Football – Bloody Hell! (15 page)
Read Football – Bloody Hell! Online
Authors: Patrick Barclay
‘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
N
or 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.
or 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.’
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!’
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 Gothenburg 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
A
mong 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.
mong 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.
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.
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