Football – Bloody Hell! (21 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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Her selfless courage was with her, Ferguson noted, to the end; as he and his brother Martin sat by her bed on the Friday evening, she told them to leave and get some rest before their matches the next day (United were to play at Wimbledon and St Mirren, where Martin was a part-time assistant to Alex Miller, were at home to Celtic).
Months after taking over at Aberdeen, Ferguson had lost his father. He had been at Manchester United less than three weeks and now, once again, he was alone with grief. Alone in a crowd of just over 12,000 at a ground even more modest than Oxford’s; that very afternoon he was in the deep south-west of London, at Wimbledon’s Plough Lane, again seeing his team defeated.
They lost at home to Norwich City just before his forty-fifth birthday on New Year’s Eve, and they were to lose to Luton Town, and again to Wimbledon, before the end of the season. But other results were more reminiscent of United’s in the pomp of Atkinson.
They beat Liverpool, the champions, home and away, and overcame Arsenal, who were on top of the League and had gone four months unbeaten under George Graham (the Highbury board were not regretting his appointment), at Old Trafford. Nor were they disgraced by a subsequent home draw with Everton, who had just taken over from Arsenal at the top of the table and were to retrieve the title from their Merseyside neighbours that season.
‘Obviously the new manager was having an impact,’ said Arthur Albiston, ‘but what really helped our results to improve was players coming back.’ The likes of Robson, Strachan and Whiteside had not become bad players overnight.
At first Ferguson, as at Aberdeen, had been relatively restrained. ‘I’d sort of warned the lads to expect fireworks,’ said Strachan, ‘but after a few weeks they were giving me odd looks. Anger is his petrol, his fuel, and I think he was holding a bit back.’ Nor was he immune to self-doubt. ‘He was feeling his way,’ said Edwards. ‘He took a while to come to terms with English football.’
When he started to live up to his reputation, some of the players were shocked, said Albiston: ‘They’d never had anybody speaking to them like that and, while I wouldn’t say it ever got out of control, a few couldn’t get their heads round the fact that he was trying to help them.
‘I’d had an early glimpse of it in a reserve game. Some of the young lads couldn’t believe what they were hearing. They were shell-shocked. But he was looking for a response and he usually got it. If he didn’t, you were probably on your way.’
Six months after his arrival, towards the end of the season and with United safely in mid-table, they went to Tottenham for a lunchtime kick-off and the entire first team were sprayed with both barrels by an irate Ferguson. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ said Albiston.
Spurs had a very good side in that single season they spent under Ferguson’s friend David Pleat; they had taken Arsenal to a third match in the League Cup semi-finals and were to finish third in the League before losing 3-2 to Coventry City in one of the great FA Cup finals. So Ferguson had taken the trouble to analyse them in the most rigorous detail.
‘His team talk,’ said Albiston, a non-playing member of the squad that day, ‘told us what was likely to happen and how Spurs would play and so on. Chris Waddle would turn this way and that before he put his crosses in – and we’d to watch out for Mitchell Thomas coming in from left-back. And we lost 4–0 – with Thomas scoring a couple from Waddle’s crosses! When he came back to the dressing room afterwards, everybody got it. Robbo included. It was a case of “and you, and you – oh, and I almost forgot about you”. Every warning he’d given us had come to fruition.’
Not for the first time, or the last, a mighty force was released by Ferguson’s vindication. Some players were on their way out. Sivebæk never played for United again, but others’ days were numbered: the strikers Frank Stapleton, Peter Davenport and Terry Gibson, the winger Peter Barnes, the defender Graeme Hogg.
Even the warrior Whiteside and the immensely gifted McGrath were to go in time. But that was to do with the booze culture: Ferguson was embarking on a cultural revolution.
How bad was the drink problem at United? Not that bad in the context of 1986, argued Arthur Albiston. ‘Things are a lot different now,’ he said. ‘The influx of foreign players – and foreign coaches – since the mid-1990s has helped to bring about a change in the way players socialise. I don’t think our club in 1986 was very different to any other. You felt you had to let off a bit of steam after matches, especially if you’d been travelling a lot.
