Football – Bloody Hell! (23 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

BOOK: Football – Bloody Hell!
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‘So did the people running the club. When people were saying he’d had enough time and they should get rid of him, I tried to find out why they seemed so happy with him. They could see the club growing. They could see him grabbing all the best kids, as usual.’ Like Giggs. And Beckham, who had also been courted by Tottenham. But he needed to invest in mature players for the medium term and the early dividends did not impress many outside observers.
He had tried to get Beardsley, Gary Lineker’s brilliant foil in the England team, from Newcastle but seen him join Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool instead. If that was a painful defeat, Ferguson also had to cope with the embarrassment of the own goal that cost him John Barnes. With Barnes and Beardsley lending more style than even Anfield had known, Ferguson’s
bêtes noires
were to claim two more championships right under his nose. In that first summer, he had been offered Barnes by Graham Taylor, then Watford’s manager, for £900,000 and stalled fatally and later moaned that, as a newcomer to English football, he should have received better guidance from the United staff.
What – three years after the whole world had seen Barnes’s wonder goal for England against Brazil in the Maracanã? It was an extraordinarily limp excuse.
With inherited players, by and large, Ferguson lifted United from eleventh to second in his first full season, 1987/8. There were only two newcomers and in each case the deal had pleased Edwards as well as Ferguson because the fees were tribunal-set and in line with United’s valuation.
The wisdom of having Anderson approached on England duty was borne out by the relatively modest outlay of £250,000. Brian McClair, from Celtic, cost £850,000, but immediately gave excellent value. He had some qualities in common with the centre-forward, Mark McGhee, who had been Ferguson’s first signing for Aberdeen: mobility, intelligence and a readiness to shoulder burdens for the team. But he also scored a lot of goals. Straight away he became the first United player since George Best to break the twenty barrier in a League season (in all he got twenty-four, including five penalties). Meanwhile, Anderson provided power and drive from the back – and effervescence in the dressing room.
Just before Christmas, an extremely significant signing was made when Steve Bruce came from Norwich City for £825,000. This proved quite a coup, for Bruce, though not quick or elegant, was a footballing centre-half with additional assets of leadership, leonine bravery and a knack of goalscoring whose memory was to be immortalised when his two goals won a thrilling match against Sheffield Wednesday in the run-in to the 1993 championship.
That Ferguson was beginning to settle became obvious on Boxing Day when United lost at Newcastle and Bryan Robson, a rare recipient of his ire, felt its full force. Gordon Strachan was there: ‘I remember going home to my wife and saying I’d just seen a kid who was phenomenal. He played for Newcastle and his name was Paul Gascoigne and he had given Bryan Robson such a hard time that Fergie was yelling abuse at Bryan from the dugout.’
Ferguson resolved to buy Gascoigne and in the summer of 1988, after being rebuffed by Newcastle’s manager, Willie McFaul, tried the direct route. Illicitly, of course. Just before he went abroad on holiday, Gascoigne rang to say he would be joining United. While in Malta, however, Ferguson discovered that Gazza had gone to Tottenham instead. But he did get Hughes back to Old Trafford and brought Jim Leighton from Aberdeen to keep goal.
It had been a pretty good season: a Ferguson sort of season in that it featured a characteristically one-eyed moan at Bobby Robson about there being an England friendly in Israel three days before United went to Arsenal in the FA Cup fifth round and lost 2-1. No member of either side featured in the international. Nor did Ferguson balance his remarks with a recognition that, as manager of Aberdeen and Scotland only two years earlier, he had squeezed two friendly internationals into a month in which his club played no fewer than six matches in twenty-two days. One of the internationals was, in fact, the annual unfriendly against England but the other took place in, of all places, Israel. He used Willie Miller and Alex McLeish in both friendlies, moreover, and Jim Bett in one of them. Once again, his photographic memory was selecting its images.
There had been another Ferguson hallmark in the incident with Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool in the April of that 1987/8 season. The match had finished 3-3 and afterwards Ferguson gave a radio interview in which he implied, quite vividly – ‘a lot of managers have to leave here choking on their own sick . . .’ – that opponents and referees came under undue pressure at Anfield. Dalglish, walking past with a baby in his arms, told the interviewer: ‘You might as well talk to my daughter – you’ll get more sense out of her.’
