to resign. He cleared his desk and went home and within a day had taken a telephone call from an erstwhile assistant who said that Alex Ferguson was in the stadium. Ferguson was not, however, being impressed either by what he saw at Molineux or the directors he met.

  He had warned Dick Donald that he was going to talk to them – £50,000 a year was on offer – but flew back to Aberdeen more appreciative of his surroundings than ever. ‘The secretary had picked me up at Birmingham Airport,’ he said, ‘and told me I was going to meet the board. I asked why. He said they wanted to interview me. “I’m not here for an interview,” I said. “You’ve offered me the job.” He said they just wanted me to answer a few questions. So I went. But the questions were unbelievable.’

  Ferguson smiled at the recollection of how he was told a true story of a young player who had gone to a bank in Wolverhampton, borrowed several thousands of pounds using the club’s name and gambled it away. ‘They asked me how I’d deal with it! I said they should be asking themselves how something like that could happen.’

  The final straw greeted him at the stadium. ‘It was an afternoon and there was only one person working there – Jack Taylor, the former referee [a distinguished one, who handled the 1974 World Cup final in which West Germany beat the Netherlands], who was on the commercial side. The place was like a ghost town. I couldn’t get on the plane quick enough.’

  His second rejection of Rangers left him on £60,000 a year and he had little difficulty, a couple of months later, in turning down an opportunity to succeed Terry Neill at Arsenal, much though he admired the grandeur of that club. He then engaged in a more prolonged flirtation with their north London rivals, Tottenham Hotspur, whose chairman, Irving Scholar, he found all the more engaging for a passion for football trivia and quiz questions which Ferguson, of course, enthusiastically shared. Once again, however, he
found it impossible to leave Dick Donald and a happy partnership in which one would address the other as ‘Mr Chairman’ and be accorded the mock-courtesy of ‘Mr Ferguson’ in return.

  It might have been easier to move south if he had been given the five years he sought from Tottenham – after offering two, they stuck at three – but in the event the London club replaced Keith Burkinshaw, who had resigned, with the in-house appointment of Peter Shreeves and that appeared to have brought Pittodrie two years of stability. Not Ferguson, though. Not quite. Not in the recesses of his mind.

  ‘Souness started biting my ear off, talking about Liverpool and English football and why I should be there,’ he said. ‘And big Jock, over dinner, when we were with the Scotland squad, kept asking, “How long are you going to stay at Aberdeen?” And I started to ask myself.’

  It may have crossed Stein’s mind that he himself had passed up an opportunity to move to a big English club – Sir Matt Busby had asked him to be his successor at Manchester United – because he preferred not to uproot his family and had then, several years later, gone south, to Leeds, at the wrong time. But Stein didn’t talk a lot about himself.

  Once, when Stein and Ferguson flew to watch Everton overcome Bayern Munich in a memorable Cup-Winners’ Cup semi-final – just as Aberdeen had done two years earlier – they popped into Howard Kendall’s office afterwards and stayed for hours, exchanging views with what Ferguson described as ‘a Who’s Who of modern football’. Sometimes he went to Liverpool and was invited to join the famous Boot Room chinwags. He became friendly with David Pleat, then forging a reputation at Luton Town, on a trip to France for the European Championship in 1984 organised by Adidas for their pet managers.

  He had even been entertained by Ron Atkinson at Manchester United, for in 1985 he wrote, in A Light in the North: ‘One English manager whom I have a lot of time for and who is very different from his media image is Ron Atkinson . . . Ron has always been first-class to deal with and always makes himself available when I call the training ground or the stadium. A lot of people tend to think of him only as a fancy dresser with a liking for champagne but those who know him will realise there is a lot more to the man . . . The main impression I get from Ron is that he’s a football fanatic who will chat and argue about the game till the cows come home. He is authoritative and well informed about the game and the players in it and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Ron’s Manchester United side become one of the great teams in the club’s illustrious history.’

  A year later, he was in Atkinson’s job. He could not have suspected it at the time, for, at Christmas in the year his paean was published, that team of Atkinson’s, featuring Bryan Robson and Mark Hughes and Norman Whiteside and Paul McGrath and, of course, Strachan, with whom Ferguson kept in touch by telephone, were on top of the League, where they were to stay until February and the beginnings of a slide to fourth. Even Ferguson could not see that coming as, juggling his two jobs, he commuted between Aberdeen and the great theatres of the English game, the circles into which he was being drawn.

  There were other factors. Dick Donald was semi-retired by now and, with time on his hands, liked to spend chunks of it with Ferguson at Pittodrie in the afternoons. Much as Ferguson loved him, he preferred to work intensely. And still he did not hurry his departure. He rebuffed Aston Villa; that was a foregone conclusion because the chairman, Doug Ellis, was widely perceived as a meddler with whom working relationships could be strained. No Dick Donald, certainly.

  Even when Don Howe stepped out of the Arsenal job in the spring of 1986, Ferguson refused to divert himself from preparing Donald’s Aberdeen for Hampden Park and the departed Stein’s Scotland for Mexico. But he was careful to accord Arsenal, like Barcelona, the courtesy of an interview; by now he would have known the Aberdeen–London flight times by heart.

