I wrote a book about Everton legend Duncan Ferguson 11 years ago - here's what happened when I met him

I knew this day would come. Not my words, but the words of Osmo Tapio Raihala who two Fridays ago finally found himself sharing radio airtime with his muse: Duncan Cowan Ferguson.

And I knew how he felt. Later the same day I was saying roughly the same thing as I sat across a table from the former footballer who had, for several years, become the object of my obsession.

I struggled to complete a book – unauthorised I hasten to add – about this complicated, controversial character who went out of his way not to speak to anyone and yet who had fascinated me, partly because of this self-imposed silence, for so long.

Our chief football writer Alan Pattullo alongside Duncan Ferguson. Pic: Lisa Ferguson | Lisa Ferguson

Like Raihala, the Finnish composer who wrote an epic orchestral piece entitled Barlinnie 9 about the former striker, I had dreamt of one day actually sitting down with Ferguson (while always having a sneaking feeling that day would come, sometime, somewhere).

Sitting down and talking to him would certainly have made writing a book about him a lot easier. I eventually navigated the project by talking to what felt like everyone who had ever crossed paths with Ferguson, including Jock McStay one fateful day at Ibrox, and some who had not, such as the aforementioned Raihala, who I felt compelled to visit in Helsinki as deadline approached much to the dismay of the publishers. Both men I’d like to think of now as friends.

Duncan, however, remained elusive. Until now, that is. Our cards are now on the table in the form of two books. One is his, the recently published Big Dunc: The Up Front Autobiography written in conjunction with Henry Winter. The other is mine, In Search of Duncan Ferguson, which came out in October 2014.

‘Often misunderstood footballer’

“I am really sorry,” he says, clocking the one that isn’t his. “I have not read a page. But I heard about it. I think I came across quite well in it, didn’t I?!”

I hoped it was a fair and accurate account, certainly. When people later asked me ‘What does Duncan think of it?’, bluffing my indifference was my default setting: Well, I am still alive, aren’t I?! In the opening acknowledgments, I described Ferguson as an “often misunderstood footballer” who I felt deserved another hearing.

I’m very relieved he is giving me one now although I am also very aware I am not a special case. Far from it. When once the near impossible task was to gain an exemption to his near blanket refusal to have anything to do with the media, now the difficulty is finding time between his already scheduled interviews as promotional activity ramps up in intensity following his book’s publication on 8 May.

“The first one I did, was this ‘Overlap’,” he says, with reference to the hour-long podcast hosted by Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Ian Wright and former England women’s midfielder Jill Scott. “I never knew what it was, I knew nothing about it. But my kids said to me, ‘Dad you must do this’.”

Duncan Ferguson celebrates one of his many great moments with Everton. | Getty Images

Ferguson was reluctant. Old habits die hard and all that. His kids – Cameron, Ross and Evie – badgered him. “‘No, you must do it!” they told him.

“And I see the difference,” he concedes. “I was down in London the other day there, I came off the train, and normally people say hello, maybe the odd person, you know what I mean? But there were taxi drivers driving past going, ‘I watched The Overlap! It was fantastic!’ It hit a million people, like, in a few days, you know?”

For some, including those employed in the media department at Everton in the late 1990s and early 2000s, this must all seem very surreal. After all, he wouldn’t even agree to be interviewed for his own DVD, which the Goodison club brought out two years after he stopped playing in 2008. There was some commercial benefit from the Greta Garbo-like mystique that developed around Ferguson: when he was made captain at Everton for the first time under Howard Kendall, the manager ordered him to say a couple of lines for the club’s Clubcall line, a service where fans could phone up a premium cost line to hear the latest news. “We cleaned up that day,” an official told me, with fans simply fascinated to hear what he sounded like.

Ferguson hasn’t read the books

As for my book, I’m not offended he hasn’t read it. He hasn’t even read his own book, or so he told an audience of around 100 who came to hear him at an official launch event at the Mar Hall hotel in Bishopton last week, where he oozed unvarnished charisma for well over an hour. It’s where we finally sat down together.

Or at least he says he hadn’t read his own book until he recorded the Audiobook, where he initially found himself stumbling over his words before finding his flow.

“Your front cover is better than mine!” he says, looking down at the possibly touched-up photo of a content-looking Dunc staring out from the front cover of his new autobiography – he’s clearly self-conscious about how ‘in your face’ it is although he looks well and is a good advert for sobriety. It’s 17 years and counting since he last touched alcohol.

The cover of my book, the rogue one as someone has described it, depicts the footballer towering over and leaning into referee Steve Bennett. As well as being a striking image, I suppose it’s an allusion to the Headbutt – the moment on which his life and career hinges. Everyone who interviews Ferguson in any kind of detail must decide when it’s best to bring it up although some knowledge of the circumstances is advisable.