For Ferguson to be irate about a draw at Anfield was a sign of progress; Liverpool were so markedly the finest team in England that nine days later, after they had beaten Nottingham Forest 5-0 at Anfield, the great Sir Tom Finney deemed their display as good as anything he had ever seen on a football pitch.
As it became obvious that the season would bring United no trophy, Ferguson addressed the future – and Arthur Albiston’s would be elsewhere. ‘I’d got my fitness back,’ he recalled, ‘and we won a few games, but then I got left out and didn’t agree with that and told him so. “I understand your problem,” he said. To be fair to him, he kept me involved and travelling with the squad. He knew that, having been in the team so long [Albiston had made almost five hundred appearances] I’d be hurting. From time to time, he’d ask me to have a word with one of the younger reserves. He treated me well and I’ve got nothing but respect for him.’
Ferguson had never screamed at the mild-mannered Albiston. Never? Well, hardly ever. ‘The only time I can remember was when he and Archie Knox were playing head tennis in the gym. I was recuperating at the time and they started arguing about whether a ball was in or out. And he asked me what I thought and I said Archie was right. I got quite a blast for that. Just for giving an honest opinion!’ Albiston smiled. ‘I don’t think I was the first.’
Soon Albiston was off to rejoin Atkinson at West Bromwich Albion. He was sorry to miss out on what seemed likely to be an exciting time at United. While they had never made Liverpool glance anxiously back on the road to the championship, a rise of nine places suggested serious progress.
The supporters, however, were not convinced. The last home crowd of the season was 28,040, to watch Wimbledon. Yet when Ferguson travelled with Bobby Charlton to Barcelona to seal the £1.8 million deal for Hughes his philosophy was one of near-boundless optimism. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ he recalled. ‘We looked around at those towering stands and, wistfully, Bobby said, “We should be like Barcelona”. And I said, “Why aren’t we?” And he said, “I don’t know”.’ From then, Ferguson waged an intermittent campaign with the board to have the Old Trafford capacity increased. When Ferguson went to Barcelona for Hughes, it held 56,000 and Camp Nou nearly twice as many. Twenty years later, it held 76,000 and the gap had closed to 20,000. Old Trafford, moreover, seldom had an empty seat at a League match.
That was far from the case in 1988/9, when, despite Hughes and McClair – not to mention Robson – United struggled for goals, managing only forty-five in their thirty-eight League matches, and could attract only 23,368 when Wimbledon came in early May; fixtures against Coventry City and Everton pulled in few more.
Strachan Leaves the Nest
F
or Ferguson there was the pleasure of that first infusion of youth. It took place in the mid-winter of 1988/9. After Queens Park Rangers had drawn 0-0 at Old Trafford in the third round of the FA Cup, Ferguson decided to send a young team to west London for the replay: it would include Lee Martin, the ill-starred Tony Gill, Russell Beardsmore in Strachan’s role on the right and the seventeen-year-old Lee Sharpe, whom Ferguson had travelled to Torquay to watch one rainy night and unhesitatingly signed (he went on to play for England but liked his nightlife and suffered from injuries and never quite fulfilled his potential).
‘What I wanted to show,’ said Ferguson, ‘was a willingness to promote anyone who did well in the reserves. The worst thing for an older player is to lose his place to a younger man. It’s the best competition you can ever get in a football club. There’s no doubt about that.’ There was no excuse for the displaced; it was not as if the manager, having bought a big name, needed to find a place for his expensive purchase. Accordingly Ferguson found it ‘interesting’ that Strachan, Robson and Whiteside expressed a wish to travel with the team to west London, even though they were injured. He mentioned it to Archie Knox, who said they were clearly concerned about the youngsters coming through. So he decided to take them.
They saw a thrilling match which United would have won 2-1 but for a late equaliser. United did go through anyway, with a 3-0 victory in a third match back at Old Trafford. They then overcame Oxford United and, after a replay, Bournemouth. Ferguson’s team were in the quarter-finals, and again at home, albeit to a fine Nottingham Forest side who were about to win the League Cup. This proved the start of a slump. Not only did United fall from fifth to eleventh at the end of the season, they let their Cup hopes be dashed by Forest in a passive manner that angered their manager.
