Football – Bloody Hell! (12 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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‘I was at a dinner many years later and somebody mentioned that I’d turned down Fergie and Frank McGarvey said, “Aye, that was a bad mistake.” But I wouldn’t change the life I’ve had.’ It enabled him to retain his philosophy. ‘Football is more important than . . . than it should be, if you like.’ Less important than life and death? He smiled. ‘Yes, it is not true what Shanks said.’
One evening when McFarlane was manager of St Mirren, his eldest son was doing his homework. ‘He used to ask me to help him and this was maths and it was a Friday night – I’ll never forget it – and he came in with a piece of paper and said “Dad, can you do this?” And I just lost the plot. “You’re talking to me on a Friday night about your stupid maths . . .” We had a match the next day and maybe we’d been under a bit of pressure. And I just saw his eyes opening wide and I thought, “What am I doing?”’
He had worked under Jim Clunie and, after a spell as caretaker, required persuasion by the board and players to take the manager’s job. Later he had misgivings about taking charge of the Scotland Under-21s and after that, when Jock Stein offered to fix him up with another club job, asked the great man not to bother. McFarlane, by his own assertion, was not cut out for the hard and lonely and relentlessly driven world of management in which Ferguson thrived. But for the part he played in Ferguson’s career to be overlooked was ludicrous.
His refusal to appear on Ferguson’s behalf at the tribunal was crucial to the change in their relationship (‘you’re either with him or you’re not’) and McFarlane explained it by saying: ‘There’s actually a complexity of things that he doesn’t know about. By the time he asked me to appear, certain things had been said to me by directors of the club and for me to go to the tribunal would not have been good for Alex because I would have been forced to say things [evidence was given under oath] that would not have been in his interests. So I told Alex I was not going to appear for either him or the directors.’
And did there follow thirty years – or more – of hurt? ‘Not in any way at all,’ said McFarlane. ‘I don’t feel hurt.’ Or particularly estranged. He pointed out that during the World Cup of 1982 in Spain (from which Scotland were removed by the Soviet Union after Alan Hansen had collided with Ferguson’s Aberdeen stalwart Willie Miller), they had met convivially. ‘He and I went on a night out together. That was six years after St Mirren.’ They would have encountered each other as fellow managers. ‘We’ve also been to a couple of weddings of mutual friends and sat round the same table. A few years ago, he signed some autographs for me to give people. But I’ve never tried to make contact with him. Lots of people have gone down to see him and asked him to leave match tickets, but I’m not into all that. It’s not my style.’
Nor to bear a grudge. ‘Life’s too short.’ But Ferguson had never shared that philosophy. McFarlane smiled again. ‘It’s in his nature to take it to another level. Look at the BBC.’
If you did, if you had looked at BBC television between 2004, when a
Panorama
programme asked questions about the involvement of his son Jason in football as an agent, and 2009, when McFarlane was making his wry point (or, indeed if you had listened to BBC radio during the same period), you would not have heard an interview with Ferguson. As he told David Frost on ITV, he was waiting for the BBC to apologise. Then the slate would be wiped clean. It does not matter who you are. McFarlane’s words resonate: ‘You are either with him or you are not.’
St Mirren remained buoyant until in 1980 they reached the Uefa Cup, knocking out the Swedish club Elfsborg but losing to a St Etienne featuring the great Michel Platini (on precisely the same autumn nights, Ferguson’s Aberdeen were being mauled 5–0 on aggregate by Liverpool in the equivalent of the Champions League).
The support never reached the levels of the Ferguson boom. There was a return to Europe under Alex Miller (assisted by Martin Ferguson) and even, in 1987, a Scottish Cup triumph under Alex Smith. In 1992, however, came relegation and the early part of the third millennium found St Mirren unsure whether they belonged at the first or second level of a Scottish game seeming to accept that never again could an Alex Ferguson – or Jim McLean – threaten the Old Firm.
It all serves to emphasise the magnitude of what Ferguson brought off at Aberdeen. ‘In a strange way,’ reflected McFarlane, ‘my decision not to go may have helped him. He needed a year up there on his own initially, to fight his corner and make his own mind up about players.’ David Provan, though Ferguson’s affection for him was never to waver, was not invited, according to Ferguson, because he thought Aberdeen would consider one former Rangers player enough.