Duncan Ferguson leaves Cupar Sheriff Court after a trial for assault in September 1993. | TSPL

In The Overlap podcast mentioned above that clearly wasn’t the case. Wright has an excuse, seeing as he was playing for Arsenal against Chelsea on the afternoon in April 1994 when Ferguson propelled his head towards Raith Rovers right-back McStay after they had jostled for possession of the ball. Keane was out injured for Manchester United’s defeat at Wimbledon while Neville was still on the verge of his first-team breakthrough at Old Trafford.

Scott, meanwhile, was just seven-years-old on an afternoon when time stood still at Ibrox in front of 42,545 witnesses. Someone who should have been watching, referee Kenny Clark, later claimed he was not. Had he seen what happened, had he sent Ferguson off, perhaps even booked him, it might not have reached the stage where the already troubled Ferguson was found guilty of assault at Glasgow Sheriff Court 30 years ago this week in a landmark ruling: his failed appeal meant he became the first British professional footballer to be jailed for an on-field offence – and to date, the only one.

“It had a big impact on both of us,” says Ferguson, referencing the other, often forgotten victim in the drama. “Obviously that led to me breaking my probation, which then obviously put me in prison. I heard as the years went on, he [McStay] had quite a difficult time with that. I saw somewhere he had some problems because he was involved in that incident. Nae fault of him. Nae fault of him. There was contact. There was contact there. There was not any force in it, but there was contact. There is nae blame to him at all. He probably got the rough end of it as such. It’s a shame, that.”

One question of many I’d always hoped to have the chance to ask Ferguson is what would be his reaction if he met McStay in the street, given everything that’s happened? And knowing, as he does now, that things spiralled for McStay as well in the aftermath, with the long-serving Raith player released by his club soon afterwards aged only 28 before later battling with depression.

It must have been tough for McStay

“I don’t think at the time… I mean, it wasn’t a bad incident,” says Ferguson. “Who’d have thought I was going to go to prison? Who’d have thought it was going to follow me around all these years? But it has, hasn’t it? Obviously it’s been tough for him [McStay]. Especially when he was still playing football. If I saw him, I’d shake his hand. There’s no ill feeling from me anyway. He was very unfortunate in that whole incident.”

Ferguson provides some further context for the contretemps in his book although it does seem somewhat flimsy basis for a grievance. McStay, he says, annoyed him with a sarcastic comment while at the bar at a footballer of the year awards do the previous year, something the former Raith Rovers player – now on the maintenance staff at

Celtic Park – denies “100 per cent” when I spoke to him earlier this week. It might all be considered ancient history by some but McStay struggled as he fell down football’s ladder while his old team-mates celebrated a historic Coca-Cola Cup win over Celtic later the same year.

Ferguson, too, still carries the scars. How could it be otherwise? He was just 23 when he served 44 days of a three-month sentence inside HMP Barlinnie – at the time described as “among the worst in western Europe”. It was genuinely chilling a couple of Fridays ago to hear him recount his first night as prisoner 12718, when his cell “grew darker” and the banging and the shouts in the surrounding blocks “grew louder”. The ears of the £4 million former Rangers footballer pricked up when he heard one fellow inmate bellow from across the landing: “Where is he then?!” Although at Everton by then, he knew he would be a marked man for around half of those in the jail.

Duncan Ferguson promotes his new book. | Lisa Ferguson

The colours of the regulation Barlinnie uniform at the time also presented problems for someone who had found a home at Goodison Park: red and white striped shirts. A photo in his new book of the one owned by Ferguson, which the caption says he took as “a souvenir”, stops you in your tracks – although it looks like there’s some blue in it. Bespoke, Ferguson explains.

“They put blue and white stripes onto it!” he says. “I don’t know if you can see it in the picture. When I went into the nick, they made it especially for me, the cons who were in there. They extended the sides with a bit of blue in it. So it was big. I must have worn that for the seven weeks! I can’t remember ever washing any of my gear! I must have just hung it out the cell or something. I stole it!” Perhaps only Duncan Ferguson could leave prison having first robbed it.

“Well, you widnae do that, would you?” he says, registering my surprise at this revelation. “It’s probably the first and only shirt that’s come out of Barlinnie.”

“I got processed the night before, because the press were outside and because they wanted me to go in the morning. So they came in at night with some of my gear, I had a suit and that. I hung my suit up. And the boy came in and said, 'You get changed in the morning in here and I will knock on your cell and you just go straight oot'. So as I was getting changed I’ve taken the shirt off and slotted it… gone! I signed the wall as well.

