Football – Bloody Hell! (5 page)
Read Football – Bloody Hell! Online
Authors: Patrick Barclay
They had begun the day with optimism. Even if defeated, they could hope that one of the teams just below them – Falkirk, St Mirren, Airdrieonians – would fail to win and thus keep them up. If the defeat were narrow, too, they might conceivably survive. But a point would ensure the drop beyond question, and this point someone from their camp resolved to buy.
Ian Ure would not say who he was, except that he was a reserve player. ‘He offered a couple of our players money to draw and, when we discussed it and it became apparent that one or two of ours wanted to take it, I threatened to go to our manager [Bob Shankly, brother of the Liverpool legend Bill] and report it. That was the end of the argument. It went no further.’
Such approaches were not unusual at the time. It was believed that players, even internationals, organised results to take advantage of fixed-odds betting – a double of successful away-win forecasts, paying 10/1, was said to be especially popular. When Gauld and the Sheffield Wednesday trio were brought to justice, there, but for the grace of God, went plenty of contemporaries.
The attempted fix at Muirton Park was known about in the St Johnstone dressing room – though not necessarily by every member of the team – and one player told me many years later that his reservations about it might have been shelved had he been aware that the clubs fighting St Johnstone for survival had themselves been up to no good that afternoon.
The defender Jim Lachlan finds the subject embarrassing. Asked about Ure’s story, he replied: ‘I can’t say yes or no.’ He was aware that ‘rogues, real rogues’ abounded in the game and had known it from early in his career when, throughout a 5-0 defeat at Airdrie, an opponent kept whispering phrases like ‘chuck it’ and ‘take it easy’. Lachlan remembered being incredulous. ‘I was never one,’ he said, ‘for taking it easy.’
Ferguson was of the same attitude, ‘a decent lad’, said Lachlan. ‘There was a group of them who came up from Glasgow and some were kind of wide boys. Alex was different. He didn’t even smoke or drink’.
Not that his good habits helped on the day of St Johnstone’s relegation. Dundee played for themselves alone, and very well, and were winning 3-0 when Ferguson headed into the net only for the referee to spot an infringement. Had the goal stood, he implied, St Johnstone would have stayed up – but under the system of goal average used before goal difference, which entailed dividing the total number scored by the number conceded, St Mirren would still have finished above them after winning 4-1 at home to Dunfermline.
Under his agonising misapprehension, Ferguson went back to work at Hillington.
When the new season started, he did not suffer financially as much as the full-timers from the descent to the Second Division, but his supervisor at Remington Rand had insisted he stop travelling to train in Perth and the manager, Bobby Brown, responded by putting him in the reserves.
St Johnstone were promoted again and his career seemed becalmed, not least to Ferguson, who, on the eve of a reserve match at home to Rangers, arranged for his brother’s girlfriend to ring Brown from Glasgow, pretending to be his mother, and say he had flu. Brown, seeing through the ruse, sent a telegram to Ferguson’s house demanding that he himself ring immediately. His parents, furious, insisted on it, but when Brown answered, the message he had to impart was mixed: while he was irked by the lie, several senior players had contracted actual flu and Ferguson was to report to St Johnstone’s hotel in Glasgow a few hours before the first-team match at Ibrox the next day.
Not only did he play, Ferguson scored a hat-trick at the theatre of his boyhood dreams. St Johnstone won 3-2 and the wind was in his sails. He walked home beaming to be congratulated by his mother, who said his feat had even been mentioned on television. Meanwhile, his father, to whom he had given a complimentary ticket, sat reading a book. Ferguson asked what he had thought of the match. ‘Okay,’ he replied, before almost praising his son for the successful observance of one of his principles: if you don’t shoot, you won’t score.
Less than twenty-four hours after being threatened with ejection from the house, Ferguson was a respectable member of the family again. He had also begun to learn how to keep a youngster’s feet on the ground.
Another lesson he was to carry into management lurked around the corner. The local boy was enjoying the bachelor’s life. He had a car and an expensive Crombie coat and plenty of friends (some of whom he was to keep for life). But it was clearly going to take more than an Ibrox hat-trick to land him anywhere near the top of Scottish football. He needed a stimulus. It came in the form of love. Or the seeds of it. One night, in a dance hall in Sauchiehall Street, he spotted Cathy Holding, a girl he had seriously fancied at Remington Rand. He approached her and almost immediately they began a steadily deepening relationship. Ferguson resolved to get a transfer from St Johnstone and make the most of his career.
