Football – Bloody Hell! Page 5

  ‘So we had a beautiful night at this guy’s house. Next day there was the game and, after playing a one-two with Fergie, I scored, but in doing so I fell and broke my wrist. So from then Fergie had to write my postcards to my wife. Every city we went, I’d dictate to him “Dear Mary, I’m writing this on behalf of Willie . . .”.

  ‘The next stop was Australia and in Sydney this lassie comes over saying “Willie! Willie! Willie!” Her mum and dad had the Silver Birch pub in Cowdenbeath. And again Fergie can’t believe it.

  ‘When we get to Melbourne, there’s a dinner-dance and I says to Fergie, “That lassie over there’s from Lochgelly [another mining village near Dunfermline].” She’s a hairdresser. I used to work in the cooperative, you see, and the hairdresser’s was across the road. So I go over. “Oh, Willie!” she says, “I thought you were never going to talk to me!” Fergie’s mouth is wide open.

  ‘Then we go to New Zealand and I get a call from the son of the guy we’d had dinner with in Hong Kong, wondering if it’s all right to come and pick me up and show me round Auckland. Again Fergie comes along.

  ‘And then we land in Canada and he says, “Who are we going to meet here, then?” and I say, “No idea”. But I knew. My mum and dad got married in Canada and my eldest brother is Canadian. So we go through with the luggage and suddenly I go, ‘Bridget! How are you?’ It’s my sister-in-law. That was it for Fergie.

  ‘Of course, if we did that trip now, everyone would be asking “Who’s that man with Sir Alex Ferguson?” But he was a great guy to have as your room-mate. A smashing guy.’

  When Dunfermline played at home in Europe, the club’s habit was to entertain the visitors to a meal. One day the Dunfermline players welcomed the Hungarians of Újpest Dózsa to the dining room of an Edinburgh hotel. ‘We’re sitting there at the table,’ said Callaghan. ‘There’s me, then a Hungarian, and then Fergie, then another Hungarian. And we’re describing the menu to them, going through the various steaks. And I’m telling the guy next to me to have fillet. And Fergie, who’s got a wee bit of a speech quirk, is trying to say the same. He’s trying to recommend fillet. And he’s saying, “Have fowet – fowet!” And we’re all just looking at Fergie and trying to imagine this Hungarian going home and telling his friends how much he’d enjoyed the Scottish speciality – fowet.’

  There were a lot of laughs. And lasting affection. ‘After a night game,’ Callaghan said, ‘Fergie would always ask if he could stay and I’d tell him my mum and dad were waiting for him. My mum used to call him “my laddie”. When he moved to Rangers, she said, “I’ve lost my laddie.” And then at Christmas this card came through the door. And she wouldn’t take it down. A Christmas card with the Rangers crest on the front and inside “To Mum and Dad, from Fergie”. And it stood on top of the sideboard after all the other cards had been thrown out. She used to dust round it.

  ‘He’s never changed. When one of our Dunfermline pals, Jim Leishman, lost his wife, he was first on the phone. When George Miller, our captain, died, the first guy there was Alex Ferguson [it was early in 2009, as Manchester United’s thoughts turned to the knockout stages of the Champions League]. That’s the type of boy he is. Never forgets his roots.’

  He grasped those roots at the end of that summer of 1967 by joining Rangers. Life was good. On the Hong Kong leg of the world tour he had scored his first pair of goals for ‘Scotland’ and by the end of his travels with Callaghan he had notched nine in seven matches. The statistic is put in a certain context by the tally of Morton’s nineteen-year-old Joe Harper, who got eight in three matches against the likes of New Zealand Under-23s and a Vancouver XI.

  Later Ferguson became Harper’s manager at Aberdeen, without a great deal of comfort on either side; Harper, though a fans’ favourite and a prolific scorer for most of his career, liked a drink and was ageing. But before Ferguson could further his education in the arts of management, he had to learn his limits as a player, and this he was to do, quite painfully, at Ibrox.

