Football – Bloody Hell! (11 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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‘After the game, Ferguson went loopy. I was in a corner getting changed when suddenly he threw a boot at me. That’s why I always have a laugh when people talk about the David Beckham incident.’ This right-sided midfielder escaped injury – while Beckham was to require a couple of stitches over an eye, Stark got away with a blow on a shoulder – but the memory remains vivid. ‘I was distraught and yet it was a defining moment. I don’t believe these incidents were off the cuff. Part of his method was to test players, to see if they had the stuff to go forward rather than buckle.
‘I resolved to prove myself to him. I never again, in my career, turned my back on the ball. If he’d just had a quiet word with me, it might have been different. But the ferocity of the message embedded it. I was about nineteen at the time – and it saw me through another seventeen years.’
The ‘hairdryer’ treatment – as Mark Hughes was to describe it at Manchester United – was often in evidence. ‘He’d come right up to players, bawling in their faces,’ said Stark. ‘But nobody ever challenged it. You just took it.’ As Provan observed: ‘Players in those days didn’t answer back. He got through to them. And we were promoted.’
Among those taking notice was Ally MacLeod, by now at Aberdeen but preparing to take charge of the Scottish national squad. As Willie Cunningham had done at St Mirren, he asked Ferguson if he fancied being his successor at Pittodrie, but on this occasion Ferguson put his own interpretation on Jock Stein’s advice. Although Aberdeen were a bigger club with room for expansion – under MacLeod they had finished third in the League and won the League Cup, and plans were already under way to develop their ground into a 23,000-capacity all-seater to take advantage of the North Sea oil boom – he told MacLeod he preferred to try to take St Mirren to the same level.
It was never going to happen. Although crowds had risen at St Mirren, money remained tight and Ferguson’s young team struggled in the Premier League, especially after Christmas, winning only four of their last eighteen matches (and losing twice to Billy McNeill’s championship-challenging Aberdeen). The threat of relegation was kept at bay, but the atmosphere at the club became inimical to progress of the sort envisaged by Ferguson a year earlier.
A Nest of Vipers
E
very account makes Love Street sound like a nest of vipers. Not least Ferguson’s, which portrayed Willie Todd, the director who had taken over from Harold Currie as chairman, as an ego-driven megalomaniac meddler with a constant need to be put in his place. Todd’s ally on a quarrelling board was John Corson, whom Ferguson dismissed as a footballing ignoramus unable to recognise Fitzpatrick when he was club captain. Michael Crick’s book offers a balanced picture of Todd in quoting the former director Tom Moran: ‘Bill Todd was one of those guys that, once you got on the wrong side of him, there was no dealing with him . . . he and Fergie were at each other’s throats.’
So much for the office politics, which were to become so bitter that Ferguson’s secretary, June Sullivan, was drawn into a conflict of loyalties that led to Ferguson first speaking sharply to her and then not speaking to her at all.
That the club, despite an increase in the average crowd from 2,000 to 11,000, had been unable to keep pace with Ferguson’s ambitions was emphasised by reports speculating that he might succeed Jock Wallace at Rangers. Nor was he in any mood to disbelieve his own publicity. At one stage towards the end of that 1977/8 season, he demanded not only a Mercedes car but a salary of £25,000 which St Mirren clearly could not afford (to put it in perspective, at that time McNeill had Aberdeen challenging for the championship on £11,500 a year). Something must have told him he was in a position of strength and everyone who was at St Mirren then – except Ferguson – says it was an indication that Aberdeen would offer him McNeill’s job when the former Celtic captain returned to Parkhead to take over from Jock Stein.
The exact sequence of events is hard to define. All that seems plain is the implausibility of Ferguson’s claim, both to the industrial tribunal and in a subsequent book,
A Light in the North
, written while he was at Aberdeen, that the approach from Aberdeen came on the evening of the day on which St Mirren sacked him.
He writes in his autobiography of a 1-0 victory at Ayr that eased the club’s relegation worries and adds: ‘Willie Todd and I were no longer talking to each other and when Aberdeen made another approach to me there could be only one reaction.’ The length of time between the Ayr match and the approach is not specified, but the match took place on 18 March and he was not sacked by St Mirren until 31May – nearly eleven weeks later later and a full month after the end of the season.
