Ian Ferguson talks about hard times in management and his attachment to both Rangers and St Mirren

Richard Wilson
Published on 21 Mar 2010

Down at the Dairy Farmers
Stadium, everything has been reduced to a vestige of hope.

Some time in the next week, North Queensland Fury will learn if a new set of owners can provide the finance to keep the franchise alive. Local businesses in Townsville are planning to save the football club by collaborating to meet the £1.5 million cost. “If they raise the money, the club will survive,” says Ian Ferguson, the Fury manger. “If they don’t, it will close.”

He might wonder how it could all diminish
so rapidly to this. Eighteen months ago, Ferguson arrived in Townsville – 800 miles north of Brisbane, with a population of 160,000 – to be met by Don Matheson and his wife. Matheson was the driving force, financially and practically, behind the 
establishment of a new A-League franchise, which he wanted Ferguson to manage.

“In our hunt for a head coach, we travelled across the country and spoke to many legends of the game. But we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to recruit an immortal,” Matheson said with the chutzpah of an impresario. So much of what Fury became could be said to belong to Ferguson, to rely on him, at least in the sense that he started with nothing and created something substantial.

Twenty-three players were recruited, back-room staff were brought to the club, including Stewart Petrie, the former Dunfermline winger who became Ferguson’s assistant, and the team finished two points short of the top six and qualification for the Finals series. But the club lost £3.6m and so now finds itself undermined by financial uncertainty.

You don’t get too many opportunities. If I never played for Rangers I’d probably have been in one 
cup final in my life. I was very lucky

Sport gathers such consequence in Australia that even a small town expects to maintain national teams in rugby league, basketball and football. It is considered almost patriotic, like a duty, to support your local clubs and Fury’s average home crowd was between 7000 and 8000.

Life in a remote town is quaint – around the time that Robbie Fowler became Fury’s marquee signing, the beaches were closed because a giant crocodile had been sighted – and attracting players so far north was challenging. Ferguson, who was known as Barking Dog by the press in Sydney when he was the Central Coast Mariners assistant manager, was persuasive enough. And among those who came was Scott Wilson, the former Dunfermline defender.

Unlike those players, though, whose contracts are safeguarded by the Football Federation of Australia, Ferguson’s role is insecure. The new owners may appoint their own coaching staff, despite his achievement in rebuking the notion that, as the league’s new team, Fury would be stricken. “People thought we were going to be the whipping boys, we were never anybody’s tips to win games,” Ferguson says with a wry laugh. “So we surprised a few people.”

Defiance has always been a natural state of mind for Ferguson, something affirming. Despite a decent passing range and an ability to time surging runs from deep into areas of vulnerability, he became known, or defined even, by his combative spirit. There was a kind of quiet ferocity in the scowl and dark eyes of the midfielder. He used to confront opponents, while team-mates told of the angst and dark mood that would be revealed by a defeat.

Ferguson’s current circumstances are, in most ways, beyond his influence. He is making plans for the new A-league season, which starts in August, and otherwise trusting
in the kind of survival instincts that are an obligation for sustaining a life in the game. That his own scenario is similar to those of Walter Smith, Ally McCoist, Kenny McDowall
and Ian Durrant at Rangers – where new owners are required to provide investment – is not lost on Ferguson. Even on the other side of the world, he is conscious of every nuance of life at Ibrox.

“It’s on a different scale, Rangers
are a massive club, but there’s 
uncertainty all over the place,” Ferguson says. “Like myself, Coisty, Walter, Kenny and Durranty aren’t going to be guaranteed their jobs. But what else can they do when they’re on the verge of winning a treble? [We speak] just as friends, how things are going with each other and so on. If anybody wants to talk about things they will, but I don’t like to put them in an awkward 
situation. It’s always more in friendship and things from the past that we have a good laugh about.”

Ferguson’s attachment to Rangers stretches back to a childhood spent in Parkhead. Boys soon become street-smart in an area of 
Glasgow where families grow up next to Celtic
Park but have an allegiance to Ibrox, and there was always a quickness to Ferguson, something sharp, like an insight. But then he was never readily constrained by stereotype.

Artur Numan once remarked on the contradiction he saw in his team-mate: so animated and fierce in the dressing-room, yet so quiet and sombre away from the game. Throughout his playing days, Ferguson was also teetotal.