  Rangers: Welcome to Hell

  The deal taking him to Rangers was completed despite Cunningham’s dismissal as Dunfermline manager. Ferguson, having anxiously phoned Cunningham from Vancouver, was promised that the verbal contract to release him would be honoured. On returning to Glasgow he was beset by reporters, most notably Jim Rodger (known, with some irony, as ‘The Jolly’), a tabloid man with a bit too much weight for his modest height, a twinkling eye and an almost complete lack of writing ability that was massively outweighed by an extraordinary gift for producing exclusive stories for his newspapers.

  Rodger would do it by taking part in these stories, personally oiling the wheels of transfers and managerial movements. He did it in a manner that suggested he had seen too many spy films, but people trusted him and, when Rodger assured Ferguson he was Rangers-bound, Ferguson knew he need only wait for the call. In a typically cloak-and-dagger operation organised by Rodger, he was driven from his home to that of Scot Symon, the manager of Rangers, from whom he agreed to take a signing fee of £4,000 and a double-your-money £80 a week.

  He also negotiated a slice of the transfer fee out of Dunfermline; it was a familiar Ferguson ploy. But from Rangers he was to get more than he bargained for. ‘No other experience in 40 years as a professional player and manager,’ he was to write, ‘has created a scar comparable to that left by the treatment I received at Ibrox.’

  It began on the day he signed when a club director asked if his wife was a Roman Catholic and then if they had been married in a Catholic church. Upon hearing that the ceremony had taken place in a registry office, the director almost audibly sighed with relief, yet Ferguson buried his distaste under the joy of having at last joined Rangers.

  The Protestant bigotry still evident at the club – it was barely disturbed until, in 1989, under the chairmanship of David Murray and with Graeme Souness manager, they signed Maurice Johnson, the first of many Catholics (though piety was not the most noticeable feature of our Mo’s lifestyle) to score and prevent goals for Rangers – was to haunt him.

  Rangers were under abnormal pressure because of their enemies’ rise under Jock Stein. Even their achievement in not only reaching the European Cup-Winners’ Cup final but taking the Bayern Munich of Franz Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller and Sepp Maier to extra time had been recorded in the shadow of Celtic’s historic triumph over Internazionale. Yet Symon, in his thirteenth year as manager, had been equipped with new players in the long and wince-inducing aftermath of the Scottish Cup defeat at Berwick: not just Ferguson but Andy Penman from Dundee and the almost equally stylish Örjan Persson, a Swedish winger, from Dundee United, plus the goalkeeper Erik Sørensen from Morton.

  On the coaching front, Bobby Seith had been engaged and it is a measure of how Rangers lagged behind Celtic off the field that Seith’s introduction of afternoon sessions for individuals, Ferguson included, was considered revolutionary. ‘Rangers had broken with tradition to appoint me,’ Seith recalled. ‘I was their first coach – as opposed to trainer – and the first member of the backroom staff not to have been a Rangers player.’

  Although Symon’s new team were to prove no match for the Stein Machine in the long term, they did beat Celtic despite losing their left-back, Davie Provan, after a tackle by the notoriously abrasive Bertie Auld that broke his left leg and his Ibrox career, and were League leaders in November.

  Then Symon was sacked. He went, moreover, in a manner that showed bigotry was not the only bad smell in a boardroom, giving the lie to the old American saying that nice guys finish second. More than a whiff of cowardice could be detected as the directors responded to terrace discontent during a home draw with Dunfermline. It was resolved that Symon, a man of dignity and presence as well as achievement, whose distinctions included having played for Scotland at both football and cricket (he had taken five wickets in an innings against the 1938 Australians), would have to go. But thirteen years, during which Rangers had collected fifteen trophies, did not entitle him to a decent farew
ell. ‘They sent an accountant to his house to offer him terms of resignation,’ said Seith, ‘and, when he refused them, wouldn’t even allow him back to Ibrox to clear his desk. I had to go and get his belongings for him.’

  When Ferguson heard, he was furious. ‘He didn’t want to be associated with a club that could do such a thing,’ said Seith, ‘and came to me so angry he was about to demand a transfer. So I took him into a sort of gymnasium place and gave him a bit of a talking-to.’ Ferguson remembers being stunned by the normally ‘sedate’ coach’s passion. ‘It wasn’t a bolllocking as such,’ said Seith, ‘I was just trying to make Alex see that it made no sense, at least from his own point of view. “Look,” I said, “if you want to do something for Scot Symon, go out there and show the people – the directors who have sacked him, the fans who have lost faith in him – that he did the right thing in signing you, that he knew a player when he saw one.” Alex went out and scored twice in the next match.’ It was a 3-0 victory over Cologne in the Fairs Cup and Ferguson went on to be the club’s leading scorer in his first season.

