Football – Bloody Hell!

by Patrick Barclay

  Ferguson had been at United for only a few months when he heard about Giggs. It was a steward at The Cliff, one Harold Wood, a jobsworth familiar to the journalists waiting outside the gates in the hope of a meaningless word with a departing player, who gave him the tip-off about a schoolboy training with Manchester City. The boy was thirteen, said Wood, and a United fan. His name was Ryan Wilson. He was a son of Danny Wilson, the Welsh stand-off half of Swinton rugby league club. On the break-up of Wilson’s marriage to Lynne Giggs, Ryan was to take his mother’s side, and her surname.

  The scout Joe Brown, a former Burnley manager, was sent to watch Wilson and a trial hastily arranged at The Cliff. Ferguson remembered the sinewy kid scampering across the pitch like a puppy chasing paper in the wind. It was a nice simile, but short of footballing relevance. Then he added that young Wilson held his head high – a mark of quality – and looked relaxed and natural on the pitch.

  Ferguson, Brown and Archie Knox became regular visitors at the Giggs home. Ryan started to train with United instead of City and from that moment, said the late Chris Muir, the City director with responsibility for an acclaimed youth development system, ‘we knew we had a serious fight on our hands’.

  Night after night Ferguson, with Knox and Brian Kidd and the astute scout Les Kershaw, would hold trials under the floodlights at Albert Park in Salford. No wonder that henceforth Muir referred to Ferguson as ‘that bugger’. But as the years went by and it became apparent that cancer would claim another victim and Muir, a splendidly convivial Scot whom even the certainty of death seemed not to daunt, held a farewell party for his friends, Ferguson was prominent among them, his presence enhancing an unforgettable occasion.

  United’s efforts to identify and secure talent intensified in 1988 with the appointment as youth development officer of Brian Kidd, who had been a teenage goalscorer in the European Cup triumph over Benfica at Wembley twenty years earlier and gone on to play for City too; his brief was to concentrate on local kids, using scouts who supported United, and so successful was the policy that the Nevilles, Scholes and Butt, all of whom hailed, like Giggs, from Greater Manchester, became garlanded internationals, alongside Beckham, who had been enticed from London without too much difficulty because his father, Ted, was a United supporter to whom Bobby Charlton was such a hero that he had given David the middle name ‘Robert’.

  These represented the second wave of youth created by Ferguson. The first were a group of players already attached to the club when he arrived, proving that United had not been wholly inactive on the youth front; twice in Ron Atkinson’s time, United had reached the final of the FA Youth Cup, while Mark Hughes had come through the ranks and David Platt been allowed to move to Crewe Alexandra before hitting the big time under Graham Taylor at Aston Villa.

  Among those whom the press dubbed ‘Fergie’s Fledglings’, after the Busby Babes, were Russell Beardsmore, David Wilson, Deiniol Graham and Tony Gill. Overall they were not in the same class as the generation that delivered Beckham and Scholes and, in some cases, they were unlucky with injuries: the defender Gill, for instance, had his career finished by a horrific leg break in a match against Nottingham Forest in the spring of 1989.

  Lee Martin scored the goal that won United their first trophy under Ferguson, the FA Cup in 1990, before he, too, succumbed to fitness problems. ‘But for injuries,’ said Ferguson, ‘Lee would have had a good career at left-back. Tony Gill would have made a decent player. And there was Mark Robins – a terrific finisher, maybe a wee bit short of some things that could have made him a better player, but a fantastic finisher who scored important goals for us.’ Including the one supposed to have saved Ferguson’s job; it gave United victory in the famous third-round FA Cup tie at Nottingham Forest. Robins also came on as a substitute in the semi-final replay against Oldham Athletic at Maine Road, Manchester City’s old stadium, and got the winner. But he was never again more than a squad player and eventually left for Norwich City.

  So, while Fergie’s Fledglings refreshed the club, they could not lift it beyond the level achieved by Atkinson, under whom the FA Cup had been won twice. The task of making them contenders for a domestic championship last won in 1967 – or, as Ferguson more graphically put it, ‘knocking Liverpool off their fucking perch’ – called upon Ferguson to show his skill in the transfer market while building the long-term aspects of the club and, for all his complaints about Edwards’s attention to the purse strings, money was spent.