Into Europe with Dunfermline
O
pportunity knocked in the form of Dunfermline Athletic. There had been rumours which excited Ferguson because, under Jock Stein, the Fife club had performed notable deeds in the old European Fairs Cup (later Uefa Cup), knocking out Everton. Stein then left for Hibernian but his successor and erstwhile assistant, Willie Cunningham, a former Northern Ireland full-back, also wanted Ferguson. The deal was quickly done and, although initially Ferguson decided to keep his job, he realised within months that it was a false economy and threw everything into his footballing career.
pportunity knocked in the form of Dunfermline Athletic. There had been rumours which excited Ferguson because, under Jock Stein, the Fife club had performed notable deeds in the old European Fairs Cup (later Uefa Cup), knocking out Everton. Stein then left for Hibernian but his successor and erstwhile assistant, Willie Cunningham, a former Northern Ireland full-back, also wanted Ferguson. The deal was quickly done and, although initially Ferguson decided to keep his job, he realised within months that it was a false economy and threw everything into his footballing career.
He did, after all, now have it in mind to get married and start a family (as a manager, he was always to encourage young men to settle down). Toolmaking had given him memories to treasure – everything from the strike he prompted in support of a sacked colleague (it ended unsuccessfully after six weeks), to that first sight of Cathy – but now he knew clearly what he wanted and it didn’t involve taking a smoke-filled bus to a factory every morning.
Dunfermline provided not only a proper footballer’s life but a vision of life beyond. ‘As soon as I became a full-time footballer,’ he was to recall, ‘I was committed to staying in the game. As an apprentice toolmaker, I’d get up and sit on a crowded bus to Hillington with everyone puffing away at their fags. Then to get my first car and be able to drive over to Dunfermline in the fresh air every morning – what a difference! I made up my mind I was going to stay in the game and started to get my coaching qualifications the following summer.’
Ferguson was lucky to arrive at East End Park, where Stein’s invigorating influence was manifest in a brightly refurbished stadium. It housed a happy club, like a family, in which most of the players had been brought through the ranks together by Stein.
Cunningham had gone outside to recruit Ferguson, swapping him for the attacker Dan McLindon, but the new boy was instantly accepted. ‘A right down-to-earth boy’ is how one of the leading players, Willie Callaghan, remembers him. ‘Fergie had no airs and graces. But Dunfermline was an easy club to come to. There were no big names. We were all on the same wages and would even show our wage slips to each other, when the packets were handed round on a Wednesday, just to compare the tax. I don’t think you’d get that now. And, if you got picked for Scotland [as Callaghan did on a couple of occasions], the whole team were delighted. It was a happy dressing room.’
After training the players would lunch together at a cinema café and discuss tactics in the time-honoured manner, with salt and pepper pots. ‘As time went by,’ Cunningham recalled, ‘Fergie got more and more into it and started bringing all sorts of information and statistics. He got into it a lot deeper than some of us.’ But the main thing was to score goals.
They came steadily in his first season, 1964/5, and he made his first European appearance away to Örgryte of Gothenburg (in the same Ullevi Stadium nearly nineteen years later, he was to guide Aberdeen to the triumph over Real Madrid in the Cup-Winners’ Cup final). A scoreless draw was enough for Dunfermline, who had won 4-2 at home. Next they beat Stuttgart 1-0 on aggregate before losing to Athletic Bilbao in a third match in the San Mamés Stadium (it was before the institution of penalty deciders and the Spanish club won the toss for choice of venue).
Back home, Dunfermline were in a three-horse race for the title which Kilmarnock eventually won on goal average from Hearts after Ferguson’s team had been inconsistent in the run-in, beating Rangers (Ferguson had been dropped that day) but only drawing with St Johnstone (Ferguson played, but missed chances). Dunfermline had, however, one more chance to take a trophy, for they reached the Scottish Cup final, in which the opponents were Celtic, now managed by Stein but having gone eight years without silverware.
Cunningham had to choose two strikers from three: Ferguson, his leading scorer; Harry Melrose, who had scored in the semi-final against Hibs; and John McLaughlin, restored after injury, a regular starter whose place Melrose had taken in the previous round.
To the manager’s mind, the argument for Ferguson was the least resonant, but he kept his line-up from the players until fifty minutes before the kick-off, when, some suffering more tension than others, they gathered in the Hampden Park dressing room to hear Cunningham – flanked by the club chairman and secretary – read out the names. Towards the end came those of Melrose and McLaughlin. Ferguson exploded. ‘You bastard!’ he yelled at Cunningham, who remained silent as he continued to vent his fury, ignoring instructions from the chairman, David Thomson, to behave.
