Football – Bloody Hell! Page 4

  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

  Opportunity 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.’

  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

  At 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.

  ‘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.

  ‘I’ve certainly never thought Alex was fitting players into a system rather than the other way round, even at Manchester United, for all the money he’s had at his disposal.’

  Ferguson left Largs a coach at twenty-five. He spent one more season with Dunfermline after being given a pay rise and a promise of a move the following summer. A high-octane European tie with Dynamo Zagreb, who won on away goals, proved the highlight. Domestically, Dunfermline slumped to eighth place. Ferguson had an unusually long spell without goals, then an injury.

  Events elsewhere were, however, working in his favour. Because Rangers were getting angry and frustrated. Stein had launched Celtic’s great era and, a few months before they could clinch the second of their nine consecutive championships (to which that year they were to add the European title), Rangers’ woes were compounded by a first-round Scottish Cup defeat by tiny Berwick Rangers: arguably the greatest shock in the competition’s history. Rangers ruthlessly sold their strikers and, as part of the task of replacing them, began the process that was to lead to a record transfer between Scottish clubs at the time: £65,000 was to change hands when Ferguson’s dream of joining Rangers came true.

  Playing for Scotland?

  He had developed considerably at Dunfermline, said Willie Callaghan. ‘Of course I’d known him before as an opponent, an old-fashioned centre-forward with no respect for anybody. With us he retained his that’s-ma’-ba’ attitude but also began coming back to get the ball and start moves – as well as getting into the box to finish them. There was more football in his game. Being with better players helped. For instance, we had a right-winger, Alex Edwards, who was that good a crosser he just bounced the ball in off Fergie’s head. Mind you, you could always rely on Fergie to be there. Coming to Dunfermline did a lot for his career, as it did for plenty of others, and along with me he got picked to go on a world tour.’

  Picked by whom? We are entering sensitive territory here, for in his book Ferguson states: ‘I was selected to go on a world tour with Scotland in the summer of 1967.’ In fact it was far from a full Scotland party which set out under the captaincy of Ferguson’s old adversary Ian Ure, now with Arsenal: a point the Scottish FA recognised in declining to award caps.

  The players of some clubs were excused because of European commitments, most notably Celtic’s momentous date with Internazionale of Milan on the outskirts of Lisbon. ‘And before any wiseacre,’ Ferguson continued, ‘observes that Rangers, Celtic and Leeds United withdrew their players, reducing the travelling party to the status of a B squad, let me point out that I was chosen in the original pool.’ No doubt. But it is also true that Ferguson was one of seven of the nineteen travellers destined never to play a full international for their country.

  He did get closer than ever to it that spring. His former St Johnstone boss Bobby Brown, now manager of Scotland, did select him for the Scottish League side who lost 3-0 to the English League at Hampden and Ferguson points out that he was on standby for the full international with the world champions at Wembley, in case his hero Denis Law failed to recover from injury. But hardly anyone remembers that apart from Ferguson. Every Scot around at the time does, however, vividly recall Law and Jim Baxter taunting the English as they won 3-2.

  Ferguson’s father and brother, who had flown hopefully to London, were among the exultant tartan throng and everyone was happy, even Dunfermline’s leading scorer having no complaints as he joined the celebrations. After all, he could hardly call Brown a bastard for preferring the great Law.

  The tour featured only one Scot who played at Wembley that day: Jim McCalliog, who made the most of Bobby Murdoch’s absence with Celtic by scoring the third goal.

  According to Ferguson, Brown ought also to have included Kate Adie in the tour party, given that the first destination, Israel, was experiencing the skirmishes that led to the Six Day War and the second, Hong Kong, coping with riots that were an overspill from the Cultural Revolution in China, where the activities of the Red Guards were to induce second thoughts about a proposed match by the Scots. In Israel Ferguson heard rockets and in Hong Kong he reported demonstrators menacing a training session before, buoyed by the news of Celtic’s historic victory in Europe, the party moved on to the tranquillity of Australia.

  Callaghan’s r
ecollections were jollier than Ferguson’s. ‘In Israel,’ he said, ‘we met Mandy Rice-Davies.’ Miss Rice-Davies was best known for her part in the John Profumo scandal that had discredited the Conservative Government of Harold Macmillan in 1963 and, in particular, for her courtroom riposte to a suggestion that Lord Astor would deny ever having met her, let alone slept with her: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ She had converted to Judaism and married an Israeli businessman. ‘Mandy had a club there – I think her husband ran it and Ian Ure knew them.

  ‘We had left and reached New Zealand by way of Hong Kong and Australia by the time the war broke out. The television was on somewhere and we just gaped at the scenes. Later we heard that Mandy had turned her club into a hospital during the war.’

  Callaghan and Ferguson, being clubmates and such pals that Ferguson would stay overnight at Callaghan’s parents’ house after midweek matches at Dunfermline instead of driving the fifty miles back to Glasgow, naturally roomed together. ‘It annoyed him,’ said Callaghan, ‘because everywhere we went the effect of my name was unbelievable.’ It does seem to have been a case of people asking: who’s that guy with Willie Callaghan?

  ‘Imagine me sitting in Hong Kong and getting a phone call. It’s a member of the Hong Kong Government who’s from Dunfermline and he asks me – as captain of Dunfermline Athletic Football Club, representing the town with the Scotland party – if I’d like to come to his house for a meal. He said I could bring a friend, so I invited Alex and, as we were waiting for the Government car to pick us up, he said, “How come you got the phone call?” and I said “It’s the name, son. Callaghan – known all over the world”.