The Management E-Book

Michael Grant

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 768

Beschreibung

'an outstanding piece of work . . . utterly compelling' - Scotland on Sunday Why has Scotland produced so many of the best football managers in the world? Based on exclusive interviews with the men themselves, their players or close friends and family, Michael Grant and Rob Robertson delve into the very heart of Scottish life, society and football to reveal the huge contribution that managers such as Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Matt Busby, Bill Shankly, Jock Stein, Jim McLean, Kenny Dalglish, Walter Smith and a host of others have made to the world game. This original, brilliantly-realised and critically acclaimed study profiles the character and methods of each of the great Scottish managers, analysing their strengths and weaknesses, and examines their impact on both club and international football. It is a deeply-researched and compelling story which presents new material on many of the greats, particularly Busby and Stein, and highlights the enormous Old Firm contributions of, among others, Willie Maley, Bill Struth and Graeme Souness.

Leseprobe

Praise for The Management

‘Scotland’s record as a producer of outstanding managers dwarfs that of any other country in the world. This excellent book provides vivid and fascinating insights into that remarkable distinction’

– Hugh McIlvanney

‘A superb book which examines the contribution Scottish managers have made to the global game’

– Scottish Daily Mail

‘A book that is already being viewed as a seminal tome’

– Daily Record

‘The Management will very likely provoke thought, inspire debate and perhaps even go as far as to ignite controversy. A monument to the impossibly impressive number of exceptional football managers produced by Scotland. [It] chronicles with admirable thoroughness their various degrees of greatness as well as their flaws. Discussions and comparisons will inevitably flow from even a quick scan of its contents. Get the book and wallow in the memories’

– The Scotsman

‘A brilliant study on this nation’s contribution to football management. The research and interviews of Grant and Robertson have produced a book bursting with ideas. The Management is a magisterial study in that it considers all evidence and calls an array of witnesses’

– The Herald

‘In a television series way back when, Hugh McIlvanney sought to explain the phenomenon of Jock Stein, Bill Shankly and Matt Busby, but now we have an immense study in print. The first, an outstanding piece of work about remarkable football men. The Management isn’t just a heavyweight football tome, it’s an important contribution to the history of this country covering, as it does, the pit and football park and why one is so inextricably linked to the other. The examination is forensic, the analysis of the miracle of the little nation and the big men utterly compelling. Some of the material that Grant and Robertson have produced on these extraordinary men is quite wonderful. The scale of the book is vast’

– Scotland on Sunday

‘Get your hands on The Management. A must read’

– Daily Star

‘A truly remarkable read’

– Birmingham Post

‘An insightful and diligent study of why Scots make such successful managers’

– The Independent

‘An absorbing study’

– The Telegraph

‘Endlessly diverting’

– Sunday Herald

‘Revealing and insightful’

– The Daily Express

‘A masterly book. Their labours never descend into dry historical analysis, nor mere hagiography. The authors quite literally mine a priceless vein of information. Grant and Robertson don’t overdo the romanticism. Some football books stultify the brain; others demand repeated perusal, and post genuine questions as the precursor to providing interesting, credible answers. The Management has already gained lavish praise and it amply justifies the plaudits’

– The Best Scottish Sports Books of the Year, STV online, December 2010

‘Some of the greatest managers in British football have been Scottish and this admirable book examines the careers of many of those key figures. The Management expertly sheds new light on their characters and is, by turns, inspiring and nostalgic’

– Scotland’s Sports Books of the Year, The Scotsman

‘Well researched. Takes a microscope to the careers of Scotland’s managerial greats without taking itself too seriously’

– News of the World

‘This is a serious work which demands your attention. For those who demand higher standards and a cerebral take on some huge personalities, it’s an essential volume’

– Aberdeen Voice

‘A great book – very entertaining and well-researched’

– David Moyes

THE MANAGEMENT

Scotland’s Great Football Bosses

Michael Grant and Rob Robertson

This edition first published in 2011 by Birlinn Limited West Newington House 10 Newington Road Edinburgh EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Michael Grant and Rob Robertson, 2010, 2011

The moral right of Michael Grant and Rob Robertson to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978 1 78027 016 6 eBook ISBN: 978 085790 084 5

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore Printed and bound by CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading

For Sharon, Tom and Charlie, and for Donald and Ruby Grant, with love and thanks.

And with love to Claire, Kirsten, Clare and Bruce Robertson.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Craig Levein

CHAPTER ONE

The Master Race

CHAPTER TWO

The Pioneers

CHAPTER THREE

The Four Kings

CHAPTER FOUR

In a Dugout Far, Far Away

CHAPTER FIVE

The Great Old Firm Managers

CHAPTER SIX

Who are ‘the Largs Mafia’?

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Great Club Men

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Giants in England

CHAPTER NINE

The Odd Couple and the Voice of the Managers

CHAPTER TEN

The Scotland Managers

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Mavericks

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Scot who Invented the Dugout

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘And that’s off the record’ . . . Managers and the Press

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Future

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Roll of Honour

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

To all of the great Scottish managers over the years: thanks for the memories, thanks for the results, thanks for the great quotes and stories, thanks for making our clubs and country proud.

The authors of The Management would like to thank: Mike Aitken, Richard Bath, Ralph Brand, Craig Brown, Peter Burns, Sandy Busby, George Cheyne, Bryan Cooney, Stuart Cosgrove, Harold Davis, Tom Devine, Tommy Docherty, Tom English, Tom Forsyth, Glenn Gibbons, George Graham, Darren Griffiths, Mark Guidi, Roger Hannah, David Hay, Tony Higgins, John Hutchinson, Jim Jefferies, Jonathan Jobson, Alex Knight, John Lambie, Jim Leishman, Craig Levein, Hugh MacDonald, Kenny MacDonald, Graham Mackrell (and others at The League Managers Association), Alastair MacLachlan, Rhona MacLeod, Archie Macpherson, Richard McBrearty, Kevin McCarra, Ally McCoist, Peter McCloy, Graham McColl, Robert McElroy, Mark McGhee, Derek McGregor, Hugh McIlvanney, William McIlvanney, Danny McGrain, Andy McInnes, Shaun McLaren, Jim McLean, Alex McLeish, Ruth McLennan, Billy McNeill, Doug McRobb, David Mason, Jody Megson, Willie Miller, Neville Moir, James Morgan, David Moyes, Michael Munro, Bill Murray, Jonathan Northcroft, Alan Pattullo, Stephen Penman, Gary Ralston, Jimmy Reid, Lawrie Reilly, John Roberts, Ian Ross, Alan Rough, Andy Roxburgh, Robin Russell, Alex Salmond, Brian Scott, Ron Scott, Jimmy Sinclair, Alex Smith, Tommy Smith, Walter Smith, Graeme Souness, Graham Spiers, Mark Stanton, Kevin Stirling, Gordon Strachan, Kenny Strang, James Traynor and Eddie Turnbull. Also a very special thanks to Mrs Margaret McDade and Mrs Jessie McNeill, the sisters of Jock Stein, for giving so much of their time, and also to Sir Alex Ferguson and Kenny Dalglish for their best wishes.