  Seith, however, had long since left the club. Within days of dissuading Ferguson from taking his protest against Symon’s dismissal to the ultimate, he had himself resigned. ‘I’d talked to my wife about it and decided to follow my conscience. I know I’d talked Alex out of that, but there was a difference in that Alex was at the peak of his playing career. I’d been Scot’s coach and wanted no part in a club that could treat such a loyal servant in this way.’ Symon was a benign disciplinarian, immaculately dressed. ‘Okay, he might never have got into a tracksuit, and in the end it might have been held against him, but he dedicated his life to the football club, helping them to win a lot of trophies [including six Scottish championships]. He was a man to be admired, straight as a die.’ It is understandable that Ferguson should have felt the same way about Seith, of whom he was to write so warmly more than thirty years later.

  Although a return of twenty-three goals from that first season may have appeared bright enough, the clouds were gathering. Towards the end of the season, with Rangers still leading Celtic on points, Stein all but conceded the championship, saying it was in Rangers’ hands and they could only throw it away (Ferguson was never to forget the ploy and would take it into management), which they eventually did by losing their final match at home to Aberdeen. Angry supporters broke dressing-room windows and it was hours before the players felt emboldened to go home; one kicked Ferguson on the leg. It had been an equally painful experience of Stein’s mind games for the new Rangers manager, Davie White.

  Ferguson never felt he had the confidence of White, who had been Symon’s assistant, and was further troubled by bigotry most clearly discernible in the bowler-hatted form of Willie Allison, a former football journalist somewhat bizarrely employed by Rangers as public relations officer. In Ferguson’s book, Allison is described as a ‘muck-spreader’ and ‘diseased zealot’ who even started rumours that the Fergusons’ first-born son, Mark, was christened in a Catholic church (it happened to be untrue).

  In truth, the whole atmosphere around Rangers was diseased. Seith remembered that once his wife, a Lancashire lass whom he had met while playing for Burnley, invited an English friend to a match at Ibrox. Neither could understand why they were being stared at with ill-concealed disapproval until Mrs Seith noticed that her friend, a member of the Church of England, had a crucifix on her necklace.

  Antipathy towards anything vaguely Catholic was manifest in aggression once shown towards the club physiotherapist, Davie Kinnear, because he happened to be wearing a tartan tie that was predominantly green. Decent men like Seith became accustomed to swallowing their revulsion, just as Ferguson let pass the director’s intrusiveness on the day he joined Rangers.

  Was Willie Allison as bad as Ferguson paints him? ‘I didn’t know the guy well,’ said John Greig. ‘But you wouldn’t have thought he’d been a press man. He wasn’t the type. He was more close to the directors.’ So Ferguson took a risk when, having phoned his wife while on tour in Denmark and been told about a newspaper story predicting (correctly) that his days at Rangers were numbered, he got drunk with Greig and others in a bar in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens and returned to the hotel to give Allison an earful of blame. ‘Part of the trouble,’ said Greig, ‘was that Alex hardly drank alcohol, if at all.’

  Just before the start of the next season, White told him he had been offered to Hibernian as makeweight in a deal for the centre-forward Colin Stein. Ferguson refused and was banished to train with the reserves, but Rangers still signed Stein, again breaking the all-Scottish record with a fee of £100,000. That he was an improvement on Ferguson is hard to deny. He scored a lot of goals, and at memorable times: in the European Cup-Winners’ Cup final victory over Moscow Dynamo in 1972, for instance. Stein also played on twenty-one occasions for Scotland, scoring nine goals.