‘We used to bump into other players from Manchester City – or Liverpool and Everton – in the areas where most of us socialised. We all got up to the same things. Possibly what we did got highlighted more because we were underachieving.’
Certainly Liverpool got away with quite a lot. Once, having celebrated a championship, they actually played an end-of-season match at Middlesbrough when drunk – and drew 0–0. ‘We could smell it on their breath,’ an opponent ruefully recalled, ‘and still we couldn’t beat them.’
So Albiston’s is a fair description of the mood of the time. But Ferguson was ahead of his time. He had seen what fitness could do for a team at Aberdeen – and now seen what the opposite could do for United. ‘While I was doing my recuperation from the stomach problem,’ said Albiston, ‘he told me he couldn’t believe how many players were missing training because of injuries.’ And he followed his instinct that it was inseparable from the drink problem most obvious in Robson – though the captain trained like a demon when he could, as if desperate to prove he could live with the habit – and Whiteside and McGrath.
Had the old regime been too soft? Albiston, while reluctant to criticise Atkinson – ‘I had a great regard for Ron and played probably my best football under him’ – did concede: ‘He was one of those guys whose attitude was that, if you did it for him on a Saturday, the rest was fine. But if you miss too much training it’s bound to catch up with you sooner or later. It’s very hard when you miss two or three days a week and then try to play.’
Such was the class of the main culprits that Ferguson tried to be patient, even as he fielded reports of their drinking sessions and, on one occasion, even saw Whiteside and McGrath the worse for wear while appearing as guests on a football magazine programme on Granada television; persistent injuries meant they had plenty of time in which to get up to such mischief.
Robson he considered a manageable risk: the least heavy drinker and a magnificent player. Whiteside was almost as gifted, lacking only pace, but less disciplined. McGrath once had to be sent off the training pitch because he was too hung-over to run. He was an alcoholic and a hopeless case. Or so it seemed until he was transferred to Aston Villa and, with the help of Graham Taylor and later Ron Atkinson (not to forget a succession of knee surgeons), played on to a very high standard for several years, appearing gigantically in two World Cups for the Republic of Ireland.
McGrath had been shipped out of Old Trafford in the same week as Whiteside went to Everton. Whiteside went without complaint or rancour. McGrath raged at Ferguson, claiming that he had at first been offered a retirement package rather than a move. But no one accused Ferguson of haste: he had managed Whiteside and McGrath for nearly three years.
How had he tracked their often mazy movements from pub to pub? Well, some managers are born to surveillance and others have it thrust upon them and Ferguson was a bit of both. As he had been at Aberdeen, where he had quickly formed his dim view of Joe Harper. ‘It was easier to control there,’ said Albiston, ‘because Aberdeen’s a compact city. Here a manager’s got a problem. There are more distractions, more places to go.’ But that was also true of Glasgow and Ferguson had been well tutored by Stein in keeping tabs on his squad.
Disillusioned fans were only too willing to help by ringing him with sightings. ‘Put it this way,’ said Albiston, ‘you always felt you were being watched.’ And the culture slowly changed. ‘Players started to be more enthusiastic about training. The senior ones realised how good he was – and how determined to turn it around.’
Turning Off the Fans
A
s Ferguson turned in for the nights in the three-bedroom suburban semi he shared with Archie Knox until Cathy and boys joined him in the summer of 1987, he must have been aware that his had not been a wildly popular appointment.
The letters column of the local
Football Pink
, a reliable indicator, was lukewarm at best about the latest pretender to the throne of Busby. Students of the game were aware that, while Scots made good managers, those who flourished at a high level south of the border tended to have been schooled in English football, like Busby and Shankly.