Foreword

Scotland is a country which has influenced what people are doing all over the world. Look through history: Scottish people keep popping up all over the place, whether as inventors, heading multinational companies, or in politics, science or engineering. Scotland always seems to produce leaders, people who do exceptional things. Especially when it comes to football management.

If Sir Matt Busby hadn’t been a football manager but had been, say, a captain in the army you just know that he would have been distinguished and would’ve come home with medals. If he’d been a politician he would have risen to a position of power. There is a quality to leadership that is hard to quantify, but part of it is all the little things that go into making a man and which end up radiating something that makes others think ‘wait a minute, this guy’s worth following’.

Players have to look at you and think you are invincible. They have to think that you believe 100 per cent in your own ability. You have to be able to pull people with you. If any of the great Scottish managers had been weak in any way, or there was a chink in their armour, the players would have been able to detect it. Players just get a sense of that from any leader. You have to show you are strong and you know what you are doing. The great Scottish managers gave off that aura.

I think a working-class background brings values and makes people understand what it means to achieve something. It makes you understand the value of winning. It’s not romanticising things to say many Scottish leaders and football managers have had to fight their way out of situations to improve themselves.

I’m from a working-class, council-house background in Fife. My grandfather was a blacksmith, my dad was an electrician in the dockyard at Rosyth. My wife’s father was a miner. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we lived in a cardboard box in the middle of the road – but things weren’t easy. There wasn’t an awful lot of money. And when you’re a kid you want things. I think when you have that fire in your belly it can lead to great things. Our great managers had that, that real desire to prove themselves.

Think of Sir Alex Ferguson. He has leadership qualities that are tied into that idea of protecting ‘his’ people. He protects the people who do well for him, the people who represent him. It’s like trade unionism. Then look down in England at the teams that are punching above their weight. For me that is an indication of who is doing well in management. You look at Davie Moyes. He has that about him, the same sort of qualities as Sir Alex.

You would not say that most of the great managers were great players. They come to the fore more as managers than they did as players. It’s sometimes not about knowing the game, it’s about understanding the intricacies of people. To me, that’s management. Understanding people rather than understanding football. That’s what all our great managers could do.

There is no single stereotype of ‘the great Scottish manager’ but there are common themes. I think Scots are always trying to prove themselves, trying to prove they are better than people think they are. I don’t know where that comes from but, again, it’s about having that fire in the belly.

I don’t think there is a logical reason why Scottish managers should have all these ‘magical’ qualities which come together, but an inordinate amount of them have done well in English football. We haven’t done so well abroad. I’ve wondered about that in the past. Did they go to England and think that was the pinnacle? Are we reluctant to learn another language? Possibly. Or are we trying to prove something? It’s as though we have conquered England . . . but that’s as far as we’ve wanted to go.

I like listening to other managers after a game when they start talking about things. I’m always looking to find out who’s a threat to me. I think if you can get something over on another manager then your team’s got a chance of getting on top of them. You learn a lot from other managers before and after games, and you can use that down the line.

I aspire to be anywhere near where our great managers reached in the past. The Scotland manager’s job is not seen as the best job in the world. Some people might not even see it as the best job in Scotland. So it’s far removed from what Busby, Ferguson, Bill Shankly and Jock Stein have done. But only Shankly did not manage Scotland at some time during his career and I am sure he would have been hugely proud to do so.

In the history of football there are only so many people who have had the opportunity to manage their country. It is a burden at times; you do feel the weight of everyone’s expectations. But I have a real desire to improve things. And I felt enormously proud to have been given the chance.

Craig Levein

Chapter One

The Master Race

How the pits, the shipyards and the mean streets created football’s great managers

Fear is one of the first things that comes to mind. The fear of being on the receiving end of a Fergie hairdryer. The fear, just as awful in its own way, of losing Busby’s approval and sensing you had disappointed him. The fear of being injured and knowing that you were no use to Shankly, to the point that he would ignore you if you passed him in the corridor. You didn’t exist to him until you were fit again. The fear of getting a Smith stare in the Rangers dressing room and feeling the temperature drop a few degrees. The fear of Stein, full stop.

The great Scottish football managers have never done hugs and kisses. They’ve never done touchy-feely, holistic, New Age or alternative therapies. Or, if they ever did, they frightened their players into keeping their traps shut so we didn’t find out about it. They’ve never shrugged their shoulders when their team’s been beaten. They’ve never put up with a player talking back to them. Never understood or sympathised when a referee made a mistake which hurt them. Never thought it was a fair point when a journalist criticised. Never written anything off as a bad day at the office. Never felt sorry for themselves. Never backed down. Never, ever, been good losers.

The great Scottish managers have come to represent something in football. They have become the epitome of the tough, aggressive, no-nonsense gaffer. Disciplined, strict and controlling. Hard as nails. Old school. Not to be messed with, not to be crossed, streetwise and armed with every trick in the book. They love hard graft. Their hair is short, their clothes neat, their shoes polished, their posture straight. Ready for anything, be it pinning a player against a dressing-room wall or psychological warfare against opponents, officials, the press or anyone who might constitute ‘them’ against ‘us’. They stand up for themselves, their players, their club and their supporters. They simmer after a setback. They boil. Their temper explodes. Around them, anger management has a different meaning entirely.

