Football – Bloody Hell! (17 page)
Read Football – Bloody Hell! Online
Authors: Patrick Barclay
Stark, like McGhee, had been recruited unceremoniously – ‘he just told me the money I was getting and that was it’ – but he did notice significant modifications in Ferguson since St Mirren. One was that he let Knox do training. Another was more subtle. ‘I think the biggest compliment you can pay Alex Ferguson,’ Stark said, ‘is that, for all the changes that have taken place in football, he has always adapted. There were signs of that when I got to Aberdeen. He hadn’t changed in terms of volatility or drive. But I noticed in the first day’s training that he was learning how to manage international players.
‘At St Mirren he’d expected nothing less than flat out from everybody. So I watched Willie Miller . . . and then I looked at Fergie. And there was nothing. And that was significant. Because Willie was the worst trainer in the world. Fantastic player, consistent, second to none. But he just didn’t train at all and Fergie seemed willing to accept that because of what he did in matches. He was kind of on a pedestal along with Alex McLeish and maybe even Jim Leighton. That’s not to say he wouldn’t criticise them – but not to the degree that the rest of us got. Including the likes of Strachan and McGhee.’
Absent friends encountered mixed fortunes. Doug Rougvie became something of a cult figure at Chelsea but was eventually transferred to Brighton and Hove Albion, who had just been relegated to the Third Division, for less than half the £150,000 Aberdeen had received. McGhee, after scoring seven goals in thirty Bundesliga matches, returned to Scotland to join Celtic for £150,000. Strachan, however, was an instant hit at Old Trafford. Not only did seven penalties help him to become United’s second highest League scorer on fifteen goals, just one behind Mark Hughes, as Ron Atkinson’s team finished fourth in the League; he won an FA Cup winners’ medal when United beat the champions, Everton, with a goal from Norman Whiteside at Wembley. Among Strachan’s guests that day was Alex Ferguson. So much for talk of bad blood between them; the time for that had still to arrive.
Doing Deals
F
erguson had seen Strachan’s departure coming – it was not too difficult, given the player’s habit of expressing weariness with the battles against the same Old Firm faces, which were so often contorted with a rage against his trickery – to the extent that after the 1983 Cup final, when Strachan came into Pittodrie to hear he was being fined for his abrupt departure from St Andrews, he met Billy Stark in the lobby. Correctly deducing that Stark was to be his replacement, he mentioned it to Ferguson and indicated that he would like to see out the final year of his contract.
erguson had seen Strachan’s departure coming – it was not too difficult, given the player’s habit of expressing weariness with the battles against the same Old Firm faces, which were so often contorted with a rage against his trickery – to the extent that after the 1983 Cup final, when Strachan came into Pittodrie to hear he was being fined for his abrupt departure from St Andrews, he met Billy Stark in the lobby. Correctly deducing that Stark was to be his replacement, he mentioned it to Ferguson and indicated that he would like to see out the final year of his contract.
In those pre-Bosman days (before the 1995 court case in which a Belgian footballer earned his profession greater freedom of movement), a club would still receive a transfer fee for an out-of-contract player, but it would be governed by his market value only if he stayed in Britain. If he went to a European club, a formula for compensation would come into play which took account of the player’s final salary.
Given that Strachan was on a basic £15,000 a year, which, even with the bonuses paid for success in Europe in the historic season of 1982/3, did not rise to more than £35,000, Aberdeen would receive considerably less than £200,000 for him from Europe. They hoped to treble or even quadruple that in England and Ferguson’s account is that he, personally, tried to arrange a transfer with various clubs south of the border before settling on a £500,000 deal with Manchester United that was presented to Strachan as a
fait accompli
. What he did not know was that Strachan had already signed a letter of intent to join Cologne in Germany.
fait accompli
. What he did not know was that Strachan had already signed a letter of intent to join Cologne in Germany.
Ferguson goes on to say that when he became aware of it he was aghast, Strachan, too, began to acknowledge that a terrible mistake had been made, and that there was general relief when Aberdeen were advised that the Cologne letter had no legal validity, after which Strachan signed for United.
Strachan recalled approaching his future from a different direction. ‘I had a simple choice,’ he said. ‘There was Cologne and the Italian club Verona [who were to win the Italian championship the following season for the only time in their history]. I felt all alone. I had no agent. I was on £300 a week basic and I had a mortgage. I was twenty-seven and it was time to give my family some security before I got a broken leg or something. I had to sign for somebody. So I signed this piece of paper saying I’d go to Cologne, who were offering £1,600 a week [or £80,000 a year, more than twice as much as he could ever hope to earn from Aberdeen]. Then Manchester United came in and I had to explain to Alex that I wanted to go there instead.’
