Fergie Rises

by Michael Grant

  Managing his country asked different questions of Ferguson and he had the intelligence to produce fresh answers. He had to be more measured with Scotland’s players than he was with those under his control at Aberdeen. He recognised that players of international standard operated at a higher level and would not respond to being shouted at and bullied. ‘I think he was mellower,’ said Gordon Strachan. ‘You can’t make the same demands of international players and “Sir Lex” was clever enough to realise that.’

  Players who had heard of the terrifying, tyrannical Aberdeen manager could not reconcile his fearsome reputation with the warm, sociable figure they met at Scotland gatherings. ‘What probably surprised me was that there wasn’t any ranting and raving from Fergie,’ said Dundee United full-back Maurice Malpas. ‘We knew Fergie or Archie would chase Aberdeen players down the track. Or he’d have someone by the throat as you were going down the tunnel. But there was nothing like that. I was pally with Jim Leighton and Willie Miller. We had our own wee clique at night time or at the dinner table. They’d tell stories about Fergie and the United boys would tell our stories about wee Jim McLean. The chat would be, “Remember that time you got beat…what did he say after that?” “Oh, he went bloody mental”. But the Aberdeen lads would tell us, “This isn’t Fergie, by the way”. This wasn’t Fergie the Aberdeen manager. This was Fergie the international manager. They said he was like two different managers.’

  Ferguson used his seven games before Mexico to build a squad and a backroom team. Walter Smith was his assistant, Archie Knox and Craig Brown acted as coaches, and his wise old ally at Aberdeen, Teddy Scott, was drafted in to help with the training. He gave debuts to Frank McAvennie, Ally McCoist, Andy Goram, Pat Nevin and Bobby Connor. The results were solid. There was a 1–0 victory over Israel in Tel Aviv, a 3–0 home win against Romania and a 0–0 draw with Holland in Eindhoven. The only other friendly brought a 2–1 defeat by England at Wembley. Losing to the English irritated Ferguson. He had brought the Chelsea winger Nevin on as a substitute. ‘I did OK, I did fine, but there was one moment that sticks out,’ Nevin remembered. ‘I dummied a defender twice and went by him, but he caught me in the box. I didn’t go down. I stayed on my feet. We were 2–1 down at the time. After the game Fergie was going around the players and he said to me, “Did you get touched in the box?” I said, “Yeah, he caught me but I stayed on my feet…” Silence. He didn’t say a word. He just looked at me. It’s funny how some people don’t even need to say anything to make you wonder, “Did I do the right thing there?” There’s no actual proof to say he thought I should have gone down. But I never got to that World Cup…’

  The Holland game was the last international before the finals in Mexico. A story from the journey home reveals how close to the surface Ferguson the Aberdeen manager remained. With the decisive final weekend of the league season still to be played, he pulled aside the Hearts players Robertson and Gary Mackay and wished them the best of luck in the run-in against Celtic. Robertson recalled: ‘He said to us, “You’ve had a great season, you’ve got a great chance of winning the league.” And then he said, “You realise you can’t win the cup?” We didn’t understand what he was on about. Why couldn’t we? He said, “Aberdeen are definitely going to win the cup. It happens every year.” He was trying to put it in our heads that his team were going to win at Hampden no matter what, and we couldn’t beat them. The Scotland game was over and he was already thinking two games ahead. I told our manager Alex MacDonald what he said. He told me, “It’s Ferguson, don’t worry about it, son.”’

  Three days before leading Aberdeen out for the Scottish Cup final, Ferguson had to make a long round of telephone calls to those he was taking, and not taking, to the World Cup. Surprisingly there were five players from Dundee United in the squad compared to Aberdeen’s four. But the big story was the exclusion of Alan Hansen. He was thirty, had just captained Liverpool through another league-winning season and would complete the double by lifting the FA Cup the day after the Scotland squad was named. To English audiences unfamiliar with the excellence of Miller and McLeish the fact that Hansen was not a regular for Scotland was baffling. For him to be omitted from the squad entirely seemed incredible. But Ferguson trusted his two Aberdeen men and felt the four other defenders he selected were more versatile than Hansen. To anyone who had paid attention it was no shock. Miller had started all seven games under Ferguson and McLeish had started five. ‘He is an absolutely magnificent bloke and when I was talking to him I felt as low as a snake,’ said Ferguson about Hansen. He claimed Hansen had understood and had said he would be delighted to be kept on the standby list and called up as a replacement if required. ‘That speaks volumes for the kind of breeding he has had with his club.’

