Football – Bloody Hell! (14 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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‘Suddenly,’ Gordon Strachan recalled, ‘after eighteen months of working with Alex Ferguson, we’d seemed to explode. I don’t know what happened in those eighteen months. The main thing I remember is suffering from incredible nerves in the last few games. I was always going to the toilet and people thought I was ill, but it was just the stress of realising we could win the League.’
They celebrated by winning with a flourish, 5-0 at Hibernian, in front of 10,000 of their supporters who had made the journey to Edinburgh. Not that Ferguson could let the day pass without a storm; for having insulted the referee at half-time he was to incur from the Scottish FA a second banishment to the stands of his Aberdeen career (the first had followed the scenes at St Mirren on the day of his father’s death), thus maintaining the bad habits of his time at Love Street. But it was still a day of glorious sunshine.
Ferguson had earned the first major honour of his career – and more. He had won his battle for Pittodrie’s hearts and minds. ‘I finally had the players believing in me,’ he said. And with the refashioning of McGhee he had shown they were in judicious hands. Ferguson was to describe McGhee as one of his three key signings for Aberdeen. And to conclude, as he analysed that first title triumph: ‘Sadly it must be stated that the misfortune for Joe Harper brought a breakthrough for the team.’
Harper played one further League match for Aberdeen at the end of the 1980/81 season before becoming manager of Highland League club Peterhead for a season. He then became a newspaper columnist and broadcaster, a regular attender at Pittodrie, where he acted as host in the Legends Lounge.
Chastened by Liverpool
T
hat to be champions of Scotland hardly equated to conquering the world was brought home to Ferguson and his players when they took part in the competition later known as the Champions League. The European Cup draw sent them first to Vienna, where a scoreless draw protected a single-goal lead McGhee had secured at Pittodrie, but then came a chastening experience at the hands of Liverpool.
Liverpool and Ferguson: their fortunes were destined to be intertwined. Just as Real Madrid had inspired his affection for attacking football on a broad front – in their 1960 final against Eintracht Frankfurt at Hampden Park, there had been dashing wing play from Canario and the lightning Gento on one side, Kress and Meier on the other – Liverpool had heightened his awareness of the game’s power as theatre.
In 1977, as manager of St Mirren, he had been fortunate enough to visit Anfield on one of its greatest occasions and confessed himself intoxicated by the atmosphere of a European Cup quarter-final second leg in which St Etienne were eventually overcome by a goal from David ‘Supersub’ Fairclough. ‘I didn’t walk away from the ground after the game,’ Ferguson remarked. ‘I floated. I had been caught up in the most exciting football atmosphere.’
Liverpool went on to win the trophy that year. They beat Borussia Moenchengladbach 3-1 in Rome. It was the first of their four European triumphs in the space of eight years. The second Ferguson saw, albeit without St Mirren’s permission, in 1978 at Wembley, where Bruges lost to a goal from Kenny Dalglish, one of three Scots who had been introduced to the team by Bob Paisley; the others were Graeme Souness and Alan Hansen and Ferguson was to have interesting relationships with them all.
But on the first of two visits to Anfield in the autumn of 1980 he just watched them from the stands. He came to the fortress where Liverpool had not lost a League match for nearly three years, where they had scored no fewer than ten goals on average for every one the opposition were brave or foolish enough to put past Ray Clemence, and watched Middlesbrough go the way of all flesh, albeit by a relatively creditable four goals to two.
Ferguson saw the match with Archie Knox, the former manager of Forfar Athletic, who had become his assistant during the summer when Pat Stanton went into management at Cowdenbeath. At Anfield they met Shankly, and Ferguson, in his autobiography, recalls the great man’s greeting: ‘Hello, Alex, good to see you – you are doing a terrific job up there.’ He was uttering awe-struck gratitude when Shankly went on: ‘So you’re down to have a look at our great team?’ Yes, said Ferguson, they were indeed. ‘Aye,’ said Shankly, ‘they all try that.’