And all of that is only a part of the picture. The great ones also innovate. They inspire, they experiment, they take calculated risks. They can charm the birds from the trees or crack a line which makes a room dissolve into laughter. They know football inside out and are also informed by a wider, worldly intelligence. They have an eye for a player. Their judgement is as close to flawless as any managers can get. They see things that others don’t. They are knowing and well-connected, with armies of informants quick to lift a phone and whisper in their ear if one of their players is spotted in a pub or nightclub. But they aren’t always intimidating men who rule with an iron fist. Their genius has often graced the game with the lightest of touches.

For the greatest of them all, genius is not too strong a description. In 2007 The Times published a comprehensive article on the all-time top 50 managers in world football. These sorts of lists are great newspaper material: highly subjective and guaranteed to provoke a row and a reaction from readers. This one was better than most: impressively researched and confidently presented. The top 20 made for compelling reading. It comprised a couple of Englishmen, a couple of Italians, two Dutchmen, two Spaniards, two Brazilians, and one representative each from Germany, France, Argentina, Austria, Portugal and Hungary. That accounted for 16 of the 20.

And then there was the country which made up the rest. The country which produced the most managers of all, twice as many as any other. The country with the smallest population of any of the nations represented on the list. No prizes for guessing which one. Four of their twenty greatest football managers were Scots.

Neglecting to include Sir Matt Busby, Bill Shankly, Jock Stein and Sir Alex Ferguson would have reduced the poll to a comedy item. Those four head a field of Scottish managers who have shaped, dictated and dominated football – occasionally in Europe and almost continually in Britain – since day one. It goes without saying that along the way they collected a mountainous haul of trophies in Scotland, England and Europe.

The volume of silverware gathered by Scottish bosses at club level is breathtaking. The European Cup has been lifted by a Scottish manager’s hands four times. Stein was the first from Britain to hold it with Celtic in 1967, and a year later it came into the possession of Busby at Manchester United. Ferguson brought it back to United in 1999 and then became the only Scot to win it twice, with another triumph for the club in 2008.

Ferguson, this colossal personality, is the most successful manager in the history of the European club competitions. He also has two European Cup Winners’ Cups and two Super Cups to his name (winning each trophy with both Aberdeen and United). Europe has not limited him: he has an Intercontinental Cup and a FIFA Club World Cup success too.

Ferguson, Stein and Busby are among six Scottish managers to have won the big European trophies. Willie Waddell and George Graham took the European Cup Winners’ Cup for Rangers and Arsenal respectively and Shankly delivered the UEFA Cup for Liverpool.

For a country with a production line of managerial excellence it was predictable that there would be these spikes of high achievement on the continent. But it is the hold Scots have had on British football which has confirmed a mastery of the skills required to assemble, organise and inspire hugely successful teams. For decades the domestic trophies within Scotland itself were harvested only by home-grown managers. Men like Celtic’s Willie Maley (who was born in Northern Ireland but moved to Glasgow at the age of one and played at international level for Scotland) and Rangers’ Bill Struth ruled Scottish football from the 1890s to the 1950s. These two giant figures of Old Firm history won 60 leagues and major cups between them.

With Maley, Struth and other natural, charismatic leaders who emerged at clubs like Hearts, Hibs, Aberdeen, Dundee United, and Motherwell, it was little wonder that for almost a century Scottish club chairmen hardly saw the need to appoint an English manager, let alone one from overseas. Few non-Scots have managed in Scottish football. Only in the 1990s did it become fashionable to begin appointing men like Liam Brady, Wim Jansen, Dick Advocaat, John Barnes and Martin O’Neill. Up until then the frequent conquering of England by Scottish managers seemed to amount to compelling evidence that there wasn’t much to learn from anyone else. The country has always regarded management as a serious business. It was a Scot who invented the manager’s dugout, an idea which spread around the world.

Scooping up all the trophies in their own back yard could never have given Scottish managers worldwide respect. The country is too small for its domestic scene to be regarded as a major stage or proving ground. Scottish managers had to broaden their horizons and follow the money. That meant moving south of the border. They did so at the very beginnings of the professional game – the first paid ‘manager’ in the world was a Scot, George Ramsay, appointed by Aston Villa in 1886 – and the drain of talent became relentless. It continues to this day. Oddly, the migration usually extended only as far as England: with only a few notable exceptions, Scots have tended not to take charge of European clubs. Of the four giant figures, Busby and Shankly never served Scottish clubs as either a player or a manager and Ferguson gained full recognition only when he began to deliver trophies for Manchester United. Stein is the exception to the rule: the one manager who achieved full international respect and status for what he accomplished while working only in Scotland.

It is what Scots achieved in charge of English clubs that truly marked them out. By the end of the 2010–11 season England’s top division had been won 65 times by an Englishman and 40 times by a Scot. Given that the population of England is ten times greater, that is a mighty level of overachievement for the wee country.

The most successful manager in English league history is a Scot. The most successful manager in FA Cup history is a Scot. No Englishman has won their League Cup more times than its most successful Scot. The big four clubs in English football were all shaped to varying extents by Scottish managers. The only managerial legends in Manchester United’s history are Busby and Ferguson. Shankly is the most popular and iconic boss Liverpool has ever had. Arsenal’s first manager was a Scot. So was Chelsea’s.

When the 2009–10 season ended the Champions League was 18 years old and only three men born in England had ever been the manager of a club in its group stages: Ray Harford, Sir Bobby Robson and Stuart Baxter (who is the son of a Glaswegian, spent much of his childhood in Scotland and doesn’t mind being described as a Scot). Three managers in 18 years? In the 2008–09 tournament Scotland had three managers in a single Champions League group: Ferguson, Gordon Strachan and Bruce Rioch.

These statistics are trotted out not to belittle the achievements of English managers – men like Herbert Chapman, Bob Paisley and Brian Clough were outstanding leaders who stood comparison with anyone – but to provide a context for the staggering contribution Scots have made in their own country and in the more demanding arena of their larger neighbour. Busby, Shankly, Stein, Ferguson and a supporting cast including George Ramsay, Tom Mitchell, Maley, Struth, Scot Symon, Tommy Docherty, Eddie Turnbull, Jim McLean, Kenny Dalglish, George Graham, Walter Smith, Gordon Strachan, Alex McLeish and David Moyes amount to a remarkable concentration of managerial talent to emerge from a country with roughly the same population as Eritrea or Singapore.