“I am just remembering …and I should have put this in the bloody book!… I signed the wall as well: ‘Big Dunc was here’. You know the daft things you get, like ‘Wee Jimmy from Possilpark was here’, ‘Alan Pattullo from Dundee was here’… but don’t worry, you werenae!

“So I signed the wall and I robbed my shirt. See that knock on that door in the morning, it was like a kid at Christmas – he’s been! You know when your mum and dad come to the door? ‘He’s been! He’s been!’”

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Ferguson is demonstrating that he’s a natural raconteur, strong Stirling brogue undimmed from over three decades living away from Scotland. He underlines his star quality again later in the evening, when he holds a room in thrall alongside ‘straight man’ host Pat Nevin and with Ally McCoist looking on from the front row.

I remember being given a glimpse of this perhaps surprising eloquence near the start of my Ferguson journey. The very beginning I can pinpoint as 12 June 2008 when I sat down to interview former Dundee United manager Jim McLean at his home (even this memory prompts a quick retort from Ferguson about the man he depicts as a tyrant: he was never invited to his house and was certainly “never asked to sit doon!”).

Duncan Ferguson and Alan Pattullo embrace after their chat at Mar Hall. | Lisa Ferguson

A short while after the McLean visit, I received word that Ferguson was due back in Liverpool – he had made a post-playing career flit to Majorca – to be inducted in the Gwladys Street Hall of Fame, something conceived by Everton fans rather than the club itself.

I made it my business to be there and so was sitting eating rubbery chicken when my jaw almost fell to the table as Ferguson rose to his feet and delivered an off-the-cuff speech of appreciation that left no one present in any doubt of its sincerity. “It’s the only club I ever played for,” he stressed, in an instant eliminating Dundee United, Rangers and Newcastle United from his career CV. “You forget the rest. The rest are… nothing!”

That was a bravura performance, Duncan, I tell him. Almost poetic. “You were there, aye?” It’s his turn to be surprised. “They still use that quote [at Everton],” he says – and I remember pushing for my book publisher to plump for Forget The Rest as a title (probably wrongly). “That’s what Everton meant to me,” continues Ferguson. “That’s where I had my success as well, remember. It’s where I played my best football, other than maybe my first few years at Dundee United. Rangers did not go well for me.

“I felt I belonged in the end, in the city, where the fans were so good to me. It's where I have my best memories. You do forget the things you fail in. You want to push it to the side, don’t you?”

Ferguson’s ‘massive regret’

Failure isn’t winning seven Scotland caps although in Ferguson’s eyes, it is. “Criminal,” he calls it, seemingly alert to the irony. “It’s a massive regret for me. I blamed everybody for what had happened to me. I just dug my heels in and decided I was not going to play.” It’s often overlooked that he played twice more for Scotland following his release from prison.

“My dad pushed me to go back,” he says. “He said: ‘C’mon. Go back.’ I didn’t like it. My heart was not in it. I was seeing people there who had been gi’ing me a 12-game ban now wishing me all the best. I was bitter, I was upset.”

Of the seven games, none were at Hampden. He scored just once at the national stadium – the second goal in a 6-0 friendly win for Everton against Queen’s Park in 2002 in front of 1,588 spectators. “It’s hardly Brazil, is it?!” he says.

Mention of which country is an excuse to segue into a question about Carlo Ancelotti, whose patronage of Ferguson perhaps qualifies for the title of most unlikely twist in the Scot’s career – the Italian even provides his new book’s foreword. Might there be a reunion in Rio, where Ancelotti is headed at the end of this season after signing off from Real Madrid?

Duncan Ferguson regrets not winning more than nine caps for Scotland. | Getty Images

“If he pays the restaurant bill!” replies Ferguson, who writes about how Ancelotti would turn up for dinner while Everton manager with no money: “Well, he’s the King isn’t he? You don’t see the King with money…”

Ancelotti’s coaching assistant son Davide once clapped Ferguson off the training ground at Finch Farm after watching him deliver an outstanding coaching session and remains in the running to take over at Ibrox. What a postscript that would provide for any future updates of Ferguson’s autobiography: Return to Rangers.

As for my book, it finishes by teasing Ferguson’s then improbable plan to come back and manage Everton, which, lo and behold, he did as a caretaker in two different spells. But, as Everton prepare to say farewell to Goodison Park this weekend, Ferguson doesn’t believe he will be back at the club in a working capacity.

He says it’s time to move on. And so it is. After asking me to sign the copy of In Search of Duncan Ferguson I have handed him, he gives me a big bear hug. Later, returning home to Edinburgh, the closed M8 means I find myself driving back via Stirling, where I pass the sign to Bannockburn, the place where it all began for Ferguson.

So much has since unfolded. Someone should write a book about it. See you around, big man.