Then Symon was sacked. He went, moreover, in a manner that showed bigotry was not the only bad smell in a boardroom, giving the lie to the old American saying that nice guys finish second. More than a whiff of cowardice could be detected as the directors responded to terrace discontent during a home draw with Dunfermline. It was resolved that Symon, a man of dignity and presence as well as achievement, whose distinctions included having played for Scotland at both football and cricket (he had taken five wickets in an innings against the 1938 Australians), would have to go. But thirteen years, during which Rangers had collected fifteen trophies, did not entitle him to a decent farewell. ‘They sent an accountant to his house to offer him terms of resignation,’ said Seith, ‘and, when he refused them, wouldn’t even allow him back to Ibrox to clear his desk. I had to go and get his belongings for him.’
When Ferguson heard, he was furious. ‘He didn’t want to be associated with a club that could do such a thing,’ said Seith, ‘and came to me so angry he was about to demand a transfer. So I took him into a sort of gymnasium place and gave him a bit of a talking-to.’ Ferguson remembers being stunned by the normally ‘sedate’ coach’s passion. ‘It wasn’t a bolllocking as such,’ said Seith, ‘I was just trying to make Alex see that it made no sense, at least from his own point of view. “Look,” I said, “if you want to do something for Scot Symon, go out there and show the people – the directors who have sacked him, the fans who have lost faith in him – that he did the right thing in signing you, that he knew a player when he saw one.” Alex went out and scored twice in the next match.’ It was a 3-0 victory over Cologne in the Fairs Cup and Ferguson went on to be the club’s leading scorer in his first season.
Seith, however, had long since left the club. Within days of dissuading Ferguson from taking his protest against Symon’s dismissal to the ultimate, he had himself resigned. ‘I’d talked to my wife about it and decided to follow my conscience. I know I’d talked Alex out of that, but there was a difference in that Alex was at the peak of his playing career. I’d been Scot’s coach and wanted no part in a club that could treat such a loyal servant in this way.’ Symon was a benign disciplinarian, immaculately dressed. ‘Okay, he might never have got into a tracksuit, and in the end it might have been held against him, but he dedicated his life to the football club, helping them to win a lot of trophies [including six Scottish championships]. He was a man to be admired, straight as a die.’ It is understandable that Ferguson should have felt the same way about Seith, of whom he was to write so warmly more than thirty years later.
Although a return of twenty-three goals from that first season may have appeared bright enough, the clouds were gathering. Towards the end of the season, with Rangers still leading Celtic on points, Stein all but conceded the championship, saying it was in Rangers’ hands and they could only throw it away (Ferguson was never to forget the ploy and would take it into management), which they eventually did by losing their final match at home to Aberdeen. Angry supporters broke dressing-room windows and it was hours before the players felt emboldened to go home; one kicked Ferguson on the leg. It had been an equally painful experience of Stein’s mind games for the new Rangers manager, Davie White.
Ferguson never felt he had the confidence of White, who had been Symon’s assistant, and was further troubled by bigotry most clearly discernible in the bowler-hatted form of Willie Allison, a former football journalist somewhat bizarrely employed by Rangers as public relations officer. In Ferguson’s book, Allison is described as a ‘muck-spreader’ and ‘diseased zealot’ who even started rumours that the Fergusons’ first-born son, Mark, was christened in a Catholic church (it happened to be untrue).
In truth, the whole atmosphere around Rangers was diseased. Seith remembered that once his wife, a Lancashire lass whom he had met while playing for Burnley, invited an English friend to a match at Ibrox. Neither could understand why they were being stared at with ill-concealed disapproval until Mrs Seith noticed that her friend, a member of the Church of England, had a crucifix on her necklace.
Antipathy towards anything vaguely Catholic was manifest in aggression once shown towards the club physiotherapist, Davie Kinnear, because he happened to be wearing a tartan tie that was predominantly green. Decent men like Seith became accustomed to swallowing their revulsion, just as Ferguson let pass the director’s intrusiveness on the day he joined Rangers.