His career has been one of unlikely contrasts: released as a youngster by Alex Ferguson at Aberdeen because he was too small, he so impressed at Clyde that Kenny Dalglish wanted to take him to Liverpool; he chose St Mirren for first-team football and scored the winning goal in the 1987 Scottish Cup final against Dundee United in what he describes as one of his “worst performances” (before extra time, Jimmy Bone shook 
Ferguson by the shoulders and demanded more from him).

“The last time they played in a cup final was 1987, so it is a special occasion for teams like St Mirren,” Ferguson says. “They’ve got to enjoy it and make sure the occasion doesn’t pass them by. What I would say to the 
St Mirren players is, ‘you don’t get too many opportunities’. If I never played for Rangers, I’d probably have been in one cup final in my life. I was very lucky.”

Few players reside so prominently in the histories of two separate clubs, but then there was a brashness to the younger 
Ferguson – to the bouncing mop of streaked blond hair and the wheeling arm celebration at Hampden – that gave way to a solemnity at Ibrox. Ferguson was always capable of succumbing to fractures in his self-restraint, none more so than when he clashed viciously with Paolo di Canio during an Old Firm game at Celtic Park, but mostly his instinct was to be staunch.

“I was a young kid when I played for 
St Mirren and it was a massive achievement to be involved in a major cup final,” Ferguson says. “We weren’t no-hopers, we had a good team ourselves, it was about having belief and going out to try to get the victory. I had so many good moments at Rangers that it’s very hard to pinpoint one. I suppose there was my first cup final, against Aberdeen, when I scored the scissors-kick. I don’t think I was accepted by a lot of Rangers fans at that time and Graeme Souness took me out the pack and raised my hand towards the fans. That was a special moment.”

He retains a deep affection for the club, so that he regularly watches matches live on television despite the need to sit up into the small hours of the night. He and Petrie will likely share a few beers during the final today. There have been regular phone calls from Scotland since the two clubs overcame their semi-final ties, but for all that Ferguson has an eminent place in St Mirren’s story, the distinction he accumulated at Ibrox – 10 league titles and eight cup medals – carries greater personal meaning.

“It was harder for the Scottish boys, you always felt as though you had a point to prove,” he says. “I tried to do the harder thing rather than keep things simple. Walter and Graeme pulled me aside and said, ‘stop trying to please everybody and just keep things simple’. From then on, I settled down.”

Even when he left Ibrox in 2000 and then spent two years at Dunfermline, it seemed an afterthought and what Ferguson discovered was the omnipresence of the Old Firm rivalry. Even retirement was no place for respite and he grew weary of the needling by Celtic supporters while he was out with his family, and of his own inability to ignore it. There was an exhaustion to him, something like a slump in resolve.

The opportunity to move to Northern Spirit (the now-defunct club in Sydney) seemed to offer a kind of fundamental change and Ferguson, who once declared that he would never become a manager, soon became a coach alongside Lawrie McKinna, a Scot who played briefly for Kilmarnock before 
embarking on a career in Australia.

Now, he is surrounded by the concerns of his own club and knows what it is to take on the responsibility of being more than just an individual. Fowler, the team captain, was voted Fury’s player of the season and scored nine goals during the campaign, but a tension between him and Ferguson became apparent when the manager changed 
formation to 4-5-1 for a fixture last January and named Fowler on the bench.

The striker watched from the stand instead, sitting alongside his family, and the Australian media reported that he refused to be a substitute. Eventually, at a restless press conference, player, manager and Matheson, sought to quell the story. For Ferguson, the incident was an exposure to the feeling of isolation that comes with management, of being laid bare.

“Robbie made a decision, but it got all blown out of proportion,” he says. “If you don’t want to play as a sub then I’ve got that decision to make, and I made it. Some pundits made a big deal of it. Robbie and I don’t have a problem. That’s a coach’s job and it wasn’t easy for me to leave Robbie Fowler on the bench, please believe me, but I’ve got to make a decision that’s right for the team.”

After almost 10 years, Ferguson is now an Australian citizen so can leave the country for another job if he wishes and still return to live there. His wife and three daughters are settled, and although he sees the likes of Derek McInnes and Gus MacPherson, former team-mates, making their way in management in Scotland, he is not envious of their profile. “I’m happy,” he says.

He used to own a boat – called The Three Sisters after his daughters – while he lived in Sydney. When Walter Smith was over on 
holiday one year, Ferguson invited his former manager for a trip on the Hawkesbury River. “A boy from Parkhead,” Smith said, shaking
his head. “What do you know about the ocean?”


http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/rangers/ian-ferguson-talks-about-hard-times-in-management-and-his-attachment-to-both-rangers-and-st-mirren-1.1014902