Ferguson’s spying mission was in vain. Liverpool won at Pittodrie through a goal from Terry McDermott and tore the Scots apart at Anfield, a Willie Miller own goal being the first of four without reply. The full-back Phil Neal quickly got the next. At half-time came the immortal rallying cry from Aberdeen’s Drew Jarvie: ‘Come on, lads – three quick goals and we’re back in it.’ He would not have been joking. Not with Ferguson present. At any rate, Dalglish struck next and finally even Hansen came up from the back to score.
It left Ferguson no happier than you might imagine, even though his team had been facing a side destined to become European champions again, this time by beating Real Madrid. ‘He came in after the match,’ McGhee recalled, ‘and slaughtered us.
Slaughtered
us.’
McGhee then smiled. ‘I always remember that the match was sponsored by KP, the snack foods company, and they had put a plastic bag on everybody’s hook in the dressing room containing all these various nuts and cheesy crackers. After the manager had come in and had his go at us, we were all looking down and then we got quietly changed and climbed on the bus with our KP bags – nobody was leaving them behind – to go back to our hotel.’
It was Strachan who broke the silence. ‘I asked if anyone wanted to swap their chocolate dippers for salt and vinegar crisps,’ he recalled, ‘or something like that.’ Ferguson immediately snapped that, if he heard anyone laugh – then, or for the rest of the night – they were all fined a week’s wages. ‘So we’re all like this,’ said McGhee, pursing his lips, ‘just about keeping it in.
‘We leave Anfield for the city centre and at the hotel we get off the bus in our Aberdeen tracksuits with all the other bits and pieces you take to a match, plus our KP bags, when Graeme Souness arrives. He’s with his wife and another woman, maybe her sister, and he’s wearing a long, light-coloured raincoat with a fur collar, draped over his shoulders. So he’s got this style and swagger and two glamorous women – and we’ve got our KPs.
‘We sit down to dinner in the hotel restaurant and Souness is at the next table. He greets us cheerfully but we’re scared to have a laugh with him in case we get fined. So for Souness the champagne corks are popping and we’re just sitting silently eating, with Fergie glaring over at us from time to time in case anyone laughs. We felt like a bunch of wee boys.’
Strachan and the Shankly Tapes
I
t was only six years after Aberdeen’s Anfield spanking when Ferguson came down to Manchester to settle to the task of doing to Liverpool what he had done to the Old Firm. By then Aberdeen, having won a European trophy themselves, were big boys. In 1980 it had been just their bad luck to encounter the mighty Liverpool so early in a season that seemed never to recover.
In the summer they had lost Steve Archibald to Tottenham Hotspur; that is what happens to provincial Scottish clubs who win the championship, sad to say, though the £800,000 pleased Dick Donald, who always insisted on balancing the books. Though generous in spirit, he treated money in a manner that could be described as Aberdonian.
With injuries, notably to Strachan, causing further disruption, Aberdeen were beaten by Celtic to the title and won neither of the Cups. Maybe, like Dundee and Kilmarnock before them, they would prove one-hit wonders?
Not at all. Indeed, Ferguson, in that summer of 1981, was to make the second of the three signings he considered his most important for Aberdeen, giving the team a new dimension in the form of width. Peter Weir was more expensive than McGhee but proved a wise way of investing £300,000 of the Archibald money. Weir was twenty-three and had already played a few times for Scotland alongside Strachan, Miller and McLeish. Ferguson reckoned his skill and verve as a left-winger would balance the team and was emphatically vindicated.
‘Weir was the one,’ he later reflected. ‘Weir made the team. Weir brought that left-sided thing that just opened it all up. Because wee Gordon Strachan, though he was doing well on the right, kept getting bogged down – he was always heavily marked. The minute we got Weir, the opposition could no longer concentrate on our right flank, because Weir would be away down the left. He was a very good player and would have been an absolute top, top one if he hadn’t been such an introvert by nature.’ He still won plenty: a Scottish Cup in his first season, and each of the seasons after that, two championships, a League Cup and the European Cup-Winners’ Cup.
