Good article on Barry I think

[outlaw69uk 123]

Ferguson adds a touch of class to the snarling

By Ian Bell

Comment

SOMETIMES YOU can read too much into tiny incidents. Sometimes, though, the small, mundane details crowded at the edges of the big picture can tell you a lot about a player and his team.

Last weekend, reportedly to the dismay of a section of the Rangers support, Barry Ferguson did not start against Hearts. By the time the captain appeared his side were already on their way to a clobbering. Coincidence?

In midweek, having carried a knee injury for the best part of a month, Ferguson was forced from the field at Ibrox for stitches to a head wound. In his absence, Stuttgart scored to blemish an otherwise impressive home performance. Another coincidence?

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Possibly so. After the Champions League win, however, you couldn't help but notice the attention paid to Brahim Hemdani and Jean-Claude Darcheville. Both deserved the praise. Rangers would have struggled, I think, without their selfless work. There was a sense, nevertheless, that the best Ibrox player on the night, and the most reliable Ibrox figure most weeks, was being taken for granted.

Reliability has something to do with it. When column inches are being consumed by perpetually crocked starlets, Ferguson just gets on with it. No one blinks at the news that he has been playing while injured. The midfielder has become the sort of figure for whom a head wound is the merest nuisance. Such things are emblematic of the 29-year-old's style.

He has never lacked for aggression, determination or pride. In years past that volatile mixture was sometimes his undoing. He looked, sounded (and sometimes played) like an ill-tempered nark when things were going against him. In polite parlance, his temperament was suspect.

Some Ibrox fans believed - and some still believe - that a lack of emotional control led Ferguson to commit an act of lese majeste against the hapless Paul Le Guen. Did he think he was bigger than the manager, and therefore bigger than the club? Was "principle" just another word for huff? Whatever side you take - I thought the player had a point - it could have ended disastrously for Ferguson. Had Le Guen survived, as seemed briefly possible, the player would now be an Ibrox memory.

Some luck and the arrival of Walter Smith saw him through it. Then again, Ferguson also came through a foray into England that would have derailed the career of a less thrawn youngster. Homesick he may have been, but the yellow brick road to glory (or Blackburn) was a dead end. The point is that he realised as much.

Once upon a time you would have given him little credit for insight. Once upon a time, in fact, you would have offered odds that Barry Ferguson and maturity would remain strangers for many years to come. Instead, in the Stuttgart game, you glimpsed a player who may be entering the most productive and impressive phase of his career.

His temperament, and therefore his leadership qualities, once qualified as suspect. Now he is essential to Rangers, so important to Smith's thinking that the manager never mentions the fact and no one else bothers even to discuss the obvious. Ferguson is essential, too, to Scotland, and not just because Alex McLeish understands his gifts as well as anyone.

Rangers, as Smith was pointing out last week, are a "new" side, particularly where Europe is concerned. Scotland, equally, are no company of grizzled veterans. Ferguson adds experience at every relevant level, a will to win that cannot be manufactured - how many of Le Guen's signings possessed the trait? - and, yes, a certain maturity.

Ferguson was never a born midfielder. It is the role to which he was always best suited, but in years gone by he too often lacked the essential vision. When he could not spot the opportunity others might have spotted he would make the pass, reliably enough, but it would be a square pass. It was Etch-a-Sketch football. Not wrong, as such, but not productive.

These days Ferguson looks harder and sees more. Where once he was the hub of the painfully slow "build-up", these days he attempts, as all the best midfielders attempt, to cut defences open. Better still, for Rangers, he is able (or is it encouraged?) to get himself forward when the obvious pass isn't available. Increasingly, he makes his own opportunities.

He did it repeatedly, on both flanks, in the game with Stuttgart. More to the point, by carrying the ball in such a manner he did what was essential, freed by Hemdani's solid backing, for a team attempting to support a lone striker, the tireless Darcheville. "Water-carrier" Ferguson may have been, but Rangers would have had an arid night without him.

After the game, typically, he shrugged off the head wound. As he explained, he simply wanted to play and everything else was secondary. It was reminiscent, and not for the first time, of Chelsea's John Terry dismissing the long-term risks of pain-killing injections when titles were at stake. Ferguson, like the Englishman, is wedded to the job. That sort of commitment is less common than we are sometimes led to believe.

These days you could mistake the Rangers man for a veteran. In one sense that is exactly what he is. But in terms of his age he is merely entering that third, crucial phase of a professional's career when all the hard work pays off and all the setbacks are forgotten. If anything, Ferguson has already achieved the greatest accolade: he is judged by his own punishing standards and expected, almost as a matter of routine, to achieve them.

Smith's new team may yet be a work in progress, but there would be a sharp intake of breath at Ibrox if Ferguson was posted missing for any length of time. McLeish's Scotland, equally, may be full of promise, but the national coach knows the value of a guarantee. That, these days, is what Barry Ferguson offers.

And who knows? Perhaps even those who are not Rangers fans may yet learn to love the stubborn, snarling one.

http://www.sundayherald.com/sport/shfootba...he_snarling.php

[Ty 0]

Aye, Ferguson is a captain in the truest sense of the word. Our best player and leads so well, I think we would have some problems if he were injured for a long period of time.

Not to knock the rest of the team, who have gelled together fantastically in only a few months, but Ferguson could well be the edge that gets us crucial Champs League points, not to mention a decent run in the league.

[likeacare 9]

Ferguson is our best and most consistent olayer in my opinion. His leading by example captaincy style has worked wonders motivating our present team.

On the rare occasions that he doesn't play the opposition sigh in relief.

[coop troop 106]

Ferguson is the one player id have every game, every time, even as we currently worry about his injury - if he wants to play, and it wont kill his season - how could you not put him on ?

Cant think of a bigger player at the club.