Fergie The Player

David Docherty Takes A Look Back At The Lesser Known Part Of Sir Alex Ferguson’s Football Career.

IT’S hard to believe that it’s now six years since Sir Alex Ferguson hung up his hairdryer to enjoy a well-earned retirement.

We all know what sort of manager he was – tough, demanding, ruthless etc. While John Lennon may have sang about mind games, Fergie used them at every opportunity to get that vital edge over the opposition.

‘Fergie Time’ has become part of the lexicon of football and is defined as ‘a generous or excessive amount of time after injury time had been added at the end of a match allowing more time to score a late equaliser or winner’.

That is a thumbnail of Fergie the hugely successful manager, but what sort of player was he?

He started his career with the famous Glasgow amateur club Queen’s Park in 1958, turning semi-professional with St Johnstone in 1960. He moved on to full-time football with Dunfermline four years after that before making a dream move to his boyhood favourites Rangers for a record Scottish transfer fee in the summer of 1967.

Fergie was an out-and-out goalscorer renowned for having sharp elbows, a single-minded determination to win at all costs and a quick, sometimes acid, tongue.

The highlight of his career prior to joining Rangers was scoring a hat-trick for St Johnstone at Ibrox in a coupon-busting 3-2 win on December 21, 1963.

All of his goals came in the space of 23 second-half minutes and he became only the fifth player ever to attain that particular feat.

St Johnstone actually did the double over the champions that particular season by winning their home match 1-0 with Fergie again in the line-up.

His worst moment must have been when he was excluded from Dunfermline’s Scottish Cup final side in 1965.