Why the Scots? Why should a small country previously respected for its excellence in finance, engineering, medicine and science turn out to be such a cradle for football managers? How did four of the greatest the sport has seen – Busby, Shankly, Stein and Ferguson – come to be born within 44 miles of each other?

One approach is to consider the qualities and character traits which are found in all of the great football bosses. What makes a manager? No two are exactly alike. There is no textbook for managerial excellence. All that can be said is that there are shared characteristics. All of the greats possess a formidable combination of presence, authority, charisma and toughness. Every one of them enjoys a certain streetwise intelligence and imagination. Most have excellent communication skills and a way with words. They show a fanatical attention to detail. Their thirst for success is unquenchable.

Scotland has a limitless resource of another quality found in the greats, namely a deep-rooted obsession with football itself. The game has held Scotland’s imagination for more than 125 years and the deteriorating quality of her footballers has not weakened the infatuation. ‘In Scotland, football is the game,’ said former Scotland national manager Craig Brown. ‘In England there can be the distraction of cricket and maybe rugby. In Scotland it’s only football.’ His predecessor, Andy Roxburgh, held the same view: ‘We have had an environment in Scotland, a breeding ground, which almost encouraged an obsession with football. Football has been the lifeblood.’

If all great managers have to be football obsessives then a few are bound to emerge from a country which is populated with fanatics. ‘Football is the number one sport in Scotland by a country mile,’ said Tony Higgins, the former Hibs player who became the Scottish representative of FIFPro, the international players’ union, ‘The country as a whole is obsessed with it. Eddie Turnbull used to talk football, football, football. All day long. The best managers I’ve known are obsessive characters. Completely obsessed by football. I remember once having the chance to go into management and a couple of jobs came up. I spoke to the likes of Alex Ferguson and Alex Smith for advice and they said: “If you’re going to do it you have to forget your family.” They were quite clear. To be a successful manager was a 24–hour-a-day job.’

Jim McLean has said that when he was at the peak of his powers with Dundee United in the 1980s he used to set aside only one hour a week to spend with his wife and two sons. He would meet them at a steakhouse at 4 p.m. on a Thursday and return to work at 5 p.m. A man prepared to make that level of personal sacrifice could not be anything other than a formidable opponent.

For almost a century in Scotland professional football was one of the few realistic means of escaping from a hard, unforgiving, dirty life working down coal mines, in shipyards, or in other forms of heavy engineering. Hundreds of thousands of working-class men left school at 14 or 15 years old without a complete formal education. The majority used football as an exciting way to spend their Saturday afternoons and expose themselves to some rare fresh air with friends. For some it was more than that. For those with the talent, it was their lifeline to social improvement. A better life.

Busby, Stein and Shankly all worked down the pits before earning full-time contracts to play football. The game was Ferguson’s way out of a career as a Clydeside toolmaker in the shadow of the shipyards. Each of them was determined that he was never going back. It was the same story in England. Nearly all of England’s great managerial figures were hewn from the same mining or heavy industry backgrounds as the Scots. Paisley was a miner. Chapman and Sir Bobby Robson were the sons of miners. Clough and Don Revie were from industrial Middlesbrough.

Every truly exceptional managerial achiever from Britain has emerged from Scotland or the north of England, with the exception of Sir Alf Ramsey from Dagenham. This suggests a correlation between the creation of outstanding leaders and their formative years being spent in the hard, tight, interdependent communities found in coalmining regions or other areas reliant on heavy industry. Why no great sporting managers from the mining heart-land of Wales, then? Well, some argue that the greatest of them all was Welsh: Carwyn James, another miner’s son from a pit village. Wales had all the ingredients seemingly required to create great dugout leaders except for the essential obsession with football itself. Her game was rugby union, so James blossomed as the legendary coach of the 1971 British Lions.

It seems that the qualities often found in Scottish people are conducive to creating great football men. Others often portray Scots as being dour, joyless and thrifty, fuelled by hard graft and self-denial. Dundee United beat Motherwell 6–1 in a 1981 Scottish Cup tie and manager McLean withheld the bonus they were due for an exceptional performance. ‘There were times when we were sluggish,’ he said, ‘We might have gone out of the cup.’ That appeals to people’s perception of the Scots.

The American satirist P.J. O’Rourke thought the whole of Scotland saw its glass as half empty. He wrote: ‘Racial characteristics: sour, stingy, depressing beggars who parade around in schoolgirls’ skirts with nothing on underneath. Their fumbled attempt at speaking the English language has been a source of amusement for five centuries, and their idiot music has been dreaded by those not blessed with deafness for at least as long.’ P.G. Wodehouse was more succinct: ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’ Scots would be a sorry bunch if there were no more to them than that. But the satirists are having a laugh. They know the bigger picture.

Many of the great football bosses were shaped by a Scottish upbringing which seemed to arm them with the necessary psychological equipment to cope and excel in the job. ‘Think about the Scottish psyche,’ said Roxburgh, ‘Hard-working, conscientious about what they’re doing, obsessive about what they’re doing, with a winning mentality and real competitiveness. Alex Ferguson has always wanted to win at absolutely everything he’s ever done. It’s like seeing a ten-year-old Scottish kid crying if he doesn’t win at a game of cards. There is a whole chemistry of the environment, of where we’re brought up, the passion for football, the hard-working mentality. We’re not alone in having these qualities. The Italians, the English and so on have these qualities and produce great coaches too. But there are 50 million of them. There are only five million of us.’

So, obsessed with football, hard, competitive and driven by an unremitting work ethic. But what else is in Scotland’s favour? The peerless sports writer Hugh McIlvanney, who himself moved from Scotland to conquer his field in England, pointed to a sense of collective self-assurance and the Scots’ refusal to be belittled or taken for granted.

‘I don’t think it’s silly to suggest that part of the explanation of Scotland’s production of strong, successful managers is the Scots’ ingrained inclination to refuse to think that anyone is superior to us,’ he said, ‘I don’t mean the “wha’s like us” rubbish. That belongs to another section of our collective personality, and it’s a pest. What I’m talking about is the idea that you don’t let anyone shit on your head. You don’t see any reason to let people be presumptuous towards you and you believe that you will be even money with the best of them. If you are aware of having certain talents you are never going to be intimidated about trying to apply them. It may seem less plausible to mention a profound gift for promoting teamwork as another strength the Scots bring to football management, given that whenever we get together, even in twos and threes, our fondness for argument is liable to come to the fore. But we’re also pretty good at sticking together under pressure and nobody can doubt that the lessons in interdependence Busby, Shankly and Stein learned in the pits, and that Ferguson absorbed in his factory days as a trade union activist, gave them a fundamental understanding of the value of teamwork. It was reflected in the teams they fielded.’