The transfer was held up for several weeks after Cologne complained to Uefa and a deal was reached in which Aberdeen would make them a payment and United travel to Germany to play a friendly match for their financial benefit. It never took place.
The signing of the letter had been arranged by Bernd Killat, an agent based in Germany who had arranged pre-season tours for Aberdeen and done work for Ferguson. When Aberdeen renewed their agreement with the kit manufacturer Adidas, for example. ‘I negotiated a new deal for Ferguson with Adidas at the same time,’ said Killat. ‘It was for a lot of money.’ He and Ferguson got on so well, he added, that on one occasion he stayed for a fortnight at the Fergusons’ house in Cults.
For bringing together Strachan and Cologne, he was due to receive the
Deutschmark
equivalent of £40,000. It was a lot of money: even at Aberdeen prices, he could have bought a small house with that. But when the deal broke down he got nothing. Killat held ‘the influence of Ferguson’ responsible. Certainly Ferguson seemed happy enough with the outcome. ‘When I eventually went to sign for United,’ said Strachan, ‘Alex came with me. I’ve never heard of a manager doing that.’ It was indeed unusual to find a manager so proud to be selling a top player. Except in the case of Ferguson, who had also turned up at Tottenham with Archibald in 1980.
Deutschmark
equivalent of £40,000. It was a lot of money: even at Aberdeen prices, he could have bought a small house with that. But when the deal broke down he got nothing. Killat held ‘the influence of Ferguson’ responsible. Certainly Ferguson seemed happy enough with the outcome. ‘When I eventually went to sign for United,’ said Strachan, ‘Alex came with me. I’ve never heard of a manager doing that.’ It was indeed unusual to find a manager so proud to be selling a top player. Except in the case of Ferguson, who had also turned up at Tottenham with Archibald in 1980.
‘And less than a year later,’ said Strachan, ‘he was my guest at Wembley. He rang me on the morning of the Cup final, to encourage me and tell me that fortune favoured the brave and all that, and then came to the United reception afterwards. In fact, Gary Bailey [the United goalkeeper] thought he was my dad, because he was sitting with me all night.’
McGhee’s departure, arranged by Killat, was less complicated. It was known that he would go to Hamburg at the end of the 1983/4 season and the deal brought in £300,000, or a profit of £230,000 on the outlay to Newcastle, emphasising how Ferguson, with his skill in developing players, was more than funding his salary increases. McGhee left with as much goodwill as Ferguson could summon and later they became friends for a time.
Snubbing McGhee
M
cGhee, after his German sojourn, played for Celtic and Newcastle again and in 1991, when he became player/manager of Reading, it was on the recommendation of Ferguson. Thus Ferguson did for McGhee what Ally MacLeod had done for him – and McGhee was soon climbing the ladder.
cGhee, after his German sojourn, played for Celtic and Newcastle again and in 1991, when he became player/manager of Reading, it was on the recommendation of Ferguson. Thus Ferguson did for McGhee what Ally MacLeod had done for him – and McGhee was soon climbing the ladder.
In his second full season, Reading were promoted from the Third Division as champions and McGhee had them challenging for another promotion when, in December 1994, he was approached by the struggling Premier League club Leicester City. Though under contract, McGhee quit. Unable to keep Leicester up, he again walked out to join Wolverhampton Wanderers a year later, thereby acquiring a reputation for disloyalty that was to stick.
Wolves were in the same division as Leicester – and at the bottom of it. But under McGhee they avoided relegation and the next season they finished third, reaching the promotion play-offs, in which they lost over two legs to Crystal Palace, the eventual qualifiers for the Premier League. Their midfield sometimes included Darren Ferguson. His father, however, was no longer speaking to McGhee.
Darren had made a few dozen appearances for Manchester United before joining Wolves, then managed by Graham Turner, in January 1994. Turner soon gave way to Graham Taylor. And then came McGhee. Up to that point, McGhee recalled, he had either rung Ferguson or been rung by him every two or three weeks. Early in 1995, shortly after he had taken his new Leicester charges to play Ferguson’s champions at Old Trafford and come away with an eyebrow-raising 1-1 draw, the phone rang in his office.
‘Cole or Collymore?’ asked Ferguson.
‘Collymore,’ replied McGhee.
It was the wrong answer, for Ferguson was about to break the British transfer record by signing Andy Cole from Newcastle for £7 million (including the value of the winger Keith Gillespie, assessed at £1 million, who went the other way). In fact Ferguson would clearly have been happy with either centre-forward for, after initially being rebuffed by Kevin Keegan when he tried for Cole, he made strenuous efforts to persuade Frank Clark, then manager of Nottingham Forest, to part with Stan Collymore.