  Time, too, was allotted to Ferguson. He needed it.

  Jousting with Graham

  At the beginning of his first Mancunian summer, Ferguson told Edwards he required at least eight new players and Edwards quailed. He had, after all, warned Ferguson that funds were very limited. This was despite the sale of Mark Hughes to Barcelona a few months earlier for £2.3 million, the biggest fee United had ever received. Edwards, to his credit, often mentioned the desirability of keeping ticket prices as low as possible, while balancing the books.

  Hence Ferguson lacked clout in attempting to secure Peter Beardsley, who joined Liverpool instead. But he had been covertly active in the transfer market long before Viv Anderson and Brian McClair joined the pre-season parade. According to George Graham, who chuckled at the recollection, Anderson had been approached months before the end of the season.

  ‘We’d won the League Cup in our first season at Arsenal,’ he said, ‘and Viv was our right-back, but his contract was up in the summer and so I said I imagined he’d be signing a new one because it looked as if good times might be on the way. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’ We tried everything we could to make him stay, but he went to United. A couple of years later, one of our old players told me Viv had been leaving all along, even before we won the League Cup [that was in early April]. Alex had got someone in the England squad to sort it out. It goes on all the time, of course. You can laugh about it. Not at the time, though!’

  Graham had long harboured a curiosity about Ferguson – and heard the rumours, which were accurate, that he had been sounded out about his own job. ‘I’d never met him at that stage,’ said Graham, ‘but I was interested in successful people and what Alex had done to the Glasgow giants, and in Europe, with Aberdeen put him in that category. I wanted to know his philosophy, to pick his brains.’ Yet their first meeting turned into an angry confrontation: the first tunnel row of several involving Arsenal and United in the Ferguson era.

  Arsenal had come to Old Trafford as League leaders; the Graham effect on them had certainly been more dramatic than Ferguson’s on United. But United won through goals from Strachan and Terry Gibson. It was a stormy match and, as the teams left the field, the managers clashed. ‘I can’t remember what the argument was about,’ said Graham (it may have owed something to David Rocastle’s dismissal for a retaliatory foul on Norman Whiteside), ‘but there we were in the tunnel, typical Scots, at each other’s throats – and we hadn’t even had a drink!’

  They soon became friends. So much so that once, when Ferguson was demanding a pay rise from Edwards, he suddenly brandished a copy of Graham’s Arsenal wage slip.

  ‘We were friendly,’ said Graham. ‘Except when our teams met.’ And even then the final whistle was final. Perhaps the most notorious meeting of the clubs in Graham’s time came in 1990, when a twenty-one-man brawl took place. An hour after the match, as the Old Trafford corridors crawled with journalists seeking reaction, recrimination and views on the likely punishment – I came across Ferguson and Graham chatting amiably in a quiet corner, as if at a cocktail party.

  For Graham, who had been a member of Arsenal’s Double-winning team in 1971, the wait to bring the club his first championship as manager was relatively short; he won it in his third season, 1988/9. Liverpool had been champions when Ferguson came south. Everton were next, in 1987. Liverpool took the title in 1988 and 1990, Arsenal in 1989 and 1991. Leeds United were to frustrate Ferguson in 1992 before he finally came out on top in 1993. Graham, asked if he had been
conscious of the threat from his compatriot, said: ‘Yes. From the moment I met him. It took longer than I expected – or he did, probably – but I knew he’d be successful.

  ‘So did the people running the club. When people were saying he’d had enough time and they should get rid of him, I tried to find out why they seemed so happy with him. They could see the club growing. They could see him grabbing all the best kids, as usual.’ Like Giggs. And Beckham, who had also been courted by Tottenham. But he needed to invest in mature players for the medium term and the early dividends did not impress many outside observers.

  He had tried to get Beardsley, Gary Lineker’s brilliant foil in the England team, from Newcastle but seen him join Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool instead. If that was a painful defeat, Ferguson also had to cope with the embarrassment of the own goal that cost him John Barnes. With Barnes and Beardsley lending more style than even Anfield had known, Ferguson’s bêtes noires were to claim two more championships right under his nose. In that first summer, he had been offered Barnes by Graham Taylor, then Watford’s manager, for £900,000 and stalled fatally and later moaned that, as a newcomer to English football, he should have received better guidance from the United staff.