Strachan had been there from the start. He had begun at Dundee, where he became something of a teenage sensation in a friendly match against Arsenal after which he was sportingly applauded from the field by Alan Ball, a World Cup winner and England captain, who had been his direct opponent. But some considered Strachan too small and slight for the rigours of Scottish football. Billy McNeill was not one of them. He took Strachan to Aberdeen in exchange for the more seasoned and powerful midfield player Jim Shirra and £50,000. But Strachan failed to find any sort of form and, having felt the scorn of the crowd, was dropped.
McNeill’s departure, then, constituted relief and it was Ferguson under whom he thrived, Ferguson who discovered the position in which Strachan would be most effective. After various experiments, Ferguson placed him just in from the right touchline and there Strachan was not only to win titles north and south of the border but to represent Scotland in two World Cups.
All he knew of Ferguson, when McNeill’s successor arrived at Pittodrie, was the St Mirren phenomenon: ‘This incredible team. Where did these kids come from? Normally you hear of promising boys as they come through the school or youth ranks – but these seemed to come from nowhere. And they were so fit. I first came across them when I was at Dundee and they just used to run us off the pitch. But I’d never met Alex Ferguson.’
They got on well, the twenty-one-year-old and the boss fifteen years his senior. The reason was simple, said Strachan: ‘He knew I loved football and was interested in anything to do with coaching and what made people tick.’ So they travelled to night matches together in Ferguson’s car.
Strachan recalled it in 2000, when he was managing Coventry City and Ferguson, having fallen out with him, was declining even to acknowledge his presence at matches between their clubs; he missed being able to talk about the old times.
‘Going to those matches seemed natural,’ he said. ‘Like him, I couldn’t get enough football. Rangers or Celtic, Arbroath or Montrose – I didn’t mind. I used to be fascinated when, after fifteen minutes, he’d analyse a game and explain the differences between the ways the teams were playing. After a year or two, Archie Knox came as his assistant and took my place in the car. Anyway, we were playing so much European football by then that opportunities were not so frequent. I remember he used to play tapes of Bill Shankly talking. “Let’s listen to Shankly”, he’d say, and shove one in.’ Less entertaining to Ferguson’s passenger was ‘a singer he liked, some awful Glaswegian singer who performed in pubs’.
Strachan observed Ferguson’s gradual self-revelation to the players. ‘At first,’ he said, ‘we didn’t see the full extent of the drive, the aggressive will. But, when it emerged, I’d never seen anything like it in my life. My dad had got angry – but it was nothing like this.’
Arge
ş
Pite
ş
ti was a case in point. The Romanian club were Aberdeen’s next opponents after their remarkable Uefa Cup victory over Ipswich in 1981/2, when Bobby Robson’s confident assertion after a 1-1 draw at Portman Road that Aberdeen could play no better on their own ground was spectacularly disproved, not least by a rampant Weir, who rounded off a 3-1 victory by teasing Mick Mills before scoring.
Aberdeen seemed assured of further progress when they beat Arge
ş
Pite
ş
ti 3-0 at home, but the away leg began badly and Aberdeen were 2-0 down as half-time approached. Ferguson had switched from 4-4-2 to a single-striker system for the occasion, with a basic middle three supplemented by Strachan and Weir wide right and left respectively and McGhee up front. ‘It’s a great system if you’ve got the players,’ said Strachan. ‘But it was kind of thrown at us. We’d done just a day’s training, if that, and my misfortune is that in the first half, while it was all going wrong, I was on the side nearest to the manager.
‘He was on at me all the time, yelling at me to spin and link with Mark and all the other things, but I didn’t know how to do it. Honestly, I wasn’t being cheeky – I’d never played that way in my life. And then I did the silly thing. As Stuart Kennedy used to say, you should never be the one to shout back at him just before half-time. It’s like a game of tig –
you’re on
. So I knew I was in trouble when I told him to shut up or said something about the tactics or whatever it was.
‘It was a long, dark tunnel at Pite
ş
ti and I was walking alone. We got into the dressing room and he hadn’t arrived yet. In situations like this, the boys would keep their heads down. He would always be wearing these shiny black shoes and, sure enough, they appeared. They were moving about. And then they stopped – and they were pointing at me. I could feel the boys on either side of me edging away. And he came right up to me and slaughtered me.

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