McGhee went on: ‘He explained that, if United had been a counter-attacking team, he’d definitely have gone for Collymore but that, because they tended to spend a lot of time in and around the opposition’s penalty area, Cole, being a predator, was probably the better choice. I listened, as always. “Oh well,” he added, “if I’m going to spend £7 million, I may as well get on with it.” And the next day I read that he’d bid for Cole. Those were the sort of intimate conversations we’d have.
‘In fact, he was the one who talked me into walking out of Leicester. After I’d done it, when I got home, I actually felt physically sick. But I had done it. I was going to Wolves. And then – bang! – nothing. He had slammed the door shut. The calls stopped. And to this day I cannot be sure why.
‘People thought it might have been something to do with Darren, but I never had a problem with Darren. I often think that, when he advised me to go to Wolves, the idea was that, if I did well there, the next step was Manchester United. At least he made me feel that. And maybe he didn’t think I had done well at Wolves.’ But McGhee’s first eighteen months had been promising enough. And as he said: ‘It was from the day I joined Wolves that the calls stopped.’
In the end McGhee became just one more manager not to get Wolves back to the top division. He was dismissed in November 1998. ‘I always remember that, the weekend after I got the sack, Mick McCarthy [McCarthy was manager of the Republic of Ireland squad at the time] asked me to go to a match at Blackburn and watch a couple of the Irish lads who were playing. And Alex Ferguson was there. He was standing by a door when Tom Finn, who was the club secretary at Blackburn, said, ‘Your mate’s here’ and motioned me towards him. And he walked right past me. And he’s hardly spoken to me since, except when it’s been absolutely necessary, at an Aberdeen function or something. I’ve phoned him a couple of times to ask about things, but there’s no relationship.’
McGhee was speaking early in 2009, when he was in charge of Motherwell. That summer he became the tenth manager to try to fill Ferguson’s shiny black shoes at Aberdeen. His first competitive match was at home to the Czech club Sigma Olomouc. In the first qualifying round of the Uefa Cup at Pittodrie, on the turf where Bayern Munich had once quaked, the Czechs won 5–1.
Scottish teams no longer caused a stir in Europe. The times when Ferguson (and Jim McLean) strode out in Jock Stein’s footsteps were history. And no longer was there any domestic challenge to the Old Firm. Ferguson had left all that behind. He was a quarter of a century on. His Manchester United had reached the Champions League final of 2009, and won the one before that. From nowhere could the scale of his achievements be seen in such stark relief as Aberdeen.
For a time it was widely believed that McGhee might be the next outstanding manager to come from West Central Scotland, after Busby, Shankly, Stein, Ferguson and George Graham, who was winning English titles with Arsenal in 1989 and 1991 while Ferguson still sought his Old Trafford formula.
McGhee’s Wolverhampton experience put paid to such talk. After nearly two years out of the game – with the blessing of Ferguson, whose recommendations were frequently sought by prospective employers, he would have been unlikely to manage that – he turned up at Millwall and, with Archie Knox at his side, seemed to conjure the old magic. The east London club were promoted from what is now League One as champions and finished fourth in the equivalent of the Championship. Defeat by Birmingham City in the play-off semi-finals closed the door to the Premier League, however, and again McGhee was to lose his job, after three years, which also proved the case at Brighton.
Back in Scotland, he did well enough at Motherwell to be a strong candidate for the post of national team manager (it went to George Burley) and then came the return to Pittodrie, where thirty years earlier his engagement to replace Joe Harper had put the Ferguson stamp on Aberdeen. The North Sea still roared at the back of the Beach End stand but inside lay a different, less exciting and optimistic, world.
Life and Death with Big Jock
I
t was at the start of the 1984/5 season that Ferguson received the call to combine his Aberdeen duties with assistance to Jock Stein, by now national team manger after his ousting at Celtic and a brief stay at Leeds United. His previous aide, Jim McLean, had quit in order to concentrate on Dundee United, but Ferguson, while aware of the hazards of a dual role, was never going to pass up an opportunity to learn at close quarters from this ‘one-man university’ of management.
t was at the start of the 1984/5 season that Ferguson received the call to combine his Aberdeen duties with assistance to Jock Stein, by now national team manger after his ousting at Celtic and a brief stay at Leeds United. His previous aide, Jim McLean, had quit in order to concentrate on Dundee United, but Ferguson, while aware of the hazards of a dual role, was never going to pass up an opportunity to learn at close quarters from this ‘one-man university’ of management.
Although he had become a friend of Stein’s, there would always be an element of awe. Not that this constrained Ferguson from asking to be responsible for the preparation of training – a task he himself now delegated – and to be involved in picking the team. Stein was happy to agree to the first request but naturally suspicious of the second. He said he would do as he assumed Ferguson did at Aberdeen: in other words, listen with respect to the views of his assistant (Knox had by now left to manage Dundee and been replaced by the retired central defender Willie Garner) but pick his own team.
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