Teamwork was certainly prominent among the qualities championed by those Scottish missionaries who helped popularise football around the world a century ago. Scots were at the forefront of the British Empire. Her sailors, engineers, bankers, teachers, scientists and ministers fanned out across the world and that provided a platform to spread education, capitalism, the Bible . . . and football.

‘Successful Scottish football managers are part of a much wider trend,’ said the leading Scottish historian, Professor Tom Devine, ‘It is easy to fall into what I call an “ethnic conceit”, but there’s no doubt that globally the Scots have punched above their weight in a whole variety of areas, and football management is one of them. It’s the same in medicine, in science, in engineering. They played a pre-eminent role, for better and for worse, in the empire. And remember the line “Beam me up, Scotty”? There’s significance to that. In Star Trek the only ethnic groups on Starship Enterprise, apart from the Americans, were a Russian, a Japanese and a Scot.’ If there had been an Enterprise XI, Scotty would have been the manager.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Scots arrived in South America, Asia and mainland Europe and taught the innovative ‘Scottish’ football style of short passing and teamwork. At that time the game in England revolved around long kicking or players simply dribbling with the ball until they were dispossessed.

The world was receptive to Scottish ideas. They were hugely significant in establishing football as the sport of the masses in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, three countries which would go on to win many World Cups between them. Modern football was introduced to China by a Scot in 1879. Other Scottish coaches worked in Holland, Italy, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And they flooded into England.

Long before the era of ‘tracksuit managers’ like Shankly and Stein, men with suits, bowler hats and Scottish accents were in charge of clubs such as Aston Villa (George Ramsay) and Blackburn Rovers (Tom Mitchell). Between 1894 and 1920 Ramsay, a Glaswegian, won six league titles and six FA Cups and Mitchell, from Dumfries, won five FA Cups. Scotland’s managerial stamp was on English football from the very beginning.

The early success of Ramsay and Mitchell and the frequency of Scotland’s victories over England in the annual international fixture meant that Scots were seen as having knowledge and understanding of the game. Over the following decades the contribution of Busby, Shankly, Stein, Ferguson and others set that reputation in stone. The modern deterioration of Scotland’s playing standards has not affected the common perception that Scots ‘know the game’.

‘In an odd way the English love the idea of “the Scottish manager”,’ said the broadcaster, cultural commentator and St Johnstone fan, Stuart Cosgrove, ‘That might be to do with national stereotypes and myths. A friend of mine is a Blackpool fan. He once said to me “What Blackpool need is a disciplinarian in charge, they need a hard taskmaster, they need a Scottish manager!” He was just grabbing an available stereotype but he wasn’t associating a Scottish manager with talking about diets or psychology or iced baths or whatever. They see the Scottish manager as the solution when players need to be reeled in and disciplined. They see the gnarled, grizzly Jock.’

It is true that Scottish managers are usually perceived as all being gruff, unyielding and pugnacious. Able to handle themselves. ‘Even real hard men would not challenge them,’ said Hugh McIlvanney, ‘Take Paddy Crerand, a real Gorbals guy. Denis Law used to say, “When Paddy starts, put out the lights and lie on the floor . . .” But one glance from Busby could have Paddy quaking, because he didn’t want to embarrass himself in Busby’s eyes.’

The sense of being a crew of formidable characters has resulted in comparisons being drawn between Scotland’s great managers and her most powerful politicians, those at home in the adversarial bearpit of Commons debates. ‘All Scottish managers I meet seem to be frustrated politicians,’ said spin doctor Alastair Campbell after Ferguson, his friend, gave a 2007 speech about Labour Party values.

Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, could understand what he meant. ‘There are certain similarities in character traits between our managers and our politicians,’ he said, ‘Scottish politicans often come from a debating background, they are disputatious. It would be difficult not to recognise a Scottish debater, and it would be difficult not to recognise a Scottish football manager. Neither of whom would you probably wish to meet on a dark night . . .’

In his autobiography the broadcaster Alan Green devoted a chapter to his fractured relationship with Ferguson and compared him to his predecessors: ‘I’m told that Bill Shankly and Jock Stein were both men it was best not to cross. And Matt Busby’s withering silences disguised a cut-throat manner when he deemed it necessary. You’ll notice, all of them Scots.’

Whatever their field of expertise, leading Scots know how to look after themselves. The author William McIlvanney, the brother of Hugh, once saw a flash of Busby’s understated but intimidating power when he somehow struck the wrong note with a question during an interview. ‘I still don’t know what I said, it was totally innocent, but I must have tread on a toe somehow because he said “But we’ll no’ be talking about that.” He had such strongly fixed parameters. He must have thought I was angling to ask him about something. I don’t know what it was. I never got to find out, either. I knew instantly I had to back off. I don’t know anyone who would have been keen to take on Bill Shankly, or big Jock, or Alex, and certainly not Matt Busby.’

How could they be anything other than hard men, given the upbringings they had? Their formative years were moulded by tragedy or danger, gnawing hardship, or their parents’ worries about money or ill health. They also shouldered heavy responsibility at a young age. Busby was six years old when his father was killed in the First World War. By age twelve he was walking five miles every morning to get to school. He left at fifteen and went down the pits at sixteen. His mother also took a job at the pit head to supplement her widow’s pension. Shankly was born within five years and thirty miles of Busby. One of ten children, he left school at fourteen and spent two years as a miner until the pit closed and he was unemployed. Stein was only nine years younger than Shankly and born five-and-a-half miles from Busby. Stein was in the mines by sixteen, working in a pit where a three-month sequence of accidents claimed the lives of seven of his colleagues.

Mining united those three. In 1913 there were 140,000 miners in Scotland and 200 pits in Lanarkshire alone. The industry – this fertile source of great football managers – was gradually wiped out by various factors including the rise of alternative fuels. The last deep mine in Scotland closed in 2002, ending the miner-to-manager route.