George Graham was to underline that point. While crowds rolled up to watch his renascent Arsenal, and Pleat’s Tottenham, some 11 per cent of the United support turned their backs on Ferguson’s side. Not only that: despite the rise from eleventh to second in the League the following season, there was a further fall of 3 per cent in attendances. The season after that, another 7 per cent stayed away, so that on average there were 20,000 empty spaces at the 56,000-capacity stadium for every home match.
United still vied with Liverpool to be the best supported team in the land, but the landscape of English football was very different then. It was to be a lot richer and more colourful in the heyday of the Premier League, when all-seat stadiums were packed to see some of the world’s brightest stars and television contracts bulged. Indeed, the final flourish of the Atkinson era, in which United began the 1985/6 season with ten straight wins, was not even seen by the wider public because the League treated as derisory a joint offer from the BBC and ITV of £4 million a year for the rights to show matches live as well as the customary highlights.
That the broadcasters, who said they would rather show films than increase the offer, were justified in believing the club chairmen overvalued their product at that time (even though within twenty years it was to bring in a hundred times more) was emphasised by the compromise that put football back on the screens early in the new year. The League got £1.3 million for the rest of the season. Not per club: this was for the entire First Division (later Premier League). The television people, under whom a rocket was to be placed by Sky when the Premier League got under way early in the next decade, had correctly judged the public’s opinion of the game. Attendances had fallen from a peak of nearly 41.3 million in 1948/9 to an all-time low of fewer than 16.5 million and, while football made headlines, they were usually about hooliganism.
On the field, English clubs had been successful, at least until the Brussels riot that condemned them to years of exclusion from European competition. It had taken nine years, after Busby’s United had made the breakthrough in 1968, for another English team to become champions of Europe, but Liverpool’s triumph over Borussia Moenchengladbach in 1977 was the first of four by that club in an eight-year period during which Nottingham Forest, twice, and Aston Villa also took that title.
Then Liverpool made their ill-fated return to the final in 1985. It was at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, where thirty-nine mainly Italian supporters of Juventus died after a charge by Liverpool followers. The match went ahead in order to reduce the danger of further bloodshed and, in an eerie atmosphere, Juventus won through a penalty by Michel Platini.
The FA immediately withdrew all English clubs from Europe and Uefa followed up with an indefinite ban. Margaret Thatcher acknowledged the national sense of shame. English football was in disgrace and its exile from Europe contributed to the low esteem in which the game was held when Ferguson came south.
It seems a long time ago now; Mrs Thatcher had all but squeezed inflation, the bane of the 1970s, from the UK economy and Neil Kinnock was squeezing Labour’s militant left with the help of a thirty-three-year-old Peter Mandelson, under whose direction the red flag was replaced by a red rose as the party’s symbol at its annual conference.
The red half of Manchester’s football was also undergoing a revolution. Maybe not a quiet revolution, but a gradual one. ‘You didn’t notice a big difference in the training until the next summer, when we returned for the pre-season,’ said Albiston. ‘It wasn’t dramatically tougher. But it was more serious than in Ron’s time.’
Another significant difference was that, while Atkinson had devoted all his attention to the first team, Ferguson insisted on knowing everything about the reserves and youth team. The pattern established at St Mirren and Aberdeen was being followed.
Youth Culture
F
erguson was growing United from the roots. After St Mirren and Aberdeen, he would not have had it any other way. At the meeting with Edwards, Charlton and Watkins in Bishopbriggs, he had pointedly asked them: ‘Are you sure you know what you’re getting?’ Charlton, the former Busby Babe, was the first to reply, said Ferguson: ‘He told me that was why they wanted me – United had to get back to developing their own players. It was important for me to know that, and for them to know it was not going to happen overnight, and, in fairness to Martin, he supported me.’
This was twenty years on. We were speaking in Ferguson’s smart office at United’s training ground on Carrington Moor, to which the staff and players had moved from the cramped and outdated Cliff in 1999, leaving behind the vantage points from which journalists and opposition spies could peer at them, and the outstretched arms of autograph hunters. More than ever, football managers and players craved privacy, and Ferguson was no exception. He had come to refer to Carrington as ‘our fortress’.

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