A SUCCESSION of former Aberdeen managers, including Sir Alex Ferguson, regularly speak fondly of the Pittodrie club's legendary chairman, Dick Donald, and his equally fabled love affair with financial husbandry. Dick did not build a multi-million pound fortune from dance halls, bingo emporiums and property by adopting a cavalier attitude to money.
In his autobiography, Ferguson relates the case of the excess champagne following the Scottish Cup final victory over Celtic in 1984. Before such events, the manager would order six cases, and the chairman would promptly instruct the club secretary t
o load one on to the team bus and put five in storage.
Ferguson would then countermand the order and reverse the ratio, secreting five on the bus and putting one in store. On the way north from Hampden, players and family members enjoyed themselves, surreptitiously passing bottles of the bubbly around, Dick, sitting at the front with his wife, Betty, across from Ferguson and his wife, Cathy, leaned across the aisle. "Mr Ferguson," he said. "Yes, Mr Chairman?". "How many cups were we playing for today?".
Alex Smith, with two national cup triumphs the most successful of Ferguson's many successors, remembers the ritual of trying to persuade Dick to endorse the purchase of a player. "You knew before you started how it would probably end," says Smith, "but it was still worth going through the motions, just for the fun of it.
"I'd say, 'We could do with a player, chairman,' and he'd come back with, 'How many players you got, Alex?'. I'd then say, 'Oh, forty-two,' or however many it was on the books. Dick would reply, 'How many do you need?'. That was his way of telling you not to bother pursuing the matter".
The old chairman's distaste for extravagance, however, did not always derive from frugality. There were times when it sprang from a commonsense grasp of economics. In the days before the SPL made undersoil heating compulsory at all of its stadiums, for example, Dick would be tackled on the subject of installation more often than anyone, Aberdeen's location making them more vulnerable than their more southerly neighbours. "It's all very well putting in undersoil heating," he would say of an exercise costing, at the time, about £100,000. "But there's no point in having a lovely, playable pitch if the fans cannae get in fae the pairts."
Those words proved prophetic once again last weekend, when Pittodrie was a lush, green oasis and the Homecoming Scottish Cup tie against East Fife had to be postponed because the access roads were impassable. All those years ago, Dick showed a knowledge and understanding of the vagaries of a Scottish winter that seem to have eluded the Rangers chief executive, Martin Bain.
Bain's fulminating against the SFA for postponing his club's tie at Forfar last Sunday – almost four hours before kick-off – hinted strongly at grandstanding for the sake of it, as well as a risible 'concern' for his club's supporters, rather than genuine outrage provoked by any wrongdoing on the part of the national association or any flaw in its procedures governing such circumstances.
Bain's various claims are not supported by either the evidence or the law of probability. His insistence that, having furnished the SFA with the weather forecast as early as the Thursday – not entirely necessary, one would have thought – the authorities took "no cognisance" of his warning and his plea for an early ruling is quite ludicrous. An inspection a full 24 hours before the kick-off, which showed the pitch to be perfectly playable, hardly amounts to ignoring the communication from Ibrox.
Bain also made a case out of the forecast of a deep frost on Saturday night which would threaten the tie. A similar outlook was given for the Friday night and the frost simply did not materialise, an example of the vagaries mentioned earlier. The SFA could hardly postpone a match a day in advance, at a time when the ground was fit. They have a duty to look after their members and they include Forfar, as well as Rangers.
As for the notion that large numbers of Rangers fans were already in transit, that is extremely unlikely, given Forfar's location – a 90-minute drive from Glasgow, less from other centres such as Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen. The Forfar secretary, David McGregor, confirms that he had only one early call from supporters, a group leaving from Inverness.
By that time, around 8.30am, referee Eddie Smith was already inspecting, having been at the ground 15 minutes earlier, the result of being called at his Dundee hotel by McGregor at 7.35am. The club secretary advised the Inverness party not to set out, as he was by then pessimistic about prospects. When they called back soon after, the postponement was confirmed.
The image of the mass migration of fans that early in the morning – at least one newspaper, astonishingly, said that "thousands" of Rangers' followers were already on the road – does not, in any case, square with the Ibrox club's total ticket allocation of 2,500.
Bain's attack on the SFA suggests a man who is not au fait with the difficulties historically associated with staging football in a northern European winter, rather curious for one of his experience. He should also, it is reasonable to suggest, have been aware of the innumerable precedents of fans actually being inside grounds when an 11th-hour turn for the worse in the weather has caused an intolerably late call-off. By comparison, a near-four-hour notice of postponement seems like pretty smart work.
The full article contains 948 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