Was Willie Allison as bad as Ferguson paints him? ‘I didn’t know the guy well,’ said John Greig. ‘But you wouldn’t have thought he’d been a press man. He wasn’t the type. He was more close to the directors.’ So Ferguson took a risk when, having phoned his wife while on tour in Denmark and been told about a newspaper story predicting (correctly) that his days at Rangers were numbered, he got drunk with Greig and others in a bar in Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens and returned to the hotel to give Allison an earful of blame. ‘Part of the trouble,’ said Greig, ‘was that Alex hardly drank alcohol, if at all.’
Just before the start of the next season, White told him he had been offered to Hibernian as makeweight in a deal for the centre-forward Colin Stein. Ferguson refused and was banished to train with the reserves, but Rangers still signed Stein, again breaking the all-Scottish record with a fee of £100,000. That he was an improvement on Ferguson is hard to deny. He scored a lot of goals, and at memorable times: in the European Cup-Winners’ Cup final victory over Moscow Dynamo in 1972, for instance. Stein also played on twenty-one occasions for Scotland, scoring nine goals.
Ferguson continued to make the odd first-team appearance and near the end of the season, with Stein injured, was chosen for the Scottish Cup final against Celtic. Not for the first time, however, he disappointed White, who had directed him to mark Billy McNeill at corners. Although Ferguson had a spring, the disparity in size was too great. After two minutes, from a corner, McNeill headed the first of four unanswered goals and afterwards White’s choice of scapegoat was simple. The atmosphere of suspicion had become mutual – during the manager’s inquest into the Cup final, he had accused Ferguson of undermining him in the press (a not dissimilar charge to that levelled against Allison by Ferguson) – and that was the end. Ferguson was dropped for the last four matches of the season and never played for Rangers’ first team again.
At the start of the next season, 1969/70, he was separated from the rest of the senior squad. At times he trained with the apprentices – until White found him coaching them at the suggestion of another staff member and banished him to train alone – and played for the third team against the likes of Glasgow University. ‘It was embarrassing for the other players,’ Greig recalled, ‘but more so for him, because we could see him. We used to run round the track at Ibrox and he’d be kicking a ball against a boundary wall. [In his book, Ferguson defiantly states that his appetite for practice was undiminished.] And once they sent him down to England with the third team and he didn’t even get a game – they left him on the bench.
‘There were a few things which, being so friendly with him, I found hard to take. I don’t know why he and the manager fell out and why it couldn’t be repaired. It was sad because he was a Rangers supporter, born and bred half a mile from the ground. It must have broken his heart.’
But not his will. Or his ability to make the best of a bad job. When a £20,000 fee was agreed for his transfer to Nottingham Forest – he assumed the English club had been alerted by Jim Baxter, the great Scotland midfield player and party animal who had returned to Rangers from Forest – Ferguson negotiated a tenth of the sum for himself. Then he heard that his old Dunfermline boss Willie Cunningham, now with Falkirk in the Second Division, wanted him too. Cathy brightened perceptibly at the thought of remaining in Scotland and all that was left for Ferguson to do was apologise to Forest for changing his mind.
A few days later, as a Rangers supporter, he went back to Ibrox to watch them take on the Polish club Górnik Zabrze. They lost and now Davie White, under whom he had been hauled from the dressing room and returned to the terraces, was sacked. It was too late for third thoughts, even though Ferguson had reason to believe the new man in charge, Willie Waddell, would have wanted him. But he did still get his £2,000.
What had caused Ferguson to fall short at Rangers? Was he unable to live up to a £65,000 price tag? Did he make his disdain for Davie White too obvious? Or was it a combination of those factors with his marriage to a Catholic? Many – including Ferguson himself – believed his battle for acceptance was harder than it needed to be.
We should dispose of the coincidental rise in tension between Catholics and the Protestant majority across the Irish Sea. Although it is true that the first civil rights marches by Catholics in Northern Ireland took place in March 1968, little over six months after Ferguson’s arrival at Ibrox, Glasgow was more of a spectator to than a participant in the renewed troubles. It remained so as rioting spread from Londonderry to Belfast over the next eighteen months and British troops were sent in by the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to be generally welcomed by Catholics, even though they were to be dragged into a bloody conflict with the IRA that lasted for decades.
