Football – Bloody Hell! (9 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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First he took a pub called Burns Cottage in the Kinning Park area of Glasgow, bordering Govan. Despite the theme, few poets were among the customers and, in any case, Ferguson immediately renamed the place Fergie’s in an ill-disguised attempt to capitalise on his lingering fame; the downstairs bit was the Elbow Room.
All human life was there: bloody brawls, but also family days out in the summer which Ferguson would organise. Stolen goods were routinely and blithely traded, as Ferguson was to confess, with only slight sheepishness. Shortly after he went into football management with East Stirlingshire, he acquired a second premises – Shaw’s, on the opposite side of the city – in a partnership with Falconer that proved ill-fated.
Even in those days, his knack for cramming an unfeasible variety into twenty-four hours was remarkable. True, the part-time footballer’s life had left plenty of hours spare, but management at East Stirlingshire was part-time only in terms of the wording on the contract and the salary it stipulated (£40 a week). Yet still he juggled the job with responsibility for Fergie’s and a share of Shaw’s.
He was, however, to devise an ingenious method of relieving the pressure when he left East Stirling for St Mirren; he called his old friend Davie Provan, the Rangers team-mate whose leg had been broken in an Old Firm match, back from England and handed him the triple role of player, coach and pub manager. How was that for delegation?
Ferguson had learned much in a playing career of 16 years, 432 matches and 222 goals.
At Queen’s Park, though an amateur, he had begun to learn the ways of the professional game and how they could be improved.
At St Johnstone, he had learned first to be wary of promises and then how to cope with relegation.
At Dunfermline, where Jock Stein had laid down a framework for growth through youth development, he had learned how a football club should be run and how enjoyable the professional game could be.
At Rangers he had learned how a football club should
not
be run and experienced the ultimate in disillusion.
At Falkirk, reunited with Willie Cunningham, he had learned coaching on a practical level and began to realise that the certificate he had obtained on the Ayrshire coast could prove the start of something big.
At Ayr, Ally MacLeod had believed in him. He had taken such encouragement in his stride – it is not an unusual trait in footballers – while resentfully absorbing the lessons of adversity. Such as being silently omitted from a Cup final by Cunningham at the last possible moment. When Ferguson himself became a manager, he resolved to give advance notice of disappointment to any player likely to be mistakenly expecting a shirt on a big occasion. ‘It is basic to my philosophy of management,’ he wrote in his autobiography in 1999.
A quarter of a century earlier, he had had thrown away his boots and collected the theories amassed over the span of his playing career, from the
catenaccio
classes with Seith at Largs to the salt and pepper sessions at Dunfermline to the spying missions on which Cunningham sent him at Falkirk. Now it was time for the university of managerial life.
EAST STIRLINGSHIRE
Small Wonders
T
here are only about 32,000 people in Falkirk and yet, despite its proximity to the footballing temptations of Glasgow and Edinburgh, the town supports two clubs in the Scottish League. One is Falkirk and the other East Stirlingshire. It is fair to say that East Stirlingshire is the smaller.
While Falkirk have won the Scottish Cup twice and not only produced several internationals – most memorably John White, who distinguished himself in Tottenham Hotspur’s great Double team of 1960/61 – the twin peaks of East Stirlingshire’s existence since 1880 have been promotions to the top division in 1932 and 1963.
Each lasted a single season. On the latter occasion, they rose in second place, behind the St Johnstone whose squad included Ferguson. St Johnstone stayed up and nine years later, under the astute management of Willie Ormond, sallied forth into European competition, achieving victories over Hamburg and Vasas of Budapest in the Uefa Cup. In contrast, East Stirlingshire were relegated in 1964 having lost twenty-seven of their thirty-four matches.
When Ferguson arrived at their modest Firs Park ground (the word ‘stadium’ is not always appropriate) to take over as manager in the summer of 1974, they were at the very bottom of Scottish football’s pile. Or so Ferguson would have us believe. In fact, East Stirling, as they are usually known, had finished fourth from bottom the previous season.
