Big Dunc - what a legend

[Bluebonic]

Agree with Joey66' an Icon certainly!

 

[davek]

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/clubs/everton/article4432631.ece

Anyone have access to this Tory filth rag who can cut and paste the whole article?

I'm just interested to know if this big galoot thinks he can be Everton manager by laying out cones and waiting for Martinez to leave.

 

[Coffee and TV]

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/sport/football/clubs/everton/article4432631.ece

Anyone have access to this Tory filth rag who can cut and paste the whole article?

I'm just interested to know if this big galoot thinks he can be Everton manager by laying out cones and waiting for Martinez to leave.

I've got it here

‘Coaching is my addiction, I love it,’ says Everton’s bad boy reformed

In an office crammed with tactics boards and laptops, training schedules and squad lists, Duncan Ferguson is midway through a 12-hour day at the Everton training ground.

He has attended a coaches’ breakfast meeting with Roberto Martínez, led the first team through a session, joined an academy event and will spend the afternoon looking through DVDs of Everton’s next opponents before heading home, perhaps in time for dinner.

It sounds like a long day. Just a normal one, Ferguson replies, contentedly. “This is my addiction,” he says, pulling out a drawer full of coaching sessions scribbled on to pieces of paper. “I love it, can’t get enough of it.”

Meet “Big Dunc”, the dedicated coach. “Duncan Disorderly” reborn as a serious, ambitious football man. Who would have thought it?

Certainly not Jim McLean, the former Dundee United manager, who so despaired of a troublesome young striker that he berated Ferguson: “The game means far too much to me, I know that. But it means f*** all to you.”

Ferguson the aspiring manager is surely not what anyone could have come to expect. Nine years after his last goal for Everton, his name still conjures vivid images of destructive mayhem, on and off the pitch. He is a man with a past, with more baggage than Louis Vuitton.

I suggest that some people may struggle to embrace the updated version. “I wouldnae blame them,” he says, accent still as thick as the day he moved south of the border.

“When I played the game I had the reputation. You can’t get away from that. I was sent off, played hard, made mistakes in my career, in my life.

“So maybe some people do say, ‘Duncan Ferguson? God almighty.’ But they don’t know me.”

We are here to challenge preconceptions and Ferguson destroys many of them over an hour. It was not an interview I expected to happen. A recent, fascinating biography by Alan Pattullo was entitled In Search of Duncan Ferguson. He has avoided the media for years, unsurprisingly mistrustful.

Yet here he is, answering questions without reticence, a story to tell and, yes, an image to soften. “I’m serious,” he says. “I want people to remember me as a coach.”

He is even thinking of writing his own memoir to set a few stories straight. The title? “How about Black and Blue?” he replies, quick as a flash.

He can laugh at his own reputation for trouble because, he insists, he has been off the booze for some years. “Nah, I don’t drink,” he says. “I don’t really socialise at all. I’ve two boys and a girl, so it’s all family life for me. And work.”

Coaching is his passion, he says, and he talks excitedly about the possession game he sought to instil with Everton Under-18 along with Kevin Sheedy.

“I’m a great admirer of Barcelona and Marcelo Bielsa, that Chile team, the way they played that intense press, 3-3-3-1,” he says. The sharp-elbowed forward is now a footballing hipster.

Some things do not change. At 43, he is still muscularly lean and intimidatingly tall. On the day we meet, he has been at Finch Farm since 6.50am, arriving early to go into the gym, where he pulled on the boxing gloves for some sparring with one of the groundsmen.

Brave groundsman, I say. “Nah, he’s only middleweight but he’s a boxing coach, knows what he’s doing, knocked lumps out of me,” he laughs.

He has mellowed from his days as an Everton captain famed for his dressing-room war cries, but, in his role as first-team coach under Martínez — “The most tactically detailed manager I’ve met,” he says — it helps to be a little scary when giving “a kick up the a***”. “I don’t get a lot of backchat,” he acknowledges.

