Football – Bloody Hell! (6 page)
Read Football – Bloody Hell! Online
Authors: Patrick Barclay
‘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?
H
e 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.’
e 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 recollections 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”.
‘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
.’
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
T
he 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.
he 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.
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