  What Ferguson really thought about Liverpool’s ‘breeding’ went unsaid. A year earlier he and Jock Stein had been angered when Hansen, Kenny Dalglish and Stevie Nicol refused to co-operate when asked how Scotland should best nullify their Liverpool team-mate Ian Rush when Wales played at Hampden. Hansen had also withdrawn from a series of squads, telling the management team he was injured before returning for treatment at Liverpool.

  Hansen’s big pal was Dalglish. On the Monday, four days after the squad had been revealed, and only forty-eight hours before they flew across the Atlantic, Dalglish dropped a depth charge. ‘Dalglish pulls out of World Cup,’ reported the Glasgow Herald. The story was too big for the sports section, and went straight to the top of the front page. Dalglish had received a specialist’s report on a knee injury, which he had subsequently aggravated during Liverpool’s FA Cup final defeat of Everton on the Saturday when he played the entire ninety minutes. Dalglish claimed the X-ray showed his ligament had lifted away from the knee cap and there was no alternative but complete rest. ‘It is a terrible disappointment that he has had to be withdrawn,’ said Ferguson at the time. ‘It came out of the blue. He was so vital to our plans. We can only feel sympathy for Kenny.’

  In Managing My Life Ferguson wrote that when he told Dalglish about Hansen’s omission from the squad Dalglish had replied: ‘You can’t leave him out’, but had ultimately accepted reluctantly that it was the manager’s decision. Ferguson offered no opinion on speculation that Dalglish had pulled out of the World Cup because his friend had not been picked. In his autobiography Dalglish insisted that those who voiced such a view were libelling him and impugning the integrity of the surgeon who had declared him unfit.

  Those who were around him at the time were impressed by the measured way Ferguson managed the squad. He had picked thirteen home-based players, seven so-called ‘Anglos’ (those from English clubs) and two who were playing in Europe. He had inherited an invisible but distinct ‘them and us’ split between the Scottish League players and the Anglos which had been a feature of Scotland gatherings for years and which even Stein had been unable to erase. Those who still played in Scotland tended to hang around together within the squad, and some felt the Anglos looked down on them and regarded their English club games as more important than the internationals. Nevin admitted: ‘There was a horrible, horrible atmosphere in that squad. From my vantage point it looked like the Anglos against “the Scots” and I certainly didn’t feel like one of the Anglos. They wouldn’t have been nasty to each other’s faces but I still didn’t like it. I felt it was our country, everyone should be together. But there seemed to be a vague aloofness from the Anglos and I despised that. Alex seemed to know that. He seemed to understand that.’

  Ferguson was typically thorough. He travelled to Suffolk to pick Sir Alf Ramsey’s brain about how to acclimatise to the heat and altitude of Mexico, Ramsey having taken England there for the 1970 World Cup. Because Scotland had been the last country to qualify for the tournament, the best training bases had already been snapped up. From Glasgow via London, Texas and Albuquerque, he took the squad to Santa Fe, arriving on 14 May 1986, for fifteen days of altitude training at 7,000ft above sea level. The squad’s hotel had a lounge with a white gr
and piano, which Ferguson discovered could play automatically. He devised a practical joke with the hotel manager whereby it would appear as if Ferguson was playing the notes. With his backroom staff gathered he offered to play a tune before appearing to do so with flamboyant flourishes. His audience watched the deception in disbelief as he battled to suppress his laughter.

  From Santa Fe they flew to Los Angeles for three days and two warm-up games at sea level before returning to Mexico. In fact, the World Cup kicked off without Scotland: they were still in LA when the opening ceremony and first game took place. Their absence produced some mild grumbling, but Ferguson was unperturbed: ‘The least of my worries is what other countries think of us.’ What did prey on his mind was the awful draw the team had been dealt. Group E at the 1986 World Cup finals helped popularise the phrase ‘the Group of Death’. Scotland were up against Euro 84 semi-finalists Denmark, Franz Beckenbauer’s powerful and improving West Germany, and reigning South American champions Uruguay. ‘The toughest imaginable group,’ according to Ferguson.