He would not have liked being beaten by Brian Clough anyway; he found Clough rude and had been snubbed by him at least once, when he and Edwards had called unannounced at Forest’s City Ground only to be told that the manager was unavailable. Where, Ferguson asked, was the passion supposed to mark his teams? And yet seven of the side that day were Ferguson signings.
There were Leighton, Bruce, McClair, and Hughes. The utility player Mal Donaghy from Luton Town stood alongside Robson. There was the former Dundee United winger Ralph Milne, with whom Ferguson was unsuccessfully trying to replace Jesper Olsen (to think that it could have been John Barnes). And the teenage flier Sharpe.
The main conclusion to which Ferguson came, however, was that he had to get rid of Strachan, whom he felt had been intimidated by Stuart Pearce.
Two days later, Ferguson had an offer of £200,000 from Ron Atkinson, now managing Sheffield Wednesday. He then rang Howard Wilkinson at Leeds United, whom he had promised to contact if Strachan ever became available, and asked for £300,000, which was agreed. Strachan made his Leeds debut at the weekend. He was thirty-two and dropping a division, but not for long. The following season Leeds were promoted as champions and Strachan received a letter of congratulation from Ferguson.
Two seasons after that, they were champions of all England. Strachan had beaten Ferguson to the honour. Leeds, with Gary McAllister, David Batty and Gary Speed joining Strachan in a wonderfully balanced midfield, had overtaken Ferguson’s United in the closing stages of the race to the title. This time there was no letter.
Nor did the course of events imply that Ferguson had blundered in getting rid of Strachan. ‘People said that,’ reflected Strachan later, ‘but he was right to sell.’ The replacement Ferguson had in mind went elsewhere, for United could not match the salary Rangers offered Trevor Steven to leave Everton for Scotland (Ferguson’s old club had become hugely and, as it turned out, overly ambitious). But the association was over. Strachan had become stale. The move to Elland Road revived him. He would never have been the same player under Ferguson at Old Trafford.
A consequence of the Old Trafford defeat that had sent him to Howard Wilkinson at Leeds was that United’s season petered out. If only that had been all.
Forest strode on to play Liverpool in the semi-final at the neutral venue of Hillsborough, the home of Sheffield Wednesday, where, as the match kicked off, ninety-five people died in the crush at the Liverpool supporters’ Leppings Lane End. Among the first telephone calls taken by Kenny Dalglish was one from Ferguson.
When the abandoned match was played at Old Trafford three weeks later, Liverpool won 3-1. They proceeded to Wembley and beat Everton in the final. Dalglish’s team, for all the strains of the mourning process, also kept winning in the League and would have taken the title as well but for the most dramatic transformation in the history of the competition.
Needing only to avoid a two-goal defeat by Arsenal at Anfield in the final match to fend off the challenge of George Graham’s men, they trailed by one until the ninety-fourth and concluding minute, when Michael Thomas struck. Ferguson, watching on television, celebrated like an Arsenal supporter. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so delighted in my life to see anyone score a goal,’ he said. ‘You have to bear in mind that I had a fear of Liverpool when I came down.’ And he believed this rough displacement from their perch could only assist him, even though his own team had finished ten places and twenty-five points behind the champions.
Welcome to Hell
F
or United – no matter what happened to Liverpool – things had to get better. And they did, but only after they had got worse. The season 1989/90 was to be Ferguson’s most hellish and yet there was a glimpse of heaven at the end, with his first trophy. It was a season that had everything, including the most bizarre pre-match entertainment, provided by one Michael Knighton.
The background was that Martin Edwards, having sunk himself £1 million into debt to buy a 50.2 per cent stake in United (his father had left him only 16 per cent), wanted to sell. He had earlier entertained advances from Robert Maxwell – the entrepreneur, media mogul and owner of Oxford United – whose crooked business dealings were later revealed. Edwards had become deeply unpopular with United’s fans in the process. But now United, as well as Edwards, needed money because of Hillsborough and the Taylor Report. The redevelopment of Old Trafford’s Stretford End, a project close to Edwards’s heart, would cost £10 million which the club did not have. Edwards had already told Ferguson he would sell to anyone who paid for the Stretford End and gave him a further £10 million for his shares.

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