Read Football – Bloody Hell! Online
Authors: Patrick Barclay
Football – Bloody Hell! (10 page)
Ferguson knew of his interest in coaching and called him back to Scotland. ‘It sounded like a good move,’ said Provan. ‘I would play – but not a lot [he made thirteen appearances]. The main idea was to look after the St Mirren second team for Alex. I’d been to Largs and also to the English coaching centre at Lilleshall. I had my qualifications and was delighted to get the chance to use them.’
Especially as it involved a little extra money on the side. Because Ferguson needed help with his pub. Fergie’s was proving such an avid time-consumer that, in his autobiography, Ferguson concedes that helping Cathy with their three young sons came third in his list of priorities, at least in terms of time; it almost beggars belief that in 1975 he became involved in the second pub, Shaw’s.
So Provan took on a dual role, pulling pints and changing kegs at Fergie’s by day and training young footballers at St Mirren in the evenings. ‘It suited us both,’ he said. ‘The wages were handy for me – the money in football then wasn’t like today’s – and Alex would have had to get someone else into the pub otherwise. He knew he could rely on me and not have to worry all the time. So I’d work there before taking the reserves for training in the evening.’
Although Ferguson’s job at St Mirren was again notionally part-time, he was in early and often stayed late (a habit that remained with him through the Manchester United years). He naturally shouldered such a burden that once he was in the middle of a pre-match address to his players when the dressing-room door burst open and a steward interjected: ‘Boss, the toilets in the stand are blocked.’
So he could have done without the distraction of Fergie’s, however rich the material it was to provide for his literary efforts in later life. There was a feeling that Ferguson, though he fell in with custom by taking home goods pilfered from the docks and sold in the pub at knockdown prices (Cathy’s eyes would roll as these unwanted bargains appeared in the house), was as much sinned against as sinning in the licensed trade and he often seemed more short of money than you would expect of a football manager, even one in the habit of betting on horses.
He needed help and Provan was ‘as conscientious and trustworthy a man as you could ever have by your side’. Ferguson said Provan joined him as assistant manager but Provan, with characteristic modesty, toned this down. ‘I helped Alex out with the first team from time to time,’ he said, ‘but didn’t have a lot of input.’ Ferguson valued him as a bridge between the youth and senior ranks. ‘But really everything with the first team was down to Alex,’ insisted Provan. ‘There were three of us in the backroom team – Ricky McFarlane, Eddie McDonald and me – and we were all 100 per cent behind him.’ And yet neither McFarlane nor McDonald is mentioned in Ferguson’s book.
McFarlane is an especially glaring omission, given that he had followed Ferguson from East Stirling to St Mirren at Ferguson’s instigation, become a key aide to the manager and later done well himself.
He had played football, once being on the schoolboy books of Celtic, but conceded that ‘no one ever paid me to do it’. As a coach he became more valuable and McFarlane is in good company there, with Arrigo Sacchi, José Mourinho and the rest. Nor should anyone imagine that the transition from physiotherapist to manager was unique, there being the shining examples of Bertie Mee, under whom Arsenal won the Double in 1971, and Bob Paisley, who helped Liverpool to win just about everything between 1974 and 1983 (though Paisley had been a respectable player too).
McFarlane, having produced a team that ‘soared high in Scotland’s top flight, playing a brand of football that captivated the Black And White Army’ (
Paisley Daily Express
, 2008), quietly went back to his physiotherapist’s practice in 1983 and it was there, more than a quarter of a century later, during a break from attending to the aches and pains of patients, that he first spoke of his separation from Ferguson and the latter’s coolness towards him.
Paisley Daily Express
, 2008), quietly went back to his physiotherapist’s practice in 1983 and it was there, more than a quarter of a century later, during a break from attending to the aches and pains of patients, that he first spoke of his separation from Ferguson and the latter’s coolness towards him.
If it was distressing, he betrayed little sign of it: more a sense of regret that the contributions to St Mirren’s rise of players and others – not least Currie’s successor as chairman, Willie Todd – had been overshadowed in Ferguson’s memoirs.
Todd, indeed, was ruthlessly disparaged in the book, and perhaps that was understandable given the acrimonious build-up to Ferguson’s departure in 1978 and the industrial tribunal case that followed, but McFarlane insisted that Todd was a good man who ‘was kind to Alex and did a lot for him’. That, however, is best considered in the context of chronology.