Nor was Provan to figure at Love Street. Instead, through a club director, he obtained a job as a whisky salesman. Later Scot Symon brought him back into football as second-team coach at Partick Thistle, working under Bertie Auld. The man who broke Provan’s leg? ‘Obviously there was animosity at the time of the injury,’ said Provan, ‘but . . .’ Yes, life was too short. ‘Bertie and I are still friends. I always remind him about the time he took a player off and played with ten men and explained that it was “for tactical reasons”. Can you believe that? We always have a laugh about it.’
ABERDEEN
An Emotional Battering
A
berdeen, when Ferguson arrived, were already established as a club of some potency. They had finished second in the League in 1971 and 1972, won the League Cup under MacLeod in 1976/7 and in 1977/8, the sole season under McNeill that preceded Ferguson’s arrival, had run Rangers close in both the League and Scottish Cup.
When they had played Ferguson’s struggling St Mirren at Love Street in late March, the attendance had been 5,900; a month later, the clubs had met at Pittodrie in front of 17,250.
This was not a St Mirren. It was a club of harmony that could, once Ferguson had got going, be compared with Bobby Robson’s Ipswich Town of the same era (when they met in the Uefa Cup in 1981, Ipswich were not only the holders of that trophy but English League leaders and in the midst of a five-match winning run in which their victims had included Liverpool and Manchester United, and Ferguson’s Aberdeen still prevailed 4-2 on aggregate). It was a club with a vision at which Ferguson settled, a club with a brain. It was also a club with a budget and so Ferguson – he who had wanted a Mercedes and £25,000 from St Mirren – started on £12,000.
That was his basic pay. At St Mirren, he had been on £10,000 plus a £5,000 bonus for Premier League survival, and again there were incentives, albeit for winning trophies or finishing high in the League rather than merely remaining in it.
There were perks, too, and the car with which he started was not a Mercedes but a less racy Rover. Irresistibly we are drawn to the story of Ron Atkinson, Ferguson’s extrovert predecessor at Manchester United, who, upon asking for a Mercedes at his interview, was told by the chairman, Martin Edwards, that the previous incumbent, Dave Sexton, had been happy with a Rover. ‘I was hoping for a car,’ growled Atkinson, ‘not a dog.’ Ferguson was more humble, or at least patient; he got his Mercedes in due course.
The deal also featured an interest-free loan of £18,000 towards the purchase of one of those expensive Aberdeen houses. He was glad of that; he had given up Fergie’s towards the end of his time at St Mirren due to poor returns and unruly customers and, upon joining Aberdeen, tried to sell his half-share in Shaw’s to Sam Falconer, only to find that his partner was in debt. The failure of the business was to be acknowledged by liquidation in 1980.
By then Ferguson was devoting all his attention to football and his family had happily settled in a new house in the village of Cults, just outside Aberdeen.
At first, however, Ferguson had shared a flat in the city centre with Pat Stanton and returned to East Kilbride after Saturday matches to spend the rest of the weekend with Cathy and the boys. It was not until early in 1979 that the family moved north.
The wife and bairns had been well out of Ferguson’s first few months at Aberdeen. ‘The early phase,’ he volunteered, ‘was a troubled time’, not just in terms of his relationship with the players but personally. Some of the ‘emotional battering’ he took was, he confessed, self-inflicted through his determination to fight St Mirren, ‘to humiliate them as they had me’.
Hence the tribunal case, foolishly pursued against the advice of both a lawyer recommended by the Scottish Professional Footballers’ Association and his new club chairman, Dick Donald. With the help of another lawyer, Ferguson poured scorn on St Mirren’s thirteen allegations and counter-claimed unfair dismissal, seeking £50,000 compensation for the three years left on his contract.
The most damaging allegation concerned his behaviour towards June Sullivan. He has always admitted swearing at her – ‘don’t you bloody do that again’ – when she took Todd’s side in a dispute over whether a player could be paid expenses tax-free but the club’s account was that he continued to behave unreasonably, refusing to speak to her unless she apologised and generally carrying the either-with-him-or-against-him principle to ridiculous, even vindictive, lengths.