Not only that: ‘My position [in deciding how to receive Aberdeen’s advances] was complicated by the fear that St Mirren might have enough of a contractual hold on me to encourage them to sue. So I foolishly delayed announcing my decision to leave and thus gave Todd a chance to implement his plans to get rid of me.’ This last sentence removes any doubt that both Todd and Ferguson correctly believed the end was nigh before the ugly formality of dismissal confirmed it.
But for how long? Given the uncharacteristic vagueness of Ferguson’s recollection, the best hope of precision went to the grave with Jim Rodger in 1997.
In
A Light in the North
, Ferguson wrote: ‘This time contact was made with me through one of the most powerful and influential sports writers in Britain ([Rodger] . . . a man of the utmost integrity and one you can trust with your life.’ In his autobiography, he calls Rodger ‘an invaluable friend to me’. But Rodger was also a friend to Todd and St Mirren, whom he just as discreetly tipped off not only that Ferguson was planning to leave – and take the bright young Stark with him – but that Aberdeen were hoping to avoid paying St Mirren compensation for the three years left on Ferguson’s contract.
So Todd did indeed start plotting and, on the last day of May 1978, Ferguson was summoned to Love Street, sacked, and read a list of thirteen supposed offences from a typewritten sheet to which St Mirren were to allude in claiming that he had broken his contract. Ferguson laughed, saying the only reason to get rid of a manager was incompetence, but cleared his desk and the same evening was speaking to the Aberdeen chairman, Dick Donald, accepting his offer and promising to drive north the next morning. A whirlwind romance and no mistake.
The Paisley public, of course, and St Mirren squad were shocked but, said Stark, the players had little chance to dwell on the news because it came in the close season and the nation was preoccupied with Scotland’s prospects at the forthcoming World Cup.
As Ferguson hit the road, his old mentor Ally MacLeod, whose bullish prognostications about what the Scots could achieve in Argentina had caused much excitement in the land and curiosity farther afield, was supervising one of the last training sessions before the match against Peru that was to burst the bubble. Scotland lost 3-1 and, by way of complication, were obliged to send Willie Johnston home for failing a drugs test. Then they held Iran to 1-1 only with the help of an own goal. The final match was against mighty Holland and, with MacLeod’s men requiring to win by three to reach the knockout stage, one wit famously asked: ‘Where are we going to find three Dutchmen prepared to score own goals?’
At one stage, Scotland did in fact lead 3-1, Archie Gemmill’s memorable solo providing false hope. The match ended 3-2. By then Ferguson was in the United States with the Aberdeen vice-chairman, Chris Anderson, ‘studying the commercial initiatives associated with the North American Soccer League’ (yes, the pace of life had certainly quickened since he encountered Aberdeen) before taking a family holiday in Malta.
Not that he forgot his farewells. Stark remembered taking a call from him.
St Mirren rose from eighth to sixth under Jim Clunie, then a heady third, then, under McFarlane, fourth, fifth and fifth again. But Aberdeen were always ahead of them; in the year St Mirren finished third, Ferguson’s Aberdeen were champions. Nor did the Love Street crowds quite match the levels of the Ferguson era. Players were lost, some of them, such as Weir and Stark, to Ferguson. The dream had died – or moved to Aberdeen.
Rancour and Defeat
B
ehind was left rancour and bewilderment. Rumours often accompany the departure of a football manager and this was a classic case as the Scottish football community buzzed with talk of illicit payments and tax evasion that was, to an extent, borne out by the tribunal hearing a few months later.
Some of St Mirren’s allegations against Ferguson were risible: that he had gone to the European Cup final, which was in London that year (Liverpool beat Bruges through a goal by Kenny Dalglish and, Ferguson pointed out, he saw it at his own expense); and allowed Love Street to be used free of charge for a Scottish Junior Cup semi-final (the club pettily argued that a fee might have been charged).