Ferguson had been at the club almost a year by the time McFarlane joined St Mirren, having finally been persuaded after a chance meeting as Ferguson drove his car past a shop from which McFarlane was emerging.
When he had arrived, the furniture had included a remarkable character called Archibald ‘Baldy’ Lindsay – and Ferguson’s autobiography denies Lindsay not a whit of credit for the identification and recruitment of young players. He calls Lindsay ‘perhaps the most remarkable of the countless scouts that I have used during my career in management’ and speaks of him movingly, never more so than in relating how, after a long spell of silence between them – if one felt the other was behaving like a fool, neither would suffer it gladly – Lindsay rang him at Aberdeen to recommend a youngster, Joe Miller, who happened to be his nephew. Miller went on to play for not only Aberdeen but Celtic and Scotland, although by then Lindsay, who had been ailing when he made the call, was long since dead.
Baldy Lindsay was a taxi-driver who had run a football club for youngsters. Nurturing talent was his passion and one of his favourites was Billy Stark, a polite young man who had trained as a schoolboy with Rangers and Dumbarton while playing for the Under-18 team of the noted amateur club Anniesland Waverley, where players had to report for matches in collars and ties.
Once a noted Argentine author was asked why his country had produced so many fine footballers (albeit mainly for export). ‘It is simple,’ he replied. ‘Because all over Argentina, in every small town or village, there are unselfish men who see it as their role in life to teach children how to play properly.’ The Scotland in which Ferguson grew up had been reminiscent of that; he paid fulsome tribute to Douglas Smith, the founder of Drumchapel Amateurs, and, a generation on, Stark received the benefit of similar tuition at Anniesland.
Even after Stark left school to become a trainee draughtsman, he was pursued by Lindsay despite the scepticism of Ferguson, who thought the lanky lad a ‘beanpole’ liable to struggle with the demands of the senior game.
Many years later, having enjoyed a fine career and become manager of the Scotland Under-21 team, Stark chuckled at the recollection. ‘Baldy would phone the house every night or turn up at the door to badger me into going to St Mirren. Eventually I did. I signed for Ferguson on the bus home from a pre-season friendly at Selkirk in the Borders. The strange thing was that I’d had a nightmare of a match, certainly in the first half – I improved to mediocre in the second. And Ferguson signed me. I was astonished.
‘It was only the second time I’d met him. The first time had been the night I played at Love Street in a [specially arranged] game for Anniesland Waverley. All he said then was ‘You did okay and we’ll keep an eye on you.’ Later it struck me that it wouldn’t have mattered to him how well I did at Selkirk. He’d have been looking for specific things.’
And trusting Baldy Lindsay. Stark became an elegant and effective member of Ferguson’s St Mirren team before also joining him at Aberdeen and winning a championship medal.
Ferguson never pretended to have initiated the St Mirren youth policy. Already secured were the midfielder Tony Fitzpatrick, whom Ferguson, after seeking Provan’s opinion, promoted to the first team as captain at eighteen, and a central defender, Bobby Reid, who might have achieved greater things but for a knee injury. But Ferguson did make the system prolific.
‘I was forced to do it,’ he said later, ‘because there was no money to buy players. But once you get used to working with young kids and seeing them come through to the first team you know it’s a good way. It’s a great source of satisfaction.’
‘He’s done it all his career,’ remarked Stark, ‘and it takes a brave man.’
There is a saying among managers that the problem with a youth policy is that your successors get the benefit of it after you have been sacked, and it applied to Ferguson at St Mirren. He brought in the striker Frank McGarvey after being tipped off by the Rangers scout Willie Thornton that he was ‘no use to Rangers’ (in other words, Roman Catholic). McGarvey went on to play for Scotland. As did the left-back Iain Munro and centre-forward Jimmy Bone. And the production line served Ferguson’s successors such as Jim Clunie and McFarlane, whose sides included not only Fitzpatrick and other Paisley notables such as Lex Richardson and Billy Abercromby but a young Frank McAvennie and Peter Weir, yet another destined to play for his country.
When Stark arrived, the manager’s first requirement had been met. For the 1975/6 season, Scottish football was being reorganised. In place of a First Division of 18 clubs and a Second of 20 there would be a Premier Division of 10 and a First and Second of 14 each. So Mirren’s task was to get into the middle tier by finishing in the top six of the Second Division. Fitzpatrick’s precocious craft and leadership proved the catalyst for an improvement that saw them win eight times in a row to qualify with a couple of matches to spare.
