The legendary Red Devils coach: The road to success

Chapter 18: Showing Off His Talents

Ferguson's coaching continued to improve, and he gradually established and improved his own unique team-building style. Ferguson boldly explored, aimed at integrity, strengthened physical and technical training, actively created unique offensive tactics, and forged a new team with a distinctive style.

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In October 1974, Ferguson officially took over as coach of St. Mirren and started a new journey.

Ferguson was recommended to St. Mirren by Willie Cunningham, who had coached him at Dunmflynn and Falkirk. Willie Cunningham was very impressed with Ferguson's coaching performance at East Stirling.

This has also become a point of view in the local media in Scotland: "Ferguson has a tough attitude and effective methods. He is very enthusiastic and inspiring, and he can unite and integrate the goals of everyone around him."

St. Mirren Football Club was founded in 1877 and has a very long history. They were one of the 1890 founding teams of the Scottish Football League, which began in 11. The team's best record was winning the Scottish FA Cup twice in 1926 and 1959, but it has never won the top league. St. Mirren's history has been full of ups and downs, and they have been fighting in the Second Division for a long time. They returned to the Scottish First Division after winning the Second Division in the 1967-68 season, but then slipped back to the Second Division.

Before Ferguson took over as manager, the team was in a state of depression and struggled. The players were in poor form and played listlessly. They could only attract about 1000 fans per game, but their home stadium, St. Mirren Park, was not small. The stadium, known as "Love Street", could accommodate people.

摆在弗格森面前的最关键任务，是要在赛季结束时把球队留在乙级前六。因为下个赛季将改为苏超（原苏甲前12名球队）、苏甲（原苏甲的后6名和乙级前6名）和苏乙（乙级后6名和丙级前6名）。假如圣米伦队不能留在乙级前六，那就会降到苏格兰第三级别的联赛。

When Ferguson arrived at Love Street, his coaching staff consisted of four members: assistant coach Provan, a reserve team coach, a team doctor and a part-time equipment manager. There were quite a few players, a full roster of 35. But there were few strong players on this roster, most of them were unknown, and many were part-time players.

The key to St. Mirren's decline is that the team lacks a grand goal and passion for the future. The old players are almost all just trying to get by, and the team has almost no youth training, with only a few young players, let alone echelon construction.

"The team is in a state of disrepair," Ferguson said. "I have decided to start reforming the team immediately."

Ferguson decided to enforce his authority with an iron fist. When he first arrived at St Mirren, the local Paisley Daily Express sent a photographer to take family photos of the team. When Ferguson saw that captain Ian Reid deliberately made a V sign behind his head, he called Reid to his office.

"If I were to choose a captain, I would choose a mature person," Ferguson said. "Your behavior is very childish, full of stupidity and meaninglessness."

Of course, Ferguson did not fire the captain because of a gesture. The fundamental reason was that Captain Reid did not accept management at all, even refused to implement tactics, and had no respect for the coach, which made Ferguson fire him.

Ferguson's list of targets was long. John Mowat was ordered to leave immediately after being undisciplined in training. Another guy ignored Ferguson's request and drove to an away game, so he was added to the "blacklist". A player missed training and explained that he had to take his girlfriend to a concert, but he never had the chance to return to the team.

Ferguson later said in an interview, "I wanted everyone to know that if they messed with me, they would suffer. They soon found out."

After being ruthlessly cleaned up by Ferguson, the remaining players immediately became alert. Especially when they lost to East Stirling, a team coached by Ferguson, and were eliminated in the Scottish Cup with a score of 0-2, they knew the power of this coach.

Ferguson decided to build a brand new team. He continued to use the training system he had used at East Sterling to strengthen the players' physical fitness, strength, and increase their running distance.

Ferguson spent a lot of effort to encourage the players to win and inspire their blood. Ferguson began to build a young team that could resonate with the locals and attract more fans in the community. When someone told him that the best young player in St. Mirren was midfielder Tony Fitzpatrick, he didn't care that the 18-year-old was excluded from the team because of pleurisy at the time, but asked for a doctor's number and asked if he could play in a reserve team game. Fitzpatrick went a step ahead and gave his parents' contact information, so that his father pretended to be a doctor to give permission to play.

Fitzpatrick played the game, and “afterwards he called me into his office. I thought he was going to release me because I was a part-time player, had pleurisy and had lied to him,” he later told The Guardian. “People always said I was too small to be a player and I wasn’t fast enough… I thought Ferguson thought the same of me.”

"On the contrary, he told me that I played well in that game and impressed him. He thought I would be a starter and wanted me to be the captain of the team in the future," Fitzpatrick said. "I couldn't believe it. It was incredible that someone believed in me and recognized me so much. He changed my life."

After vigorously promoting Fitzpatrick, Ferguson retained several cornerstone players of the original team as the skeleton and actively added young players to the team.

St. Mirren began a complete transformation.

"The team was very united and people started to flock to the stadium," said Fitzpatrick, who later became CEO of St Mirren. "It was an incredible experience for those of us involved. Ferguson took over an aging team, but he made bold changes and changed the whole club and the community. He believed in young players and showed outstanding leadership skills."

"I was successful at this club? I was a legend at this club? That was all thanks to Ferguson," Fitzpatrick said. "He saved my life."

