Free Football – Bloody Hell! by Patrick Barclay Page B

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