Stark Improvement
B
illy Stark came into all this knowing Ferguson mainly as a player. He remembered having been taken to Rangers matches by his father and appreciating Ferguson’s goals and ‘his rumbustiousness, his aggression’. And how did he now like him as a manager? ‘Well,’ said Stark, ‘I’d no one to compare him with, but “like” is not the term I would use. Anyway, would you find any manager a
nice
man? What you could certainly recognise in him was that drive, that almost manic desire which I think has played a big part in his success. I think he’s unique in that way and you picked up on it straight away. He was thirty-three and still had that youthful enthusiasm. You thought it was his age but, of course, he’s carried it through his career.
illy Stark came into all this knowing Ferguson mainly as a player. He remembered having been taken to Rangers matches by his father and appreciating Ferguson’s goals and ‘his rumbustiousness, his aggression’. And how did he now like him as a manager? ‘Well,’ said Stark, ‘I’d no one to compare him with, but “like” is not the term I would use. Anyway, would you find any manager a
nice
man? What you could certainly recognise in him was that drive, that almost manic desire which I think has played a big part in his success. I think he’s unique in that way and you picked up on it straight away. He was thirty-three and still had that youthful enthusiasm. You thought it was his age but, of course, he’s carried it through his career.
‘Coming from Anniesland Waverley. I was used to discipline, but he was on to you for every tiny detail. Dress code, timekeeping – he was very big on those things. And he had an omnipresence. You always felt you were being watched by him, at or around the club.
‘It was the same at Aberdeen. Even though by then he’d allow his assistant – Archie Knox, or whoever it was at the time – to take training and there’d be no sign of him and at first, knowing him, you’d think it strange, and then suddenly the Merc would pull into the car park. Sometimes he’d just watch from there. It was for effect – no doubt about it. You’d know he was there.
‘It was something he tried to impose on you – that there was nothing you did that he didn’t know about. That control thing has always been a part of him. Right from the start at St Mirren – the embryonic stage.’
The sharpness of Stark’s observation was borne out many years later when Ferguson, discussing the degree of delegation that had helped him, he believed, to stay so long at Manchester United, recalled his first glimmer of understanding that it had its uses.
Archie Knox, whom he had made his assistant at Aberdeen – they were to have a long and cheerfully foul-mouthed association – was frustrated. ‘I don’t know why you brought me here,’ he complained. Ferguson expressed bewilderment. ‘I don’t do anything,’ said Knox. Ferguson replied that he looked after the players in the afternoons. ‘I’m the fucking assistant manager,’ Knox stormed on. ‘And you still do all the training sessions! It’s ridiculous.’
The only other person present was Teddy Scott, a long-serving member of the Pittodrie coaching staff to whom Ferguson always listened. Scott looked at Knox, then at Ferguson, and said: ‘He’s right.’ The way Ferguson remembered it was that Scott continued: ‘Why are you doing all the training sessions, barking and yelling and coaching all the time. You should be observing. You should be in control.’
That was when the penny dropped: when Ferguson heard the word ‘control’.
The next day he told Knox he would ‘give it a go’. Knox snorted. So he agreed to let Knox train the team on a permanent basis and Stark, when he arrived at Aberdeen in 1983, noticed the difference.
St Mirren under Ferguson had finished sixth out of fourteen in the new First Division and the next season, with McFarlane helping Ferguson to guide the first team, they achieved promotion as champions, giving Ferguson his first honour as a manager. Just as encouraging had been the presence in a Scotland Under-21 squad of four St Mirren players: Stark, McGarvey, Fitzpatrick and Reid.
By now the supporters were buoyant – they had provided the bulk of the £17,000 it cost to bring Jackie Copland, a strong and experienced defender, from Dundee United – although progress was not always smooth behind the scenes. Once Ferguson, furiously lecturing the players on the evils of drink after they had been caught in a pub, smashed a Coca-Cola bottle against a wall, showering them. ‘The quickness of my temper and depth of my anger often worried me,’ he recalled. Yet Stark, looking back, could see method in much of his madness.
‘It could have you in turmoil,’ Stark said, ‘but it made a better player out of me. There were countless episodes, but the worst I personally suffered was when we played Celtic at Love Street and eventually lost 3-1. During the game, Celtic got a free-kick around halfway. I was playing right midfield and turned to jog back. They took it quick, played it over my head to someone who crossed and they scored.
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