  Ferguson continued to make the odd first-team appearance and near the end of the season, with Stein injured, was chosen for the Scottish Cup final against Celtic. Not for the first time, however, he disappointed White, who had directed him to mark Billy McNeill at corners. Although Ferguson had a spring, the disparity in size was too great. After two minutes, from a corner, McNeill headed the first of four unanswered goals and afterwards White’s choice of scapegoat was simple. The atmosphere of suspicion had become mutual – during the manager’s inquest into the Cup final, he had accused Ferguson of undermining him in the press (a not dissimilar charge to that levelled against Allison by Ferguson) – and that was the end. Ferguson was dropped for the last four matches of the season and never played for Rangers’ first team again.

  At the start of the next season, 1969/70, he was separated from the rest of the senior squad. At times he trained with the apprentices – until White found him coaching them at the suggestion of another staff member and banished him to train alone – and played for the third team against the likes of Glasgow University. ‘It was embarrassing for the other players,’ Greig recalled, ‘but more so for him, because we could see him. We used to run round the track at Ibrox and he’d be kicking a ball against a boundary wall. [In his book, Ferguson defiantly states that his appetite for practice was undiminished.] And once they sent him down to England with the third team and he didn’t even get a game – they left him on the bench.

  ‘There were a few things which, being so friendly with him, I found hard to take. I don’t know why he and the manager fell out and why it couldn’t be repaired. It was sad because he was a Rangers supporter, born and bred half a mile from the ground. It must have broken his heart.’

  But not his will. Or his ability to make the best of a bad job. When a £20,000 fee was agreed for his transfer to Nottingham Forest – he assumed the English club had been alerted by Jim Baxter, the great Scotland midfield player and party animal who had returned to Rangers from Forest – Ferguson negotiated a tenth of the sum for himself. Then he heard that his old Dunfermline boss Willie Cunningham, now with Falkirk in the Second Division, wanted him too. Cathy brightened perceptibly at the thought of remaining in Scotland and all that was left for Ferguson to do was apologise to Forest for changing his mind.

  A few days later, as a Rangers supporter, he went back to Ibrox to watch them take on the Polish club Górnik Zabrze. They lost and now Davie White, under whom he had been hauled from the dressing room and returned to the terraces, was sacked. It was too late for third thoughts, even though Ferguson had reason to believe the new man in charge, Willie Waddell, would have wanted him. But he did still get his £2,000.

  What had caused Ferguson to fall short at Rangers? Was he unable to live up to a £65,000 price tag? Did he make his disdain for Davie White too obvious? Or was it a combination of those factors with his marriage to a Catholic? Many – including Ferguson himself – believed his battle for acceptance was harder than it needed to be.

  We should dispose of the coincidental rise in tension between Catholics and the Protestant majority across the Iris
h Sea. Although it is true that the first civil rights marches by Catholics in Northern Ireland took place in March 1968, little over six months after Ferguson’s arrival at Ibrox, Glasgow was more of a spectator to than a participant in the renewed troubles. It remained so as rioting spread from Londonderry to Belfast over the next eighteen months and British troops were sent in by the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to be generally welcomed by Catholics, even though they were to be dragged into a bloody conflict with the IRA that lasted for decades.

  The songs of hate were incessant on the stadium slopes. Soon after the death of the Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands in May 1981, Rangers met Dundee United in the Scottish Cup final at Hampden Park, which echoed to gleefully repeated chants of ‘Sands is dead’ (to the tune of ‘Hooray for the Red, White and Blue’) and, had the martyr been a Loyalist, no doubt the same would have been heard at Celtic’s Parkhead. But it was a soft sectarianism that football harboured.

  The difference between Rangers and Celtic in that era was that, while Celtic would employ Protestants – Jock Stein and several members of his great side included – Rangers avoided giving Catholics work, reflecting the discrimination that had led to the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. It would still be wrong to deny that Rangers had signed Ferguson knowing he had followed in the family tradition of marrying whom he pleased.

  So was Ferguson just not up to the international standard Rangers expected? The words most frequently used in descriptions of his playing style were ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘elbows’ (though not necessarily in that order). He was even to allude to the latter in renaming a Glasgow pub he had acquired the Elbow Room. John Greig recalled: ‘Obviously I played against him as well as with him [they were even sent off together after Ferguson had joined Falkirk towards the end of his career] and he was always a handful, a pest. He bustled about with his elbows parallel to the ground – and he was all skin and bone so that, when he got you, it was like being stabbed.’