He has worked his way up over several years back at the club where, Everton tattoo on his shoulder, he became a cult hero for supporters in his days as a big, combative striker. Things finished badly for him in 2006, when David Moyes told him that there would be no new contract. Moyes held out his hand to show no hard feelings. Ferguson turned his back and walked out.

He disappeared, fleeing football and Britain for Majorca. He had no plans, except to lie in the sun. “You’re sitting by the pool and your belly is getting bigger,” he says. “Your missus is getting on your case. I started to miss football.”

He began recruiting a few players for a private academy, then decided that he wanted to try his hand at coaching. Everton was the obvious place to return, but Moyes was still manager. They had not spoken for five years.

“That phone call was tough,” Ferguson says. “I can be hard-headed and we never parted on the best of terms. But I’m glad I did it. He was good as gold with me. It was Moyesy’s idea to send me to the academy.”

Ferguson started working with the kids and there was much he could tell them about how to handle the fame; the do’s and especially the don’ts of stardom, which he learnt the hard way as a teenager in Stirling. “I made a lot of mistakes, but I wouldnae hammer myself for them,” he says.

“You are 16, 17, coming from an estate, what are you going to do? I had to go out and meet girls. And people start to look at you in a different way, you become the focal point. Back then I never had the strength to walk away, you know? But hand on heart, I never started anything, never once. That’s the truth. I finished a few.”

Among the scrapes, Ferguson was fined for punching and kicking a man on crutches after he was goaded in a taxi queue. “You are standing with your girlfriend and she’s getting slaughtered and there’s three or four fellas,” he says.

“Maybe I should have run in the opposite direction and left her, but on the estates I grew up, look, you’re talking fat lips, black eyes. That’s nothing. But because you’re a player it’s all over the media.”

He went to Merseyside to escape the frenzy in Scotland that followed his criminal conviction for headbutting — still the only British footballer jailed for an on-field offence.

Yet trouble pursued him to England. There was a drink-driving incident when he was arrested in the early hours of the Saturday night before a Merseyside derby on the Monday.

“Yes, that was a big mistake,” he says. “I went oot. I went through a bus lane, Paradise Street. I was taking a short cut, not because I was falling about drunk. I blew only 15ml over the limit, half a glass or something.

“At that time in my life, it probably sums things up. Maybe I shouldn’t have been out. But maybe there’s some regret that spurs you a bit harder.”

On the Monday night, Ferguson leapt highest, heading home his first goal in a victory over Liverpool that established him as a Gwladys Street hero. From bottom of the league, Joe Royle’s “Dogs of War” would become FA Cup winners by May 1995. The fans still chant his name. “It’s a bit embarrassing,” he says, yet there is no denying the deep, enduring connection.

“Once Everton has touched you, nothing will be the same,” Alan Ball once said, and the sight of Ferguson’s dugout celebrations during the recent victory over Manchester United seemed living proof. Ferguson says that he will stay at the club for as long as they will keep him. “I’m an Everton fan with a ringside seat,” he says.

As well as first-team work, he remains a frequent visitor on Sunday mornings to watch the academy teams.

The paper he submitted to pass his Uefa PRO Licence last year was a study of youth development at Real Sociedad. “Developing from within is my big passion,” he says. “I like to test myself on academy players, see where they end up. I started doing that four years ago, predicting their progression, seeing if I get it right.

“We’ve got a great set-up with the academy, education programmes that are second to none. There was nothing like that when I was coming through.

“I got a lot of injuries and you do think, ‘Maybe if I didn’t have so many nights out, if I lived a more professional lifestyle, maybe that would have saved me a few operations.’ But I didn’t know any of that. You know what players’ lounges were like, alcohol on the bus going back from games. Ridiculous.”

Much has changed, and Ferguson with it. He has found that he cannot live without football. What remains to be seen is whether his coaching ability can match his enthusiasm. His strengths? Picking a player, he says. “Ask me an opinion, I’ll give it. I’m not afraid of sticking my neck on the line. But that’s easy to say now. I might go into management and sign ten diddies.”