The other players just watched. ‘We were shocked,’ said Willie Callaghan, one of those most friendly with Ferguson, ‘but we had to get on with the game. I found it very surprising that Fergie was not playing. But you never know the inside story.’
The relationship with Cunningham, which was to last many years and be to Ferguson’s considerable advantage, could almost be described as love/hate. ‘Willie Cunningham was a very stubborn man,’ said Callaghan. ‘And Alex Ferguson was a
very
stubborn man.’ He chuckled. ‘So it was quite a clash of personalities.’ That Cunningham was later to offer Ferguson a route into management was proof that the damage could be permanently mended. ‘Oh, they soon sorted it out,’ said Callaghan. ‘Man-to-man, the way it should be.’
very
stubborn man.’ He chuckled. ‘So it was quite a clash of personalities.’ That Cunningham was later to offer Ferguson a route into management was proof that the damage could be permanently mended. ‘Oh, they soon sorted it out,’ said Callaghan. ‘Man-to-man, the way it should be.’
But not right away. There being no substitutes in 1965, Ferguson stayed in his suit and told his parents the news as they waited outside Hampden. He then watched Dunfermline lose 3-2 – their goals came from Melrose and McLaughlin – and, having sought and been refused a transfer (phlegmatism was never a Ferguson characteristic), turned his lingering resentment into a positive force.
A happy private life can only have helped. Towards the end of the following season, in March 1966, he married Cathy and they moved into a semi-detached house in the Simshill district of Glasgow which they had been sanding and painting for months. There was no honeymoon; they wed on a Saturday morning and not only did Ferguson play against Hamilton Academical at East End Park the same afternoon but the next day he went with the team to a hotel to prepare for a Fairs Cup quarter-final at Zaragoza. Dunfermline, despite two goals from Ferguson, went out 4-3 on aggregate.
In the Scottish League they finished fourth, Ferguson’s contribution giving him a tally of forty-five goals in fifty-two matches at home and abroad. He rejected Dunfermline’s pay offer for the next season amid reports that Rangers, the club of his heart, and Newcastle United, who had a traditional fondness for signing Scots, were interested and headed for the Scottish FA’s coaching centre near Largs on the Ayrshire coast to complete his qualifications for a career beyond playing.
Learning to Coach
A
t Largs, Ferguson shared a room with Jim McLean, who, in years to come, as Dundee United manager when Ferguson was at Aberdeen, was to help him to break the Rangers/Celtic duopoly.
t Largs, Ferguson shared a room with Jim McLean, who, in years to come, as Dundee United manager when Ferguson was at Aberdeen, was to help him to break the Rangers/Celtic duopoly.
They were taught by Bobby Seith, a member of the Dundee team whose finest hour and a half had brought about Ferguson’s relegation with St Johnstone four years earlier; Seith was to be on the staff at Rangers when Ferguson secured a move there in the summer of 1967, and to be fondly remembered by Ferguson. ‘Both Alex and Jim were good pupils,’ said Seith. ‘Even then, you had the impression that they would go far. They were always so keen to think about things, to learn and to ask.
‘They first came the previous year to do the prelim, which involved very basic things like how to set up a session. But when they came back to do the full badge it was much more complicated and related to the game itself. We’d do something then put it into a game and see the effect.
‘We’d work on systems of play like 4-3-3, which was coming in at that time [that very summer in England, Sir Alf Ramsey was using a version of it to such effect that his so-called Wingless Wonders won the World Cup]. And other systems including
catenaccio
, with which the Italians had had a lot of success.
catenaccio
, with which the Italians had had a lot of success.
‘Not that you should ever fall into the trap of fitting players into a preconceived system. A good example of it occurred at Dundee. After we won the championship, we started the next season badly and it was worrying because in the European Cup we were due to play Cologne, who’d been built up as favourites to win the competition. So two days before the match Bob Shankly devised a system to stop the Germans scoring.
‘He withdrew me to play almost alongside Ian Ure and brought back Andy Penman, who played in front of me, into midfield. Now Andy, who was a natural and hated anything tactical, was like a fish out of water. After twenty minutes the reserves were beating us 3-0 and Shankly called a halt. “Och,” he said, “I’m washing my hands of you – just get on with it.” And we beat Cologne 8-1. Those were the sort of practical examples we gave the students and I like to think they gleaned something.
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