  What – three years after the whole world had seen Barnes’s wonder goal for England against Brazil in the Maracanã? It was an extraordinarily limp excuse.

  With inherited players, by and large, Ferguson lifted United from eleventh to second in his first full season, 1987/8. There were only two newcomers and in each case the deal had pleased Edwards as well as Ferguson because the fees were tribunal-set and in line with United’s valuation.

  The wisdom of having Anderson approached on England duty was borne out by the relatively modest outlay of £250,000. Brian McClair, from Celtic, cost £850,000, but immediately gave excellent value. He had some qualities in common with the centre-forward, Mark McGhee, who had been Ferguson’s first signing for Aberdeen: mobility, intelligence and a readiness to shoulder burdens for the team. But he also scored a lot of goals. Straight away he became the first United player since George Best to break the twenty barrier in a League season (in all he got twenty-four, including five penalties). Meanwhile, Anderson provided power and drive from the back – and effervescence in the dressing room.

  Just before Christmas, an extremely significant signing was made when Steve Bruce came from Norwich City for £825,000. This proved quite a coup, for Bruce, though not quick or elegant, was a footballing centre-half with additional assets of leadership, leonine bravery and a knack of goalscoring whose memory was to be immortalised when his two goals won a thrilling match against Sheffield Wednesday in the run-in to the 1993 championship.

  That Ferguson was beginning to settle became obvious on Boxing Day when United lost at Newcastle and Bryan Robson, a rare recipient of his ire, felt its full force. Gordon Strachan was there: ‘I remember going home to my wife and saying I’d just seen a kid who was phenomenal. He played for Newcastle and his name was Paul Gascoigne and he had given Bryan Robson such a hard time that Fergie was yelling abuse at Bryan from the dugout.’

  Ferguson resolved to buy Gascoigne and in the summer of 1988, after being rebuffed by Newcastle’s manager, Willie McFaul, tried the direct route. Illicitly, of course. Just before he went abroad on holiday, Gascoigne rang to say he would be joining United. While in Malta, however, Ferguson discovered that Gazza had gone to Tottenham instead. But he did get Hughes back to Old Trafford and brought Jim Leighton from Aberdeen to keep goal.

  It had been a pretty good season: a Ferguson sort of season in that it featured a characteristically one-eyed moan at Bobby Robson about there being an England friendly in Israel three days before United went to Arsenal in the FA Cup fifth round and lost 2-1. No member of either side featured in the international. Nor did Ferguson balance his remarks with a recognition that, as manager of Aberdeen and Scotland only two years earlier, he had squeezed two friendly internationals into a month in which his club played no fewer than six matches in twenty-two days. One of the internationals was, in fact, the annual unfriendly against England but the other took place in, of all places, Israel. He used Willie Miller and Alex McLeish in both friendlies, moreover, and Jim Bett in one of them. Once again, his photographic memory was selecting its images.

  There had been another Ferguson hallmark in the incident with Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool in the April of that 1987/8 season. The match had finished 3-3 and afterwards Ferguson gave a radio interview in which he implied, quite vividly – ‘a lot of managers have to leave here choking on their own sick . . .’ – that opponents and referees came under undue pressure at Anfield. Dalglish, walking past with a baby in his arms, told the interviewer: ‘You might as well talk to my daughter – you’ll get more sense out of her.’

  For Ferguson to be irate about a draw at Anfield was a sign of progress; Liverpool were so markedly the finest team in England that nine days later, after they had beaten Nottingham Forest 5-0 at Anfield, the great Sir Tom Finney deemed their display as good as anything he had ever seen on a football pitch.

  As it became obvious that the season would bring United no trophy, Ferguson addressed the future – and Arthur Albiston’s would be elsewhere. ‘I’d got my fitness back,’ he recalled, ‘and we won a few games, but then I got left out and didn’t agree with that and told him so. “I understand your problem,” he said. To be fair to him, he kept me involved and travelling with the squad. He knew that, having been in the team so long [Albiston had made almost five hundred appearances] I’d be hurting. From time to time, he’d ask me to have a word with one of the younger reserves. He treated me well and I’ve got nothing but respect for him.’