He laughs out loud, but it sounds like management is a serious ambition one day. And surely there is only one job that appeals?

“I think everyone dreams of being Everton manager, don’t they,” he says. “Don’t you? Everyone has dreams, but it’s not something I’m anywhere near. We’ve got a top-drawer manager, outstanding, and I’m learning from him every day. I just want to be the best coach I can be. I’m working hard at it.”

 

[davek]

I've got it here

‘Coaching is my addiction, I love it,’ says Everton’s bad boy reformed

In an office crammed with tactics boards and laptops, training schedules and squad lists, Duncan Ferguson is midway through a 12-hour day at the Everton training ground.

He has attended a coaches’ breakfast meeting with Roberto Martínez, led the first team through a session, joined an academy event and will spend the afternoon looking through DVDs of Everton’s next opponents before heading home, perhaps in time for dinner.

It sounds like a long day. Just a normal one, Ferguson replies, contentedly. “This is my addiction,” he says, pulling out a drawer full of coaching sessions scribbled on to pieces of paper. “I love it, can’t get enough of it.”

Meet “Big Dunc”, the dedicated coach. “Duncan Disorderly” reborn as a serious, ambitious football man. Who would have thought it?

Certainly not Jim McLean, the former Dundee United manager, who so despaired of a troublesome young striker that he berated Ferguson: “The game means far too much to me, I know that. But it means f*** all to you.”

Ferguson the aspiring manager is surely not what anyone could have come to expect. Nine years after his last goal for Everton, his name still conjures vivid images of destructive mayhem, on and off the pitch. He is a man with a past, with more baggage than Louis Vuitton.

I suggest that some people may struggle to embrace the updated version. “I wouldnae blame them,” he says, accent still as thick as the day he moved south of the border.

“When I played the game I had the reputation. You can’t get away from that. I was sent off, played hard, made mistakes in my career, in my life.

“So maybe some people do say, ‘Duncan Ferguson? God almighty.’ But they don’t know me.”

We are here to challenge preconceptions and Ferguson destroys many of them over an hour. It was not an interview I expected to happen. A recent, fascinating biography by Alan Pattullo was entitled In Search of Duncan Ferguson. He has avoided the media for years, unsurprisingly mistrustful.

Yet here he is, answering questions without reticence, a story to tell and, yes, an image to soften. “I’m serious,” he says. “I want people to remember me as a coach.”

He is even thinking of writing his own memoir to set a few stories straight. The title? “How about Black and Blue?” he replies, quick as a flash.

He can laugh at his own reputation for trouble because, he insists, he has been off the booze for some years. “Nah, I don’t drink,” he says. “I don’t really socialise at all. I’ve two boys and a girl, so it’s all family life for me. And work.”

Coaching is his passion, he says, and he talks excitedly about the possession game he sought to instil with Everton Under-18 along with Kevin Sheedy.

“I’m a great admirer of Barcelona and Marcelo Bielsa, that Chile team, the way they played that intense press, 3-3-3-1,” he says. The sharp-elbowed forward is now a footballing hipster.

Some things do not change. At 43, he is still muscularly lean and intimidatingly tall. On the day we meet, he has been at Finch Farm since 6.50am, arriving early to go into the gym, where he pulled on the boxing gloves for some sparring with one of the groundsmen.

Brave groundsman, I say. “Nah, he’s only middleweight but he’s a boxing coach, knows what he’s doing, knocked lumps out of me,” he laughs.

He has mellowed from his days as an Everton captain famed for his dressing-room war cries, but, in his role as first-team coach under Martínez — “The most tactically detailed manager I’ve met,” he says — it helps to be a little scary when giving “a kick up the a***”. “I don’t get a lot of backchat,” he acknowledges.