  Offered the Arsenal job with George Graham as his assistant, he promised them an answer after the World Cup but, amid rumours that they suspected his heart was at Manchester United (although there is no reason to believe any approach from Old Trafford had been made, he had been linked with Old Trafford in the press and at least one United director, Sir Bobby Charlton, had been monitoring his career), they gave the job to Graham instead. Ferguson heard the news at Scotland’s training camp at Santa Fe, New Mexico, from where they moved to Los Angeles and then on to Mexico.

  Just before he left, he had spoken of his restlessness to Donald, who had advised him to leave Pittodrie only for United. ‘That’s the biggest challenge in football,’ said the chairman. Ferguson needed no telling. As the tournament approached, he spent time with Strachan, whose room was next to his own in the Scotland hotel and who recalled: ‘He said he would leave Aberdeen for only one of two clubs – Barcelona or Manchester United.’

  At the World Cup

  But that would have to wait. Scotland had flown out for the World Cup without Hansen, a decision for which Ferguson was to be unfairly criticised for many years, certainly in England; the Liverpool defender, though a magnificent performer for his club, had withdrawn from too many squads to suggest anything other than that he would take unkindly to the likelihood that the consistency of Miller and McLeish would consign him to the substitutes’ bench. Or, as Ferguson put in his autobiography: ‘I simply felt that he did not deserve to go.’ David Narey, of Dundee United, went instead.

  Ferguson did, however, harbour concerns about the possible reaction of Hansen’s friend Kenny Dalglish to his exclusion which were borne out by a telephone conversation shortly before the squad announcement. It was almost on the eve of the departure for Santa Fe that Ferguson lost Dalglish, too.

  One of Scotland’s finest players of all time, the holder of their records for caps won (102) and goals scored (thirty, shared with Denis Law), would miss what would have been his fourth World Cup because of a knee injury. Dalglish hotly denied that it had anything to do with the Hansen decision; he was merely taking the strong advice of a surgeon. So only Souness of the Liverpool trio was on duty when Scotland, drawn in a tough group with West Germany, Uruguay and Denmark, began by facing the Danes on the outskirts of Mexico City.

  It had been a professional but enjoyable build-up. Ferguson had gratefully retained ‘Steely’ – Jimmy Steel, Stein’s beloved tea-maker, impressionist, raconteur and all-round feel-good factor – to complement an impressive coaching team. Andy Roxburgh, Ferguson’s old striking partner and by now highly regarded at the Scottish FA for his work with young players, had a limited role but Ferguson also brought in Craig Brown, then manager of Clyde, along with Archie Knox and Walter Smith. In time Brown was himself to take charge of the national team, after serving as assistant to Roxburgh, and to prove one of Scotland’s most astute and successful managers. Smith, too, was to do the job before the lure of Rangers proved irresistible. So the coaching was serious. But there was fun, too, and Ferguson joined in the give and take at Santa Fe.

  The players were in the main hotel building, the staff in log cabins, and once, Brown recalled, some players found their way into Ferguson’s cabin and loosened all the light bulbs so that, upon his return at the end of an evening on which everyone had been allowed a few beers, none of the lights worked. ‘Cursing, he came into my cabin to phone reception and then went back to his cabin to wait for the electrician. Somehow he found his way to the toilet, but the players had put cling-film over it so that, when he let go with a much-needed pee in the dark, it all splashed back on him. But he could take that sort of thing – he’s always had a good sense of humour.’

  Inevitably, given Ferguson’s gift for quizzes and games such as Trivial Pursuit, there were plenty of those and Ferguson had to win. ‘He’d obviously got a lot out of his education,’ said Brown, ‘and had a very broad knowledge. History, geography, politics – you name it. Even Dr Hillis, who was to become a professor, couldn’t beat Fergie.’

  There was golf, too, and a day at the races; a trotting track was nearby. But the training was earnest. ‘After practice matches,�
� said Brown, ‘he would take the players back and sit them down and they would all – not just Willie Miller and Alex McLeish but Anglos like Graeme Souness, too – be hanging on every word. There were none of the lapses of concentration some managers encounter. No one ever got fidgety.’

  Though discipline was maintained with a light rein, everyone knew who was in charge. Once Steve Archibald reported a slight hamstring problem and said he would do his own warm-up before training the next day. ‘You’ll be getting up early then,’ said Ferguson, ‘because you’ll be doing your own warm-up before you join our warm-up.’ Which he did, of course, albeit after arriving, to Ferguson’s mild irritation, in a stretch limo supplied by the team hotel.

  And so to the football. Scotland played quite well against Denmark but missed chances and lost 1-0. Next they took on the Germans in Querétaro and, although again their football impressed neutrals, were defeated 2-1.

  Ferguson and company were learning as they went along. The day before the match against the Germans, there had been special care to make the final training session in the stadium private. ‘Alex had insisted on that,’ said Brown, ‘because there had been a doubt over Strachan’s fitness and he didn’t want Franz Beckenbauer and Berti Vogts to know his team. Yet later Berti told me they’d known that Strachan would play. I asked him how. “Well,” said Berti, “when we were barred from coming into the stadium to watch the session, I noticed a Coca-Cola man with his barrow arriving outside.” The tournament was sponsored by Coca-Cola and the stuff was everywhere. “So,” said Berti, “I gave this guy a Germany shirt or something and he let me borrow his white overalls and hat and I just pulled them on and wheeled the barrow into the stadium, where they were setting things up for the match.”’