Under Ferguson's guidance, St. Mirren began to climb the league table. The vibrant St. Mirren won eight games in a row and their points rose rapidly. Although Chudi lost two of the last five games, they retained their sixth place in the league.

The reformed Scottish First Division was launched. Under Ferguson's leadership, St. Mirren maintained its fighting power among many strong opponents and finally ranked sixth in the season.

The club management was overjoyed and the fans also saw new hope.

Ferguson had great ambitions and was determined to reach the higher level Scottish Premier League.

Ferguson decided to take a two-pronged approach, starting with the daily life of the club and the team training. As a person who loves the job of head coach, Ferguson personally took care of everything and organized the team. From buying cleaning supplies to ordering pizza on match days, from setting up the team newspaper "Saints" to lowering the roof of the stands to prevent fans from climbing over the turnstiles, from comforting fans to guiding community football, Ferguson was involved in everything about the club and devoted a lot of effort.

St. Mirren's business operations began to improve, and Ferguson's comprehensive management ability continued to improve due to his active participation in the club's specific affairs. It was from St. Mirren that Ferguson became a coach who managed the team comprehensively, a manager who took on the role of a manager. He not only made continuous progress in leading the team, but also benefited greatly in improving the club's operational level.

With Ferguson's strong promotion, the team newspaper "Saints" was officially launched and regularly delivered to Perlis residents for free. Although Ferguson's whimsical move was criticized at the beginning, the number of interested fans increased rapidly, and the community residents' enthusiasm for football also grew rapidly. Although this regularly published newspaper was only the size of a piece of paper, its subscriptions continued to increase and even began to generate advertising income.

In order to attract fans, Ferguson insisted on going to the community of Perlis every week, to middle schools and primary schools, to volunteer to coach community teams in playing and training.

"No one on the team is more hardworking than him," Willy Todd, who succeeded Curry as the new chairman, wrote in an article in The Guardian. Even though the chairman of the board had a sharp conflict with Ferguson, he had to admit Ferguson's excellence.

Ferguson has always been committed to building an emotional bond with the fans, and the team has benefited from it. In addition to establishing a team newspaper, he visited the St. Mirren Supporters Club twice a week to mingle with the fans. Ferguson's emotional investment soon paid off. Before the start of the season, Ferguson wanted to sign Dundee United defender Jackie Copeland, but the team was financially tight and unable to pay the transfer fee. After hearing the news, the supporters club immediately agreed to raise pounds and signed Ferguson's favorite player.

In order to increase the attendance rate and team revenue, Ferguson thought of many ways. St. Mirren is located in Paisley, a small town. The town is also deeply affected by the high unemployment rate. Most of the residents are fans of the two old friends in Scottish football. Every weekend, fans will take a bus to Glasgow to watch the games of Glasgow Rangers or Celtic.

Ferguson believed that the town had a deep inferiority complex and that it must be changed.

Ferguson came up with a good idea. He asked the club electrician Douglas to fix a big speaker on the top of a van, and he sat in the van with a microphone and went around Paisley to promote the team. He solemnly introduced his team to everyone over and over again, introduced the team's new developments every day, and called on fans to return to St. Mirren Park to support their home team.

This method really worked. St. Mirren's average attendance has increased dramatically to around 10, times the number before Ferguson took office. In this season's cup competition, St. Mirren's highest home attendance record has exceeded .

Under Ferguson's coaching, St. Mirren became more professional and the team continued to grow stronger. Not only that, the team was marked with a distinct Ferguson imprint: young, brave, passionate and full of fighting spirit.

Ferguson focused on offense and had a distinctive style. The team soon took on a new look and became more vigorous, which was very popular with the fans. Ferguson attached great importance to youth training and actively discovered and trained young players. After his careful exploration and meticulous polishing, what finally appeared in front of the fans was a young team with youthful vigour. A group of talented young players including Billy Stark, Lex Richardson, Bobby Reid and others stood out, and St. Mirren also created a youth storm in Scottish football.

In the Scottish football world at that time, the young team of St. Mirren had a resounding nickname: "Ferguson's Fury", which reflected Ferguson's passion and the youthful atmosphere of the team. The main players of the youth team, such as Frank McGarvey, Billy Stark, Lex Richardson, Bobby Reid, Derek Hyslop, Bobby Torrens and Fitzpatrick, were all discovered and cultivated by Ferguson himself. The St. Mirren team, holding high the banner of attack, was youthful and vigorous. The average age of the team players was only 19 years old, and the captain Fitzpatrick was relatively old - 20 years old.

The 1976-1977 season was unforgettable for Ferguson. His team made great progress from the beginning of the season and secured the top spot in the league after Christmas. Ferguson promised the fans that he would bring the team to the Scottish Premier League and that all difficulties on the journey would not be a problem!

Ferguson's team was awe-inspiring, sweeping the Scottish First Division and securing the title early on. After three years of hard work, Ferguson finally brought St. Mirren, a team in the lower middle of the Scottish Second Division with an average attendance of 3 fans per game, to the championship podium of the Scottish First Division in the 1000-1976 season and brought the team to the Scottish Premier League.

Ferguson began to show his brilliance at St. Mirren and became a remarkable new coach in Scottish football.