He has worked his way up over several years back at the club where, Everton tattoo on his shoulder, he became a cult hero for supporters in his days as a big, combative striker. Things finished badly for him in 2006, when David Moyes told him that there would be no new contract. Moyes held out his hand to show no hard feelings. Ferguson turned his back and walked out.

He disappeared, fleeing football and Britain for Majorca. He had no plans, except to lie in the sun. “You’re sitting by the pool and your belly is getting bigger,” he says. “Your missus is getting on your case. I started to miss football.”

He began recruiting a few players for a private academy, then decided that he wanted to try his hand at coaching. Everton was the obvious place to return, but Moyes was still manager. They had not spoken for five years.

“That phone call was tough,” Ferguson says. “I can be hard-headed and we never parted on the best of terms. But I’m glad I did it. He was good as gold with me. It was Moyesy’s idea to send me to the academy.”

Ferguson started working with the kids and there was much he could tell them about how to handle the fame; the do’s and especially the don’ts of stardom, which he learnt the hard way as a teenager in Stirling. “I made a lot of mistakes, but I wouldnae hammer myself for them,” he says.

“You are 16, 17, coming from an estate, what are you going to do? I had to go out and meet girls. And people start to look at you in a different way, you become the focal point. Back then I never had the strength to walk away, you know? But hand on heart, I never started anything, never once. That’s the truth. I finished a few.”

Among the scrapes, Ferguson was fined for punching and kicking a man on crutches after he was goaded in a taxi queue. “You are standing with your girlfriend and she’s getting slaughtered and there’s three or four fellas,” he says.

“Maybe I should have run in the opposite direction and left her, but on the estates I grew up, look, you’re talking fat lips, black eyes. That’s nothing. But because you’re a player it’s all over the media.”

He went to Merseyside to escape the frenzy in Scotland that followed his criminal conviction for headbutting — still the only British footballer jailed for an on-field offence.

Yet trouble pursued him to England. There was a drink-driving incident when he was arrested in the early hours of the Saturday night before a Merseyside derby on the Monday.

“Yes, that was a big mistake,” he says. “I went oot. I went through a bus lane, Paradise Street. I was taking a short cut, not because I was falling about drunk. I blew only 15ml over the limit, half a glass or something.

“At that time in my life, it probably sums things up. Maybe I shouldn’t have been out. But maybe there’s some regret that spurs you a bit harder.”

On the Monday night, Ferguson leapt highest, heading home his first goal in a victory over Liverpool that established him as a Gwladys Street hero. From bottom of the league, Joe Royle’s “Dogs of War” would become FA Cup winners by May 1995. The fans still chant his name. “It’s a bit embarrassing,” he says, yet there is no denying the deep, enduring connection.

“Once Everton has touched you, nothing will be the same,” Alan Ball once said, and the sight of Ferguson’s dugout celebrations during the recent victory over Manchester United seemed living proof. Ferguson says that he will stay at the club for as long as they will keep him. “I’m an Everton fan with a ringside seat,” he says.

As well as first-team work, he remains a frequent visitor on Sunday mornings to watch the academy teams.

The paper he submitted to pass his Uefa PRO Licence last year was a study of youth development at Real Sociedad. “Developing from within is my big passion,” he says. “I like to test myself on academy players, see where they end up. I started doing that four years ago, predicting their progression, seeing if I get it right.

“We’ve got a great set-up with the academy, education programmes that are second to none. There was nothing like that when I was coming through.

“I got a lot of injuries and you do think, ‘Maybe if I didn’t have so many nights out, if I lived a more professional lifestyle, maybe that would have saved me a few operations.’ But I didn’t know any of that. You know what players’ lounges were like, alcohol on the bus going back from games. Ridiculous.”

Much has changed, and Ferguson with it. He has found that he cannot live without football. What remains to be seen is whether his coaching ability can match his enthusiasm. His strengths? Picking a player, he says. “Ask me an opinion, I’ll give it. I’m not afraid of sticking my neck on the line. But that’s easy to say now. I might go into management and sign ten diddies.”