There is also some disputing his contention that the club had eight players when he was engaged three weeks before the start of the new season. In
The Boss
, Michael Crick’s justly acclaimed and rigorously researched book about Ferguson, it is described as ‘part of the Ferguson mythology’ that he teased the chairman, Willie Muirhead, about it, observing that eleven men were needed to start a game of football. According to Crick, no fewer than twelve members of the previous season’s squad played for Ferguson in his four months at the club.
The question of ‘the Ferguson mythology’ is one to which we shall naturally return.
What cannot be doubted is that Ferguson faced an uphill task. He had no goalkeeper, for a start, and signing Tom Gourlay from Partick Thistle took £750 out of an allocation of just £2,000 for reinforcements. He then paid a budget-busting £2,000 to keep the forward Billy Hulston, a former East Stirling favourite, out of Stenhousemuir’s clutches.
Ferguson was thirty-two and already manifesting a relish for management reminiscent of Brian Clough, who had made his way from Hartlepool to Derby County a few years earlier. A defining Clough anecdote was that he drove to Archie Gemmill’s home in 1970 to sign the Preston North End midfield player and, upon being told that Gemmill planned instead to join Harry Catterick’s Everton, the champions, declared that he would sleep in his car in the hope of a change of mind by morning; Gemmill’s wife offered Clough the spare room and the signing for Derby was agreed over a breakfast of fried eggs.
That Ferguson, too, had a flair for the persuasive gesture had been evident in the Hulston signing. Removing £50 from his wallet, he spread the notes in front of the player as an extra inducement to sign for East Stirling without first having the courtesy to inform Stenhousemuir. Nor did Ferguson waste any time in showing that applied psychology would be characteristic of his style of management.
From where did that come? Stein, Bill Shankly. And maybe Ally MacLeod, too. Ferguson’s year at Ayr had been a happy and useful one, for all the injury problems that had persuaded him to quit as a player, and MacLeod had no hesitation in recommending him as a manager, first to Queen’s Park, where Ferguson made a mess of his interview through nerves induced by having to face people under whom he had served as a young player, and then East Stirling. An East Stirling director, Bob Shaw, had encountered MacLeod at the World Cup in Germany and sought his opinion of the headstrong aspirant. It was positive and Ferguson now sailed through his interview, he and Muirhead taking to each other despite the limited resources the chairman was able to offer.
Ferguson accepted the notionally part-time job on £40 a week and, of course, did it full-time, despite his interests in the licensed trade and a young family. There were rows over money, not least when he was rebuked for paying a Glasgow junior club £40 in travelling expenses to come to test his young trialists, but plenty of encouraging moments. The players responded to him. One, Bobby McCulley, was famously quoted by Crick as saying: ‘I’d never been afraid of anyone before but he [Ferguson] was a frightening bastard.’
He knew when to impose fear and when to remove it. In an early match at Forfar, his team came in for half-time trailing 3-0. Ferguson told them they had played well and could still win. They drew 3-3. On other occasions, he would exhibit a tendency to disturb half-time teacups. But the highlight of his 117 days at Firs Park came towards the end: a local derby. Falkirk had been relegated from the top division the season before and this enabled Ferguson to take a liberal portion of a dish best served cold.
The opportunity for revenge on the club and manager, John Prentice, who had rejected him came in October. A crowd of nearly 5,000 – about 12 times the number to which East Stirling had been accustomed – gathered to witness the fruits of the new manager’s effort. But much was done before the match kicked off.
Ferguson, having informed the local paper that he was aware of all the strengths and weaknesses of the Falkirk players – he had been playing with and coaching them eighteen months earlier – arranged with Muirhead to have his team eat at a hotel where he knew Falkirk, too, would be having their pre-match meal. As his men arrived and walked past the window of the room where their counterparts were eating, he ordered them to laugh and joke as if carefree and confident.
