interview Sir Alex insists Scotland can become as proficient at youth development as Manchester United, writes Richard Wilson
He was responding to Pat Crerand repeating his assertion that Ferguson is a better manager than Sir Matt Busby, because he has been more successful. Eventually, he reverted to the old comfort of joking affectionately about Crerand and his career.
Yet in that small moment of modesty, it was possible to see the complexity of Ferguson, the humanity of a man so routinely imagined in callous and harsh terms. He cannot, like any iconic figure, be reduced to common habits.
On Sunday night, at the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow, Ferguson was being honoured with a tribute at the Scottish Football Hall of Fame dinner, for the 25 years in charge of Manchester United that continue to be an accumulation of glory, but also for his place at the summit of the game.
As the event reverberated around Ferguson -- he was the centre of guests’ attention, their awe even, drawing them towards him in hesitant clusters -- he could be held as the eminence of Scottish football. He would never deny his sense of self-importance, but neither does he need to claim every significance as his own; in Glasgow, among familiar faces and long-held intimacies, he can shed some of the command.
“I give my support, that’s all,” he says softly of his influence on Scottish football. “It’s not down to people like myself, it’s about young people, with energy, and good young coaches. You’re base is good coaches, then it’s the facilities, and you can drive on from there. It’s not that difficult, you know.”
During a question-and-answer session with Dougie Donnelly, Ferguson discussed his life and times with humour and frankness. His major themes were on the values of loyalty and the importance of upbringing, but he revealed something of his methods as a manager, pointing out that no leader of a team could entertain fear.
He said he had never picked a side in the expectation of being beaten, never faced up to an opponent with any apprehension of coming off second best.
He was also insightful on the players who have illuminated his career. He cited Peter Weir as his most influential player at Aberdeen, saying that if the winger played to his best then the team was irresistible, and insisted that Frank McDougall was the best finisher at the club under his tenure.
This was Ferguson in a mood to be candid, to admit some light into the recesses, or at least acknowledge, in some depth, the range of his own possibilities.
Ultimately, he has been shaped by a refusal to be complacent, or to ever lose the feeling of being on edge, but also by the certainty that nothing is impossible. Defeat, to Ferguson, is something that should never be allowed to contaminate his thinking; everything lies within reach, given time, patience, leeway.
“It’s possible,” he says of Scotland becoming as proficient at youth development as Manchester United have become, “if you put the energy into it and the facilities and the good coaches, and the players. Since I was a young player, there’s always been a lack of facilities [in Scotland]. Rangers had their training ground at the Albion and when that wasn’t available, we used to train at the Southern General hospital. Celtic had their place along at Barrowfield, but no-one else had a training ground. At Aberdeen, we trained at the barracks.
“Ernie Walker had that Think Tank away back and I said to him at the time that if people invest in the training facilities and good coaches then you’ve every possibility. It’s like education. If you’ve got a kid at four years old and you put him in nursery and teach him how to count, by the time he gets to primary school then he has an advantage. If you can give him a ball at four years of age and teach him technical skills, it’s an advantage.”
Ferguson has always maintained a professional interest in Scottish football, with a number of teenagers during the years travelling regularly down to Manchester to train with United.
He admits that Darren Fletcher might be the last Scot to emerge from the club’s youth set-up, since the academy system means that clubs are restricted in how far away they can recruit players from, but Ferguson remains optimistic about the national team’s progress under Craig Levein.
“They’ve got a group of very good midfield players, that’s their strength,” he says. “At the moment, you’d think that if they could get a couple of players in important positions they could be decent. In midfield, they’re very good, [James] Morrison, there’s a collection of them, [James] McArthur, [Graeme] Dorrans, Fletcher, Naismith, who does a fantastic job. They’re doing quite well, I thought they played really good football the other night [in the victory over Cyprus].”
He is still an emphatic figure. Even when he was asked if he might one day work for Scottish football in some way, his response, “do you know what age I am?” carried a sharp edge.
Ferguson will always be too deep, too colossal a character to be diminished by the years, by the evolution of the game, or by the softening of some of his old furies.
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