‘The hardness of their existence and their environment made them challenge and be challenging figures,’ said Archie Macpherson, the broadcaster and biographer of Stein, ‘It’s so obvious, isn’t it? They were brought up hard, they remained hard, and their focal point was being able to transmit that hardness in a sport that they knew inside out. That’s why all of these men seemed to be able to reach the heights.’

It’s no coincidence that Busby, Shankly, Stein and Paisley served time in the dirty, dark and dangerous world of coalmining. The sense of solidarity and comradeship among miners was unsurpassed in any other workforce. Men effectively placed their lives in the hands of their colleagues every time they entered a cage and were lowered down the shaft to the seam. They might be suffocated, crushed by a pit collapse, trapped in an underground fire or killed or injured some other way. The unity of purpose, the shared exposure to death and danger, hardened the miners and enabled them to deal with any other difficulty life might present to them. When they emerged blinking into the daylight at the pit head they rejoined a local community entirely united by reliance on the mine.

‘We all know that, without any desire to over-romanticise mining communities, there is no question at all that they had a great spirit and an imposed spirit of togetherness,’ said Hugh McIlvanney, ‘Men underground had to believe in teamwork of the most basic kind because their lives could depend upon it. I don’t think it’s too fanciful to suggest that the values of mining contributed seriously to the approach that men such as Stein, Shankly and Busby had to their later work in football. A lot of people would possibly sneer at the connection I’m making, but I think they would be foolish to do so. These are not the only men who drew their wisdom for working in football from a background in mining. Jock worked underground until he was 27. He once said to me that he knew that when he was working in the pit that wherever he went, and whatever he did, he would never work with better men.’

The McIlvanney brothers, journalist Hugh and author William, can talk with some authority about miners given that their father spent part of his working life down the pits. ‘Jock once said “If you’ve been down a pit you’re not going to worry too much about a wee kerfuffle in a football club”,’ said Hugh, ‘It gave them terrific perspective on life. They had that experience in the wider world. So when it came right down to it was a football player ever going to bother them that much? Not only had they had to confront real physical danger, but there was the fact they had dealt with really hard men who would be hard with them if they didn’t handle themselves properly. So if a football player might have tried to act the goat with them it really didn’t have much of an effect.’

Archie Macpherson used to detect an attitude when he saw his friend, Stein, engage some adversary or other in an argument. ‘When you saw Stein taking swipes at people he gave a sense that he was thinking “You don’t know what you’re talking about, you haven’t had to face the challenges that I’ve had”. That mining background bred self-confidence bordering almost on arrogance, as it did in Shankly’s case, albeit a pleasant, almost comedic arrogance. It’s maybe too obvious to pick up the mining community thing and dismiss it, say it can’t be that which shaped the great managers, but there is little doubt that Stein spent the early part of his life feeding the rats his piece down the mines. He also had men die beside him in an accident down Bothwell pit. I don’t think miners went down consciously thinking that they might not get out alive, but I think the awareness existed. Life was about survival, making ends meet, and with it an aspiration to get out of that. Anything else in life is probably relatively easier to cope with after that.’

Given the aspects of trust, loyalty, solidarity, resilience and pragmatism required to survive life in the pits, or the shipyards, Tom Devine has said that great human qualities were forged there. ‘These places were universities.’

Ferguson’s upbringing was steeped in shipbuilding. His father and brother worked in the Govan yards and although Ferguson himself did not, the yards were on his doorstep. He was an apprentice toolmaker and the sense of community around the noisy, bustling Clydeside yards was a constant source of wonder to him. At the peak of production 100,000 men were employed in 33 yards on Clydeside. Today there are only three yards and fewer than 4000 workers. Ferguson has talked of the ‘intensity of shared experience’ found when a community is reliant on a single industry. He has left no one in any doubt that Govan made him. If he were born today he would be in a different Govan and he could not evolve as quite the same character.

‘I grew up accepting that shipbuilding was part of the fabric of my existence,’ Ferguson has said. ‘It has been said that the values great managers like Jock Stein, Sir Matt Busby, Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley brought to their jobs in football were rooted in their mining background. I have no doubt it is true and I am sure, too, that any success I have had in handling men, and especially in creating a culture of loyalty and commitment in teams I have managed, owes much to my upbringing among the working men of Clydeside.’

William McIlvanney has admired Ferguson’s sense of ‘Don’t forget where ye come fae’. He said: ‘I was at a game at Old Trafford once and the match programme had small biographies of the two managers. It said “Alex Ferguson, born Govan”. Not “born Glasgow”, but Govan. It was that precision of knowing where he really came from. Not a Glasgwegian, but a Govanite.’

Football became Ferguson’s lifeline to escape. Not to escape Govan – never that – but to escape the uncertainty, monotony and limitations of life as a toolmaker. The lives of working-class Scottish males seemed predetermined and unalterable in the first half of the 20th century. The sons of miners became miners themselves. The sons of shipyard workers became shipyard workers. Further education was all but closed to the majority of the working-class population and there was an accepted inevitability about leaving school, taking a place in the prevailing industry of the region, and settling into the same hard, subsistence existence their parents had gone through.

Professional sport offered the prospect of a better life for the precious view with the talent to merit full-time status. Boxing became a doorway for some but many more used football. Imagine how precious a footballer’s contract would be to someone whose alternative was the darkness, dirt and danger of a life down the pits . . .

‘For unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled labour in Scotland, as Shankly said, football is much wider and deeper than simply a game,’ said Tom Devine. ‘Almost all of these guys left school at 14 or 15. Their aspirations in their particular cultural or social milieu were to excel in the area or areas they knew best, and one of those areas was football.’

Busby left the pits behind when he joined Manchester City, aged 18. Shankly signed for Carlisle United when he was the same age. Stein once said ‘You don’t want to be underground all your life’. A less talented player than the other two, he had to wait until he was 27 before Llanelli became the first club to offer him full-time professional status. When the Welsh club ran into financial difficulties Stein feared losing his full-time status and having to go back down the pits. He was spared that when Celtic offered a contract to return and play in Scotland.