Ferguson then got up to some more of what we now recognise as old tricks, telling his team the local press were biased in favour of the bigger club but then going through Falkirk’s individual weaknesses – lack of pace, one-footedness and so on – to the extent that his men went out thoroughly believing they could win.
It was not all propaganda – the strikers, for instance, were advised to shoot early for a corner of the net rather than try to take the ball round Falkirk’s goalkeeper – and East Stirling, fuelled by this heady cocktail of morale and useful information, won 2-0.
Soon they were in fourth place in their division, drawing crowds of more than 1,200 rather than a few hundred, but such clubs are seldom buoyant for long and the usual happened. It was later to happen to St Mirren, and Aberdeen. A club with more potential identified the secret of their success – and bought it.
To be fair to Ferguson, he accepted St Mirren’s shilling with reluctance, or at least left East Stirling with a heavy heart, for he had grown genuinely fond of his first managerial charges, not to mention Muirhead. But quit he did.
The call had come even before the derby and, since the caller, the familiar Willie Cunningham, was at that time the manager of St Mirren, Ferguson could hardly have guessed at the motive behind an invitation to the club’s Love Street ground in Paisley, a few miles from Govan. Cunningham said he was about to retire and asked if Ferguson would like to succeed him. Ferguson agreed to see the chairman, Harold Currie, but remained unsure. St Mirren were, without question, a bigger club, having spent much of their existence in the top division and with a sizeable ground that had once held more than 47,000 for a match against Celtic. However, they were below East Stirling in the Second Division table and pulling crowds no higher.
Ferguson rang Jock Stein, by now a friend as well as an inspiration, and the Celtic manager advised him first to go to the highest point of Love Street’s main grandstand and look around, and then to do the same at Firs Park. We shall never know what Stein would have counselled had Ferguson got the job for which he was interviewed before East Stirling, for Queen’s Park’s Hampden home then dwarfed not just Love Street but every other stadium in Scotland. Anyway, Ferguson got the message.
Later, when he became as big as Stein and even more widely sought after for assistance on managerial posts, he tended to give similar advice, telling people to go for potential. It was a principle Ferguson himself followed, for example in rejecting Wolverhampton Wanderers when that club was overreaching itself and about to take a tumble down England’s divisions – and in going enthusiastically to Manchester United.
By 2009, when Ferguson was renewing his campaign to have the United board increase Old Trafford’s capacity towards 90,000, the official figure for East Stirlingshire’s ground was 1,800. This included two hundred seats, which made the Firs Park stand about the same size as Old Trafford’s press box on a Champions League night. East Stirlingshire were still the smaller club of even their own small town – but they will forever be able to boast of having been the first of Alex Ferguson’s managerial career.
SAINTS ALIVE:
THE LOVE STREET YEARS
Building on Baldy
S
o the first club to hire Alex Ferguson as a manager was East Stirlingshire. The first to fire him was St Mirren. But the stigma was hurled at a clean pair of heels because, by then, Ferguson was bound for Aberdeen; it was an untidy ending to an often troubled relationship.
The early signs had been promising. Ferguson knew the area and talked a good game, portraying St Mirren as potent enough to challenge Rangers and Celtic (although they tended to finish in the lower half of the First Division, they had won the Scottish Cup in 1959). He also found the seeds of a youth-development system that was to help make his reputation. But first he had to build a team of assistants.
One took about a year of cajoling. Ricky McFarlane had been a young physiotherapist at Falkirk, under John Prentice, and then East Stirling, but clearly had more than the treatment of injuries to offer, as he was to emphasise by training the players while still in his early twenties and eventually becoming manager of St Mirren.
While McFarlane took some time to be convinced that the Ferguson project was for him, Davie Provan leapt at the chance to join. When Ferguson rang his old Rangers team-mate, Provan was still playing, albeit not to the standard he had reached before his leg-break. Upon becoming surplus to requirements at Ibrox, he had gone to Crystal Palace on a free transfer but made only one League appearance and subsequently moved down a couple of divisions to Plymouth Argyle, where he played for five years.

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