  Ferguson had never screamed at the mild-mannered Albiston. Never? Well, hardly ever. ‘The only time I can remember was when he and Archie Knox were playing head tennis in the gym. I was recuperating at the time and they started arguing about whether a ball was in or out. And he asked me what I thought and I said Archie was right. I got quite a blast for that. Just for giving an honest opinion!’ Albiston smiled. ‘I don’t think I was the first.’

  Soon Albiston was off to rejoin Atkinson at West Bromwich Albion. He was sorry to miss out on what seemed likely to be an exciting time at United. While they had never made Liverpool glance anxiously back on the road to the championship, a rise of nine places suggested serious progress.

  The supporters, however, were not convinced. The last home crowd of the season was 28,040, to watch Wimbledon. Yet when Ferguson travelled with Bobby Charlton to Barcelona to seal the £1.8 million deal for Hughes his philosophy was one of near-boundless optimism. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ he recalled. ‘We looked around at those towering stands and, wistfully, Bobby said, “We should be like Barcelona”. And I said, “Why aren’t we?” And he said, “I don’t know”.’ From then, Ferguson waged an intermittent campaign with the board to have the Old Trafford capacity increased. When Ferguson went to Barcelona for Hughes, it held 56,000 and Camp Nou nearly twice as many. Twenty years later, it held 76,000 and the gap had closed to 20,000. Old Trafford, moreover, seldom had an empty seat at a League match.

  That was far from the case in 1988/9, when, despite Hughes and McClair – not to mention Robson – United struggled for goals, managing only forty-five in their thirty-eight League matches, and could attract only 23,368 when Wimbledon came in early May; fixtures against Coventry City and Everton pulled in few more.

  Strachan Leaves the Nest

  For Ferguson there was the pleasure of that first infusion of youth. It took place in the mid-winter of 1988/9. After Queens Park Rangers had drawn 0-0 at Old Trafford in the third round of the FA Cup, Ferguson decided to send a young team to west London for the replay: it would include Lee Martin, the ill-starred Tony Gill, Russell Beardsmore in Strachan’s role on the right and the seventeen-year-old Lee Sharpe, whom Ferguson had travelled to Torquay to watch one rainy night and unhesitatingly signed (he went on to play for England but liked his nightlife and suffe
red from injuries and never quite fulfilled his potential).

  ‘What I wanted to show,’ said Ferguson, ‘was a willingness to promote anyone who did well in the reserves. The worst thing for an older player is to lose his place to a younger man. It’s the best competition you can ever get in a football club. There’s no doubt about that.’ There was no excuse for the displaced; it was not as if the manager, having bought a big name, needed to find a place for his expensive purchase. Accordingly Ferguson found it ‘interesting’ that Strachan, Robson and Whiteside expressed a wish to travel with the team to west London, even though they were injured. He mentioned it to Archie Knox, who said they were clearly concerned about the youngsters coming through. So he decided to take them.

  They saw a thrilling match which United would have won 2-1 but for a late equaliser. United did go through anyway, with a 3-0 victory in a third match back at Old Trafford. They then overcame Oxford United and, after a replay, Bournemouth. Ferguson’s team were in the quarter-finals, and again at home, albeit to a fine Nottingham Forest side who were about to win the League Cup. This proved the start of a slump. Not only did United fall from fifth to eleventh at the end of the season, they let their Cup hopes be dashed by Forest in a passive manner that angered their manager.

  He would not have liked being beaten by Brian Clough anyway; he found Clough rude and had been snubbed by him at least once, when he and Edwards had called unannounced at Forest’s City Ground only to be told that the manager was unavailable. Where, Ferguson asked, was the passion supposed to mark his teams? And yet seven of the side that day were Ferguson signings.

  There were Leighton, Bruce, McClair, and Hughes. The utility player Mal Donaghy from Luton Town stood alongside Robson. There was the former Dundee United winger Ralph Milne, with whom Ferguson was unsuccessfully trying to replace Jesper Olsen (to think that it could have been John Barnes). And the teenage flier Sharpe.