  Denmark had never qualified for a World Cup before, but they were an excellent side. When they met in Neza on 4 June, Richard Gough almost put Scotland ahead before Denmark took control in the second half. After almost an hour Preben Elkjaer attacked Miller and got a lucky break of the ball, capitalising to rifle a shot across Leighton for the only goal of the game. But with eleven minutes left, Klaus Berggreen made a horrible challenge on Charlie Nicholas. ‘It’s the worst tackle I’ve ever suffered in my life,’ said a distraught Nicholas. With his ankle ligaments damaged, his World Cup was effectively over, though he did manage a few more minutes off the bench in the final group game.

  Another ankle injury meant Scotland’s other striker, Paul Sturrock, also missed the second fixture, against West Germany. So did McLeish, who had fallen sick with a virus. Ferguson had three days to conjure up a team. The temperature during the opening game in Neza was nothing compared to what awaited 140 miles north in Querétaro. The match against Germany kicked off at lunchtime and was played in 90-degree heat. The 1,000-strong Scottish support reddened on the exposed terraces, and when it was over some of the Scottish players had lost 8lb in weight. The opening goal was glorious and it was Scotland’s. Strachan whipped a shot across the goalmouth into the far corner before producing an iconic celebration that saw him plant his outstretched leg on an advertising board because he was too wee to jump over it. The lead lasted from the eighteenth minute until the twenty-second. Scotland were opened up and Rudi Völler equalised with a tap-in. Early in the second half they suffered their second unlucky break of the tournament when the ball spun away from David Narey to Klaus Allofs, who scored the winner.

  Scotland had performed valiantly in a memorable, open game, but they were staring at elimination. They needed to beat Uruguay in the final game and pray that two points would be enough to sneak one of the four places available to the countries who finished third in their group. Uruguay had drawn with West Germany but been smashed 6–1 by Denmark. All they needed to reach the last sixteen was a draw against Scotland. On 13 June Ferguson made the most controversial and debated selection of his managerial career thus far. ‘I only slept for an hour last night,’ he told the Scottish press pack on the eve of the game. ‘I was tossing and turning all night, going over all the possibilities. Without meaning any disrespect to my own club, Aberdeen, this is the most important match I have been involved in throughout my career. I simply must pick the right team.’ The consensus was, and has always remained, that he didn’t. No one cared about Arthur Albiston replacing Malpas at left-back or Narey retaining his place despite McLeish being fit again. Attention and criticism was focused entirely on the decision to leave out the team’s captain and undisputed leader, Graeme Souness, in favour of the young Celtic midfielder Paul McStay. Souness was thirty-three and had fifty-four caps. McStay was twenty-one, had fourteen, and had not been selected by his country for the previous four-and-a-half months. Ferguson believed Souness was struggling with the heat and had faded in the latter stages of the first two games. But conspiracy theorists had a field day with the decision. Souness had just become manager of Rangers. Was Ferguson deliberately trying to embarrass him? Was this an early attempt to dominate a new rival? Could it even be that he was settling a score that dated back to Liverpool’s humiliation of Aberdeen in 1980?

  Such fantasies are testament to the grip Ferguson’s public persona exerted on Scottish football at the time, not to mention the intense animosity felt towards him at Ibrox. For his admirers and his detractors alike, he was an arch-manipulator with the Midas touch. If Alex Ferguson made a ‘mistake’ there was sure to be more to it than plain fallibility. But the truth was just that: he made the wrong call. And Scotland did not get the win they needed.

  Uruguay delivered an ugly, brutal, cynical performance which became infamous for José Batista scything down Strachan after forty-nine seconds and receiving an immediate red card from French referee Joël Quiniou. There were still eighty-nine minutes left for Scotland to score. The closest they came was when an open goal beckoned for Steve Nicol. He struck the softest of finishes and allowed the goalkeeper to claw it off the line. McStay did not impose himself on the game in the way that Souness might have done, especially against ten men. Souness remained diplomatic: ‘I wasn’t happy at missing the game against Uruguay, but I know that there are times when I will have to make similar decisions now that I am on the other side of the fence. A manager can’t keep everyone happy.’ He accepted that his international career was over.