He laughs out loud, but it sounds like management is a serious ambition one day. And surely there is only one job that appeals?

“I think everyone dreams of being Everton manager, don’t they,” he says. “Don’t you? Everyone has dreams, but it’s not something I’m anywhere near. We’ve got a top-drawer manager, outstanding, and I’m learning from him every day. I just want to be the best coach I can be. I’m working hard at it.”

Thanks mate.

Utterly ridiculous last question, though DF answered it correctly.

 

[RFUS]

Thanks mate.

Utterly ridiculous last question, though DF answered it correctly.

Perfect response.

He's the man. Always has been, always will be.

If he ever becomes Everton manager then I have no doubt it will only be if he's ready. And he might never be, which is fine. Point is, he won't be Shearer at Newcastle. He's no fool, nor does he have time for fools.

 

[AaronTheBlue]

He will be our manager one day.

Spoiler: you're going to click this anyway....

No doubt about it. He's got his coaching badges purely to come and be our boss.

It's in the book "In Search Of Duncan Ferguson", a direct quote from him.

is that book good btw, looking to get it.

 

[AaronTheBlue]

also he is a legend, no matter what anyone here says. He is.

 

[degsy]

He will be our manager one day.

Spoiler: you're going to click this anyway....

No doubt about it. He's got his coaching badges purely to come and be our boss.

It's in the book "In Search Of Duncan Ferguson", a direct quote from him.

When 'they' were touting Stubbs and even Capt. Pip at one stage I would've been happy with Dunc and a mentor....Or.

Dunc and maybe Rhino and or Sheedy

can't be any worse.

Can it.

 

[sageyefc]

When 'they' were touting Stubbs and even Capt. Pip at one stage I would've been happy with Dunc and a mentor....Or.

Dunc and maybe Rhino and or Sheedy

can't be any worse.

Can it.

Yeah, its bit early.

One day though would certainly think he'll be in with a shot of managing us

 

[Groucho]

is that book good btw, looking to get it.

Have only just flicked through, will start it at weekend.

 

[ianefc]

 

[Joey66]

also he is a legend, no matter what anyone here says. He is.

Ok put his games and goal scoring record on here , and compare it with great EFC centre forwards like Graham Sharp, and Joe Royle, Bob Latchford even Fred Pickering as I said he is a great icon idol when we were going through a bad time, left the club to come back crocked just a loved icon, talisman from fans who have not seen great no 9s - do not get me wrong when he was young up in Scotland he had everything in his locker as a no 9 - His unfortunate prison sentence was harsh, but never ever an EFC Legend imo!

 

[AaronTheBlue]

Ok put his games and goal scoring record on here , and compare it with great EFC centre forwards like Graham Sharp, and Joe Royle, Bob Latchford even Fred Pickering as I said he is a great icon idol when we were going through a bad time, left the club to come back crocked just a loved icon, talisman from fans who have not seen great no 9s - do not get me wrong when he was young up in Scotland he had everything in his locker as a no 9 - His unfortunate prison sentence was harsh, but never ever an EFC Legend imo!

With no disrespect, i don't really care what other players done goal rate wise, Dunc was a legend and if he was in a better team he'd be one of our top top scorers, he was a legend for what he meant and what he did and was the one big shining light in a shower of turd that he had around him.

He is a legend, like i say.. no matter what ANYONE says.

 

[Boss_Blue]

He is a legend

 

[Joey66]

With no respect, i don't really care what other players done goal rate wise, Dunc was a legend and if he was in a better team he'd be one of our top top scorers, he was a legend for what he meant and what he did and was the one big shining light in a shower of turd that he had around him.

He is a legend, like i say.. no matter what ANYONE says.

Tough that's your opinion mine still stands facts prove what a legend is Big Dunc everyone loved him including me , but never a Legend imo for my reasons given!