The songs of hate were incessant on the stadium slopes. Soon after the death of the Republican hunger striker Bobby Sands in May 1981, Rangers met Dundee United in the Scottish Cup final at Hampden Park, which echoed to gleefully repeated chants of ‘Sands is dead’ (to the tune of ‘Hooray for the Red, White and Blue’) and, had the martyr been a Loyalist, no doubt the same would have been heard at Celtic’s Parkhead. But it was a soft sectarianism that football harboured.
The difference between Rangers and Celtic in that era was that, while Celtic would employ Protestants – Jock Stein and several members of his great side included – Rangers avoided giving Catholics work, reflecting the discrimination that had led to the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. It would still be wrong to deny that Rangers had signed Ferguson knowing he had followed in the family tradition of marrying whom he pleased.
So was Ferguson just not up to the international standard Rangers expected? The words most frequently used in descriptions of his playing style were ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘elbows’ (though not necessarily in that order). He was even to allude to the latter in renaming a Glasgow pub he had acquired the Elbow Room. John Greig recalled: ‘Obviously I played against him as well as with him [they were even sent off together after Ferguson had joined Falkirk towards the end of his career] and he was always a handful, a pest. He bustled about with his elbows parallel to the ground – and he was all skin and bone so that, when he got you, it was like being stabbed.’
Davie Provan said: ‘I’d give him about seventy out of a hundred as a player. As far as effort was concerned, he was a hundred. And he did score quite a few goals for us.’ Bobby Seith added: ‘He was typical of good goalscorers. If you saw any picture of a match in which Alex was playing and the goalkeeper was on the ground with the ball, you could bet your bottom dollar that Alex would be standing over him, waiting for him to let it go. He was always looking for goalkeepers or defenders to make mistakes. So, if you were playing against him, you had to be very careful not to make a wee slip – because he’d be there and the ball would be in the back of the net.’
So why did Scotland prefer the likes of Colin Stein, let alone Law? ‘He lacked a bit of pace,’ said Seith, whose other criticism was more subtle. ‘Perhaps his work rate was not all it could have been – certainly not what you’d expect in the modern game.’ The modern striker, by harrying defenders in possession or obstructing their lines of communication with those further forward, acts as a first line of his own side’s defence. ‘People would cover for Alex,’ said Seith. ‘As they should when a striker’s putting the ball in the net. But it is fair to say that he liked to save his energy for the business of scoring goals.’ In which case he fooled a few. Newspaper accounts often spoke of his crowd-pleasing energy and combativeness. And Greig expressed surprise that Ferguson’s industry had been questioned. ‘I don’t think Alex ever scored from outside the eighteen-yard box,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never before heard him accused of not working hard enough. He gave defences a lot to do. But you have to bear in mind that there was a lot of competition for Scotland places in those days.’ Too much for Ferguson.
Fighting at Falkirk
W
illie Cunningham still wanted Ferguson, so it was off to Falkirk and another dip into the Second Division, albeit a brief one. He joined in December and five months later the club were promoted with Ferguson contributing plenty of goals in partnership with Andy Roxburgh, later to succeed him as Scotland manager.
They were to have a long association, for they had met towards the end of Ferguson’s spell at Queen’s Park, when Roxburgh joined the youth team, and continued to meet for half a century because Roxburgh, after parting company with the Scottish FA, became a coordinator of elite coaches for Uefa, organising informal conferences at which the cream of the profession – the likes of Ferguson, Marcello Lippi, Louis van Gaal and José Mourinho – could exchange views.
At Falkirk, though, their relationship became strained – certainly on Ferguson’s side – through a bizarre episode seen by millions on national television. It was in 1970, shortly after the club had been promoted, that they were invited to take part in a BBC programme called
Quiz Ball
.
For those too young to remember it – those old enough certainly will – it was a competition between teams of four from various English and Scottish football clubs in which they scored ‘goals’ through making ‘passes’. A pass was completed by the successful answering of a question. The more difficult the question, the longer the ‘ball’ travelled and when it reached the opponents’ ‘line’ a ‘goal’ was scored. Each match made a half-hour programme. The excitement inherent in the format (and no sarcasm is intended here) was enhanced by interest in what these footballers, whom we had hitherto only seen rushing around on the field, were like in real life and, in particular, how clever they were.