Authors: Patrick Barclay

Football – Bloody Hell! (19 page)

BOOK: Football – Bloody Hell!

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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

B
ut 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.”’

Not that the Germans could prevent Strachan from giving Scotland the lead. Yet two German goals meant the Scots had to beat Uruguay in their final group match to stand any chance of remaining in the competition. It was back to Nezahualcoyotl, the sprawling shanty town not surprisingly known as Neza.

Ferguson dropped Souness, who was thirty-three and had been below his best in the heat, but Scotland seemed to acquire a massive advantage when José Batista was sent off in the first minute for a hideous foul on Strachan.

The decisiveness of the French referee, Joël Quiniou, should have eased the Scots’ path to the knockout stages but instead they departed after a scoreless draw, bitterly complaining about the violence and sly gamesmanship of the Uruguayans.

According to Brown there was another reason for their departure: ‘A player who gave the greatest individual performance I have ever seen.’ He referred to Enzo Francescoli, who, when playing for Olympique Marseille, became the ultimate hero to a boy called Zinedine Zidane. ‘Francescoli played our entire back four on his own and, although we finally managed to put some pressure on the Uruguayans late in the game after Davie Cooper had come on, we were eliminated.’ The Scottish press blamed Ferguson for omitting Souness and everyone went home.

Privately, Ferguson blamed himself not only for leaving out Souness but for letting himself be distracted in the build-up to the Uruguay match by a row with Steve Archibald, who had been left out, and proceeding to do himself no justice with a lacklustre team talk.

And, when the Scottish FA reviewed matters on the squad’s return, the idea that they might cheer up the nation by appointing Ferguson on a permanent basis appears not to have occurred.

Some managers seem more suited to the club milieu than the international game and neither Stein nor, with admittedly limited opportunity, Ferguson was able to lift Scotland as they had Celtic and Aberdeen respectively. It might have given pause for thought to the many Englishmen who had yearned for Brian Clough to be put in charge of the national team; without day-to-day control over the players, would he have been as successful as at Derby and Nottingham Forest?

At any rate, the job of filling Stein’s seat in the Scotland dugout went to Ferguson’s old acquaintance Andy Roxburgh and he did it well, guiding Scotland to qualification for a World Cup and a European Championship with the assistance of Craig Brown, who, upon succeeding him, also secured a place in one each of the major tournaments, coping even more impressively with a sharp decline in the quality of player available to Scotland managers.

Pittodrie Postscript

T
here was to be no rousing finale for Ferguson at Aberdeen. The League match destined to be his last with the club, against Dundee, was a win, but it left them fifth.

Under Ian Porterfield, Aberdeen finished the season fourth, but never at any stage got close to a trophy.

The joint management of Jocky Scott and Alex Smith brought a revival, with a Cup double and a near thing in the League in 1989/90, three years before Dick Donald died of Alzheimer’s disease.

Under the management of Roy Aitken, an old foe of Aberdeen’s from his belligerent Celtic days, there was a League Cup triumph in 1995/6, but club football in Scotland was, like the national team, in decline.

No one could threaten Celtic or Rangers – Tweedledum would enjoy a few years at the top, then Tweedledee take his turn – and an eerie fatalism had fallen over even Pittodrie long before the appointment as manager, in June 2009, of Mark McGhee, Ferguson’s first signing.

MANCHESTER UNITED: EARLY DAYS

A Chat with Bobby Charlton

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