Others were dubious: that he had been paid for giving advice to a bookmaker (the man was an old friend); that he had taken £25 a week in expenses without the directors’ knowledge (Ferguson later produced a letter contradicting this).
Further allegations, including those of unauthorised bonus offers to players, did indeed indicate an unacceptably cavalier attitude to relations with the board – and were to conspire in his painful defeat at the tribunal.
Ricky McFarlane was at his side throughout those final months at St Mirren. ‘As someone who worked more closely with him than anyone,’ he said, ‘I would simply not countenance the idea of any serious financial irregularity. There were a few occasions when he did things without the authority of the board, with players and so on, but it was never to do with his own personal gain. I know him well enough to be utterly certain about that.’
But the rumour mill, McFarlane implied, had been even more unkind to Willie Todd, who was held responsible for undermining Ferguson – ‘there were others on the board trying to do that’ – and deserved better. ‘Willie got a bad name and has had a bad name in Paisley ever since. I feel sorry for him and I think it is very sad, because Willie loved the club and put a lot of his own money into it, and did some super things for Alex.’ Including sanction loans; more than £3,500 was owed to the club by Ferguson in accounts published, to Ferguson’s mind mischievously, after his departure. ‘Willie was good to Alex,’ said McFarlane. ‘And was a good man.’
In an interview with the
Guardian
in May 2008, Todd spoke of regret. ‘Nobody at the club worked harder than Alex did,’ he recalled, ‘and everyone was grateful for what he achieved. I got on well with him at the time, we were good friends and I have seen him a few times since . . . But in 1978 it was a simple case of myself, as chairman, doing what was best for the football club. I had no option but to sack him in the end.
‘Four days before he eventually left, I knew perfectly well that he had told all the staff that he was moving to Aberdeen . . . Jim Rodger told us that Alex had asked at least one member of the squad to go to Aberdeen with him. It was a clear breach of contract on his part. He was still under contract to St Mirren and Aberdeen had not contacted us to discuss compensation.
‘There were various other stories at the time, such as Alex wanting players to receive tax-free expenses, but that was not the real issue. The issue was St Mirren being destabilised because the manager wanted to leave.’ Hence the tribunal. ‘I do regret it. As I said, we got on well. It was just a pity Aberdeen had not come out and said they wanted our manager because then we could have spoken about compensation and done things amicably.’
A year later, I asked Todd if he wanted to add to that. By now he was eighty-eight, but still a frequent attender at St Mirren’s matches and proud of his status as the club’s first honorary president; even Ferguson never disputed that Todd was a true fan. But it was not a welcome approach. ‘I don’t want to be bothered,’ he said. ‘I’m nearly ninety years of age and it was all a long time ago. We didn’t want to do anything bad. But we had to do what the lawyers told us. If we hadn’t taken their advice, maybe we’d have ended up with no compensation.
‘When I say I regret it, I regret that mud had to be thrown at Alex’s reputation. I don’t regret getting compensation from Aberdeen.’
The Forgotten Man
W
hile the dispute was raging, McFarlane stayed neutral. Because of what he knew, he declined to appear for either Ferguson or St Mirren at the tribunal.
This is not, of course, mentioned in Ferguson’s autobiography, which simply says that, after being refused Jim McLean’s permission to take Walter Smith from Dundee United as his assistant, he went for Pat Stanton, who had just ended his playing career at Aberdeen. ‘He might deny that he wanted me to go,’ said McFarlane, ‘but it’s the truth. He’s that kind of person – you’re either with him or you’re not – but it would have been difficult for me to go to Aberdeen, for a lot of reasons.’
One was that the sums didn’t add up. McFarlane had built a house in the new town of East Kilbride – near Ferguson, who had moved Cathy and the boys from the semi in Simshill – and it was a substantial detached residence, of the proportions required to accommodate a growing family (the McFarlanes ended up with five children). ‘If I’d sold it,’ he said, ‘such were the house prices in Aberdeen at the time that I’d have got only a two-bed terrace for the same money. I was offered £6,000 a year to be Alex’s assistant. When you’ve got a young family settled at school, that sort of money’s not going to sway you. If it had been a huge salary like some people get in football now, it might have been different.

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