‘People would not have thought that men coming from those areas could become successful businessmen or successful football managers,’ said Macpherson. ‘But they did. I think they cared less about the consequences of their actions. They took chances, and taking those chances was part of the gamble that they took in life. They took chances that perhaps someone from a more protected, or middle-class or even upper working-class environment wouldn’t take, because there the taking of chances simply wasn’t necessary. Nobody cushioned them or mothered them. Some might have gone on to boxing but the sensible and athletic ones saw football as an opportunity to show what they were capable of doing.’

Serving time in ‘real’ jobs before entering football was enormously significant in determining the attitudes, priorities and sense of perspective that men like Busby, Shankly and Stein brought into management. Footballers tend to emerge from the working class, even today, and here were men who knew what it meant to graft for a living.

Ferguson was cut from a similar cloth, born during the Second World War and now the last of his kind in top-class British football management. ‘Alex does represent much the same background and much the same values as the great managers of previous generations, especially those three ex-miners, Stein, Busby and Shankly,’ said Hugh McIlvanney, ‘Having served his full apprenticeship as a toolmaker he knows about earning a living outside football. That’s pretty rare for managers now. These days they usually come through from within the insular world of football and they are not directly acquainted with what goes on in more ordinary workplaces. I’m not suggesting they don’t have enough imagination to realise what it is like to make a living elsewhere, but they don’t have the personal experience of “earning your keep” in any area other than football. And a narrower background tends to mean narrower perspectives.’

Mining and the yards were universities which produced a handful of extraordinary football managers and hundreds of thousands of socialists. Labour was the default party of the Scottish working class for decades. The political sympathies of men like Busby, Shankly, Stein and Ferguson were left-wing, aware and supportive of the issues and concerns affecting the common man. Even a younger manager such as David Moyes has talked of being ‘dead against’ private schools. There was a minute’s silence at the Labour Party conference in 1981 when Shankly’s death was announced. Busby and Stein were interested in miners’ issues for decades after they left the pits.

Stein and Ferguson walked together to a game at Hibs’ Easter Road Stadium during the 1984 miners’ strike. There were collection buckets outside for the striking miners. Ferguson, his thoughts occupied by the game he was about to see, walked past. Stein stopped, flashed his younger friend a challenging stare and asked ‘Here, are you not forgetting something?’. Ferguson had forgotten himself, no more than that. He was as sympathetic to the miners as Stein was and quickly dug out a fiver for the bucket.

‘The miners have been crucial in the evolution of socialism,’ said William McIlvanney, ‘They needed communal values. If you didn’t have a cup of sugar you’d be given a cup of sugar. If you didn’t have a suit for a funeral you’d be lent a suit for a funeral. There was that sense of mutual deprivation that led to a sense of mutual sharing. Remember Shankly saying “If you get them [footballers] to pool all the things they can do for each other, it’s a form of socialism: without the politics, of course . . .” That giving of respect and demanding of respect would be crucial in a managerial position. Now you have players with manic self-esteem because of the money they get. If you have someone like Ashley Cole crying in his car because he thought Arsenal were offering him “only” 50 grand a week, I just find that pathetic. If values have been distorted to such an extent that you are emotionally distraught at not getting the other 30 grand a week they should also be giving you, it’s time to forget it. Abdicate the species.’

The four pre-eminent managers were instinctively drawn to the charismatic Govan trade union leader Jimmy Reid, and vice-versa. Here was a gruff, strong, articulate, hugely impressive man cut from the same cloth as themselves. When Reid led a work-in in a proud attempt to spare the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders (UCS) yards from government closure in the early 1970s the great football figures supported his cause financially and emotionally. ‘They were all of the left, insofar as they had any politics in them at all,’ said Reid, talking to the authors in one of his last interviews before his death in August 2010. ‘They were proud of their origins, they identified with the Scottish working class and that never changed, no matter how successful they were. They were good guys. If you knew them they were very open and if they could help in any way they would do so. I know you have to be able to be a bit of a bastard to be a good football manager, but these guys were all good working-class men and proud of that. Shankly talked about football being a form of socialism. You could argue that in the Scottish working class a huge proportion of men you might call “natural leaders” went into trade unionism or football.’

It is an intriguing idea, that fate might have delivered Shankly or Ferguson into a career in trade unionism or politics, or a charismatic leader like Reid into football management. Ferguson quickly became the representative of the players’ union at whichever club he joined. It was common for the union leader in any club’s dressing room to be a Scot.

‘There was the idea of that generation being inextricably linked to trade unionism, to the nationalised industries, to industry itself,’ said Stuart Cosgrove, ‘Just like today every player has an agent, in those days every player had a relationship to a place of work that wasn’t football. Because Scotland had the big ones – coal, shipyards, steel, all the big, physical industries – it had a culture of organised labour. I’m convinced if you look at any of the big English clubs it would have been Scots who were among the first players’ union leaders, whether it was Jimmy Sirrel or Shankly or whoever. I think the Scottish dressing-room leaders would also have been anti-“the system” or anti-the directors or whatever. Anti-establishment. Within a year of being at St Johnstone Alex Ferguson had already fallen out with the club. You get the feeling they would often be in a tense relationship with the directors. Ferguson at some of his clubs, Shankly at Preston, Docherty throughout his career.’

When Sir Alf Ramsey took over as manager of Birmingham City one of his first acts was to say: ‘There’s one thing in this dressing room I don’t like . . . there are too many Scots.’ This was not a criticism of the quality of players like Kenny Burns, Jimmy Calderwood and John Connolly. Ramsey was acknowledging that the Scots would be strong characters, unionised barrack-room lawyers who were liable to give him trouble if they thought he was taking liberties.

‘Mining and the shipyards developed a strong background of solidarity,’ said Salmond, ‘Us against the world. United we stand. Community. There’s that streak in our great football managers. Maybe a lot of great motivators have that in one way or another. I don’t think it’s necessarily the fact that they came from mining, it’s much more about the solidarity issue. A football manager has to be able to speak to a predominantly working-class group of football players. There are some very smart guys who made it as players – Davie Weir, Maurice Malpas, Alex McLeish are clever men – but even now the number of them who have degrees would be quite low. Craig Levein is an intellectual guy but he also knocked out Graeme Hogg with a punch in a game at Stark’s Park. So intellectual or not, you’ve got to be able to communicate in a language the squad understands. We know that Sir Alex Ferguson does – often with some force – and we know that Jock Stein did. We also know that both of these men and others have the ability to control the uncontrollable. Who else could have managed Jimmy Johnstone?’

