Free Football – Bloody Hell! by Patrick Barclay Page A

Ferguson, most obviously a stubborn streak – had one significant difference from the younger man.
    Such was his lack of vindictiveness that the following season he appointed Ferguson first-team coach, with responsibility for every aspect of match preparation except team selection – on which he would, however, be able to advise Cunningham.
    According to Ferguson, performances improved, but he was just a month into his new role when, in the first half of a Cup match with Aberdeen, he swapped petulant kicks with Willie Young and was sent off. It was irresponsible enough behaviour for a player; for a player/coach it verged on a resignation letter. Nothing was said at half-time but late on the night of his sixth dismissal – a terrible figure to reach in an era when the walk of shame was comparatively rare – Cunningham took him aside and suggested he get wise if that future in football was to be rescued. Neither man knew that the incident had already cost Ferguson an interesting job offer: Jimmy Bonthrone, the Aberdeen manager, was having second and final thoughts about asking him to be his assistant.
    The next day, Ferguson’s apology to his fellow players was accepted, but the Scottish FA, tiring of Ferguson’s rough edges, imposed a suspension of nearly two months.
    Falkirk, for the second season in succession, avoided relegation, but Cunningham was dismissed. The new manager, John Prentice, let the firebrand Ferguson go and the next move was to the West Coast. To Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses (as Robert Burns wrote) for honest men and bonnie lasses. The national poet would have been proud of the local football club, too, in 1973/4 because, under the effervescent management of Ally MacLeod, later to supervise Scotland’s calamitous appearance in the World Cup in Argentina, an Ayr United team of part-timers finished sixth in the First Division, the club’s best performance ever.
    Ferguson, partnering another former Rangers striker, the cheerful playboy George McLean, began with seven goals in eight matches, but his form and fitness deteriorated and by early spring he was usually a substitute. His last competitive match was for Ayr’s reserves against their East Fife equivalents and, although there was potential for one last sending-off in that his craggy young opponent, Colin Methven, handled him with scant care, the devil in Ferguson had gone with his legs.
    The devil in the player, that is; there was a hell of a manager to be made. ‘By now I knew I was going to have to work hard at it,’ he was to recall. ‘When you’re with Rangers and scoring in front of big crowds, you think it will never end. Then you’re released and try for the Falkirk job and don’t get it and you start thinking. I was at Ayr when the offer came along to manage East Stirling. I asked Ally about it. “You can’t wait for the perfect job,” he said.’
    First the loose ends of his playing career had to be tied. The second half of his two-year contract was mutually waived in the early summer of 1974 and MacLeod did it with kindness, happily writing off the entirety of Ferguson’s signing-on fee and erring on the side of generosity with his severance pay.

The University of Life
    B y now the Fergusons had completed their family. Mark, their first-born, was nearly six and the twins in nappies. Social life tended to revolve around the Beechwood pub and restaurant near Hampden Park, where the Fergusons got on especially well with Jock Stein and his wife. Ferguson was given a basic training in the catering business; helped by friendly staff, he learned to cook and met a publican called Sam Falconer who, at his own establishment, passed on the techniques of keeping beer in good condition and customers calm.
    The latter was not always easy, as Ferguson discovered when he followed his instinct into the licensed trade.
    First he took a pub called Burns Cottage in the Kinning Park area of Glasgow, bordering Govan. Despite the theme, few