Legacy of Ferguson years forgotten in gloomy windswept fortress on sea’s edge

One day in July 2003 I found myself in Aberdeen, waiting for an evening flight home to Dublin. I decided to kill an hour or two with a walk out to Pittodrie, the home ground of Aberdeen FC.

Walking up the coast road I saw the redbrick back of the Richard Donald stand appear to my left. It turns out there's nothing between Pittodrie and the grey North Sea but a couple of hundred yards of grass. It's among the most stark, desolate and atmospheric locations of any British football ground – the stadium at the edge of the world.

This gloomy windswept fortress was the lair of Alex Ferguson's first great team, the Aberdeen side who won the European Cup-Winners' Cup in 1983. In March of that year, Bayern Munich came to the ground at the edge of the world, and fell off.

Bayern had started well. A few minutes after kick-off Klaus Augenthaler scored a goal that was the very definition of majestic, gliding past challenges 20 yards out and hitting a rising shot into the top corner.

It was a strike that demonstrated Bayern's superior class and should have demoralised Aberdeen. Instead, the Scots fought back with the ferocity the world would come to associate with Alex Ferguson teams. Neil Simpson equalised before half-time, only for Hans Pflügler's speculative effort to restore Bayern's lead with half an hour remaining.

Favourite ruse

Aberdeen’s equaliser is lovely to watch because we remember seeing it repeated many times during Ferguson’s years at Manchester United. It was a ploy that became a favourite ruse of

Ryan Giggs

. Two Aberdeen players went to take a free kick at the same time, almost running into each other over the ball. They appeared to apologise to each other, then, as they walked back to resume their positions, one of them quickly spun around and whipped a free-kick into the box, onto the head of Alex McLeish, who buried it for 2-2. The man in the Giggs role that night was

Gordon Strachan

, the current

Scotland

manager.

Aberdeen’s winner came less than a minute later, so soon after the equaliser that the cameras missed the build-up. Another ball into the box, another header, another rebound, another goal. Ferguson’s team that night were the spirit of Scottish football: guile, intensity, fierce will to win.

That day in 2003 there wasn’t much about Pittodrie to remind you of its great history. There’s a big grassy field between the stadium and the sea. The only people to be seen were two boys who had climbed the hill next to the stadium and were whacking golf balls into the field. When they exhausted their ammunition they scurried down, gathered up the balls and scrambled back up the hill for another round of drives. A pristine park ideal for football, in the shadow of one of the temples of the game and the local kids are playing golf? Maybe this explained what had happened to Scottish football.

Rapid decline

At that time, the Scotland team was in rapid and frightening decline. They’d been perennial

World Cup

participants during the 1970s and 1980s, and maintained a respectable position among the world’s top 30 during the 1990s. Then, as the 20th century became the 21st, they suddenly forgot how to play football.

In the 2004-05 season, Scotland lost at home to Norway in World Cup qualifying and sank to an all-time low of 88 in the Fifa rankings.

That was also the season in which the best young footballer in Scotland, Aiden McGeady, played his first matches for the Republic of Ireland. McGeady wasn't the first Scottish-accented player in the Irish team – there had been the likes of Ray Houghton and Owen Coyle before him – but his situation was different from theirs.

Certain starter

Houghton and Coyle played for Ireland simply because Scotland never called them up. Scotland had a lot of good players in those days. McGeady, by contrast, would have been a certain starter for the threadbare Scotland team of 2004-05. It was galling for Scots to see a Glasgow boy who could have been one of their best players deciding to represent another country.

History repeated itself in February 2010. Once again Scotland had failed to make the World Cup, once again they’d been humiliated by Norway in qualifying, and once again the best young Scottish footballer – in this case James McCarthy – was making his debut for the Republic of Ireland.

McGeady and McCarthy are entitled to play for their country of choice and Irish football is lucky that they chose Ireland. But Scottish supporters are entitled to wish they had been more like Ikechi Anya.

Anya, who scored Scotland’s goal against Germany in September, comes from the same Castlemilk suburb of Glasgow as McGeady and McCarthy. He decided to play for Scotland, the country of his birth, rather than Romania or Nigeria, the countries of his parents.

McGeady and McCarthy (if he's fit) will probably take some abuse from the home crowd on Friday. To some of the Irish visitors, this might sound like a manifestation of the anti-Irish racism that still haunts the west of Scotland. But at Celtic Park, it seems unlikely you'll hear them booed because they're Catholics who chose to play for Ireland.

If it happens, it will be because they’re good footballers who chose not to play for Scotland. And it’s difficult to see any problem with that.