  Jim Leighton said: ‘Graeme would have been perfect for the Uruguay game. He could have kicked the shit out of everybody. That would have been right up his street. We all felt at the time that it was a big mistake, but it’s easy to say in hindsight.’ Uruguay had the draw and the point they needed. They were through, but their performance had been a disgrace. They repeatedly kicked Strachan and Graeme Sharp. They play-acted, they wasted time, they pressurised and jostled the referee, they even spat at Scotland players. In a chaotic press conference after the event Ernie Walker, the SFA secretary, was asked what he thought of the match. ‘What match? There was no match played here this afternoon. What you saw out there was the scum of world football.’ (The remark is often misquoted as ‘the scum of the earth’.)

  Ferguson’s comments that day have not attained the same notoriety, but they were equally scathing. ‘As a nation they seem to have no respect for anyone,’ he said. ‘That was a debacle out there. I know we are out of the World Cup, but honestly I am glad to be going home because this is no way to play football.’

  Ferguson had heard Uruguay manager Omar Borrás call the red card ‘murder by the referee’. He responded: ‘I have had to sit here and listen to Borrás lying and cheating. My players are very upset and I will not criticise any one of them. I cannot say “good luck” to Uruguay. They do not deserve it.’ Uruguay were fined £8,000 for misconduct and warned by Fifa that they could be expelled from the tournament if there was any repeat. Borrás was censured and banned from the touchline. The punishment was meaningless for a country caught up in the excitement of going through to the last sixteen. Scotland took unapologetic delight in their defeat by Diego Maradona’s Argentina in their next game.

  Scotland’s World Cup was over and so was Ferguson’s spell as an international manager. The SFA had agreed that he would remain in charge until the end of the tournament and then relinquish the role to devote himself to Aberdeen again. It had been by far the most demanding and intense nine months of his managerial life. By the end players like Charlie Nicholas, who had once ‘hated’ him for Aberdeen’s tactics against Celtic, saw an entirely different character. ‘He was knowledgeable, approachable and very friendly. I thought, “I could start liking this guy”, and very soon I did. I thought he was sensational. I felt blessed. Those six weeks I had with him really did open my mind about football.’ Ferguson also found the challenges constantly stimulating. He joked that until sitting with
SFA officials as the Scotland manager he had never been in a room with them without being fined or suspended.

  The team flew home via Texas where a mix-up at the airport meant Scotland were put in economy seats rather than first-class. All complaints to the airline fell on deaf ears. The travelling party had three Fergusons: Alex the manager, Alan (‘Fingers’) the marketing advisor who had been with Aberdeen in Gothenburg, and Eric the physiotherapist from Dundee. Fingers recounted: ‘The airline guy says, “We’ve been able to get one seat in first-class and we’re going to have a draw to see who gets it”. So he does it. “It begins with an F…it’s Ferguson.” Fergie goes, “Yes”, and I go, “Hey, wait a minute, there are three Fergusons.” We look at the guy again. “Initial? Initial?” He goes, “A.” We go, “Name? Name?” “Alan!” All the players are laughing. You could see Fergie wasn’t happy. I gave it to him. I said, “I’ll give you this ticket for one reason only. You took our country to the World Cup.”’

  Chapter 21

  SOUNESS

  Chris Anderson first noticed the symptoms towards the end of 1984. A couple of months after a routine hernia operation he began to suffer stiffness in his right leg and right hand. When it gradually became worse he visited his doctor for a check-up. Anderson was teetotal and a non-smoker, he exercised regularly and joked with some degree of truth that, at sixty, he might be the fittest man for his age in the whole of Aberdeen. He took early retirement from his day job to make time for travelling with his wife and to help the Dons stay on top. The doctor told him he had Motor Neurone Disease. That horrible illness, which gradually imprisons its victims within the atrophied muscles of their own bodies, took its toll swiftly. By the time Anderson went to Switzerland to represent Aberdeen at the draw for the first round of the European Cup in July 1985, his condition had become apparent and he made the news public the following month. By October, when Aberdeen beat Hibs in the League Cup final, he was savouring what remained of his life. ‘I found myself looking round the great stadium and knowing that it would be the last time I would see it,’ he said in his final interview. ‘Afterwards I went to congratulate the players and found I could face them all…with one exception. Somehow I choked up when I came face to face with Eric Black. And so did he. He epitomised for me all that was good in football. He seemed to stand for all that Aberdeen had done in recent years.’