The rest of the evidence now appears little more than a laborious exchange of time-warped trivia – while the board questioned their manager’s right to attend the European Cup final, the manager complained, dubiously, that the club were paying some players more than him – but the verdict of the tribunal chairman, William Courtney, and other members, one representing management and the other the trade unions, was unanimous: St Mirren, they concluded, ‘were entitled to think that the deterioration in relations was likely to be irreversible . . . it was only a short, logical step to decide they had no choice but to dismiss, and in the Tribunal’s view this was a conclusion reasonably arrived at’.
The blow to Ferguson and Cathy, who had supported his campaign, fell just before Christmas, when he was already under stress due to the terminal deterioration of his father’s health.
He recalled it one May morning in 2008 at the Manchester United training ground. After dispensing champagne in plastic cups to journalists gathered to hear his reflections on the Champions League triumph over Chelsea in Moscow less than thirty-six hours earlier, he responded to a question on retirement by saying: ‘The big fear is what you do with yourself. There are too many examples of people who retire and get buried in a box soon afterwards because they have lost the very thing that keeps them alive.’ And then Ferguson became wistful.
‘I remember when my dad had his sixty-fifth birthday,’ he said. ‘The Fairfields shipyard gave him a big dinner in Glasgow. There were three or four hundred of his fellow employees there and the bosses. It was a big night and I came down from Aberdeen. The following week, my mother phoned and said, “Your dad’s going for an X-ray. He’s got pains in his chest.” I said, “It’ll be the emotion.” It was cancer. One week after his retirement. One week.’
His father continued to watch matches when he could and, although weak, was at Dens Park, Dundee, in mid-December 1978 to see Aberdeen beat Hibs 1-0 after extra time to reach the Scottish League Cup final. By the time they lost to Rangers at Hampden Park three months later, Alexander Ferguson was dead.
He died in hospital late in the afternoon of an Aberdeen match while his son, just a few miles away at Love Street, seethed in the away dugout; Aberdeen had led St Mirren 2-0 at half-time only to be held to a draw because of goals from McGarvey and Copland that briefly put Ferguson’s former team on top of the League and demoted his current team from third to fourth.
Ferguson had spent most of the second half protesting to the referee as his team lost their grip on the match and had two men sent off and, according to one account, was angrily thumping on the door of the officials’ dressing room afterwards while a St Mirren employee waited to break the news of his father. Ferguson denied this. He insisted that he had berated the referee only at half-time.
Immediately Ferguson went to the hospital. He had seen his father there the previous day and remembered his final words: ‘It’s just one of those things, Alex.’ Martin was there; he had been there at the end. The funeral was on the Wednesday. After it, on the way back to Aberdeen, where his team were to play Partick Thistle that night, Ferguson pulled into a lay-by and cried. Aberdeen won 2-1.
Ferguson is Working
T
he death of Alexander Ferguson, a believer in the decency of socialism, occurred only a couple of months before the beginning of the end of Old Labour.
The elder of his sons was preparing Aberdeen for the League Cup final when James Callaghan’s Government suffered a single-vote defeat in the House of Commons at the hands of a coalition of Conservatives, Liberals, Scottish Nationalists and Ulster Unionists. Five weeks later, a general election saw Margaret Thatcher become Britain’s first female Prime Minister, to the increasing distaste of, among others, the manager of Aberdeen Football Club and later Manchester United, where the players were only too aware of his aversion to the bling culture caricaturing the ostentatious, consumptive society that survived Thatcher’s leadership and pervaded the Blair and Brown years.
Oddly enough, the journalist and political commentator Andrew Marr reflected in 2007 in his riveting
A History of Modern Britain
, Margaret Thatcher had set out to foster things like neighbourliness and hard work – as I read it, I recognised the sort of principles Ferguson’s parents liked to follow – not consumer credit or ‘show-off wealth’. Marr noted: ‘That is the thing about freedom. When you free people, you can never be sure what you are freeing them for.’

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