Shankly made endless connections between football and socialism. Stein had been a pit delegate representing the concerns of his fellow miners. During his apprenticeship as a toolmaker Ferguson served as a shop steward in the Amalgamated Engineering Union and was actively involved in two Clydeside strikes in 1960 and 1964.

Busby’s leanings were similarly left-wing. ‘Any time I went to Manchester, if there were any posters up saying “Jimmy Reid speaking” or whatever it was, Matt would be on the phone saying I’d to come down to Old Trafford on the Saturday and be a guest of the club,’ said Reid. ‘It was like being part of a Clydeside Mafia! They looked after their ain. In my experience they were very supportive and sympathetic towards whatever problems were affecting the men of the yards. I got to know them all very well. Walter Smith is cut from similar cloth. He has a kind of Scottish working-class character. Although they don’t make a song and dance about it, they are proud of it and they hold on to it. They are principled guys. They represent values that the Scottish working class used to hold quite dear. The funny thing was that when they became managers they would all have their wee fall-outs with the players’ unions!’

Stein and Shankly were teetotal, in defiance of the heavy-drinking environments in which they were brought up. Busby drank in moderation but saw his greatest playing talent, George Best, reduced by the bottle. Ferguson likes a fine wine and owned a pub while he was manager of St Mirren. Perhaps Bryan Robson, Norman Whiteside and Paul McGrath believed that would mean he would turn a blind eye to their drinking when he arrived at Manchester United. Instead, Ferguson identified the ‘drinking club’ as a massive problem and obliterated it by getting rid of Whiteside and McGrath. Robson would have gone too, but his skills were indispensable.

Busby, Stein, Shankly and Ferguson were all spared the predisposition towards heavy drinking which grips so many working-class Scots. At the level they reached, drunkenness and hangovers would be incompatible with the energy, drive and focus required to deliver relentless achievement.

Ferguson brings sharpness, vitality, commitment and competitiveness to all his passions. His 1999 autobiography, Managing My Life, was an enormous undertaking and he went about it with the ambition and thoroughness that he has brought to management itself. At almost 500 pages it was far larger than most sports biographies, albeit he had rather more to fit in than most. It won the 2000 British Book Awards book of the year. The pages reveal the intelligence, the hunger for knowledge, and the range of interests that Ferguson shares with all the truly exceptional managers.

Leaving school early or missing out on further education was no impediment to them. They could hold their own in any company. It can be no coincidence that every one has been refreshingly free from the curse of religious prejudice which still pollutes the west of Scotland. Stein, Shankly, Ferguson, McLean, Graham, Smith, Dalglish, McLeish and Moyes all emerged from Rangers-supporting families, of varying passion, and Busby and Docherty from Celtic ones. All were blessed with wise, principled parents who drummed it into them that there was no place for sectarianism in their lives. That open-mindedness was the intellectual equivalent of having a goal of a start.

‘A lot of the Scottish managers are self-taught,’ said Tony Higgins, ‘It’s like the days of the old Communist Party in Scotland, the Jimmy Reid thing of being self-taught, self-educated. Guys like Fergie read books on being managers and tried to understand it, not from attending a course in university but by reading books about leaders and things like that. He would read about Fidel Castro, or whoever, to absorb lessons about leadership.’

The football historian, broadcaster and journalist Bob Crampsey – a former ‘Brain of Britain’ and semi-finalist on Mastermind – described Stein as having ‘the most powerful intelligence’ he had ever encountered.

Hugh McIlvanney described Stein as a sort of ‘uneducated intellectual’. ‘Many Scots are quick to develop a certain worldliness, a useful freedom from naiveté,’ he said, ‘Along with an alertness to human foibles, there’s often the sense of keen intelligence applied in a practical way. Jock Stein had those advantages, and lot of others. He had a very special mind. Nothing about the game could fool him. He was a complex man, capable of being melancholic, of sinking into moods that took him to depths of introspection. And, naturally, he was too thoughtful not to have serious interests beyond the game. But his passion for football was immense and when he committed himself to it the quality of his mind meant he was a master of team management.’

This form of street intelligence, gained in the rough-and-tumble of their neighbourhoods or the mines or the yards, gave the great managers the priceless advantage of understanding what made men tick. Alex McLeish said, ‘A lot of us have tried to copy big Jock and Fergie and might think it’s about making up fancy words and bamboozling our players with tactical stuff and making long-winded speeches. But then you hear them and you remember that they made it really simple.’

The greats have always been able to strike the balance between encouragement and intimidation. They could sense which of their men responded to an arm around the shoulder and which needed a kick up the backside. Ferguson has always been selective about who was on the receiving end of ‘The Hairdryer’, the ferocious, nose-to-nose bawling he administers to a player who has displeased him.

‘You have to look at the forthright honesty and integrity of these guys,’ said Craig Brown, ‘The blunt truth from the Shanklys and Steins of the world. If you speak from the heart and you know the game it’s impossible for anyone to dispute those qualities. Davie Moyes embodies those qualities right now: straightforward, right down the line, no flannel. There’s an awful lot of bullshit in English management but the Scottish guys are right down the line. They are complimentary when required, critical when required. And there’s a wee touch of humour about them all too. I think a wee sense of humour is useful in a dressing room.’

It has been said that all Scots have a great sense of humour because it is a free gift. Very droll. What’s certainly true is that men like Shankly, Tommy Docherty and Gordon Strachan have enriched football with some great lines over the years. Scottish managers as a whole are seen as having the gift-of-the-gab and being more than capable of holding their own if a rival or journalist tries to put one over on them.

Shankly once claimed that the fact continental Europe was on different time zones to Britain was a conspiracy to inconvenience Liverpool Football Club in the European and UEFA Cups. He once told his players that Manchester United’s Paddy Crerand, whom they were about to face, was ‘slower than steam rising off a dog turd’. When United’s players arrived at Anfield before a game he emerged in their way holding a raffle ticket and told them: ‘Guess what, boys? I’ve had a go on the tickets that give the time when the away team will score. And it says here “in a fortnight”.’

On what it felt like to play for Scotland, he said: ‘You look at your dark blue shirt, and the wee lion looks up at you and says “Get out after those English bastards!” ’