John McMaster was part of an Aberdeen set-up that believed it would beat Rangers or Celtic every time they travelled south to Glasgow.
How he wishes the current crop of players wearing the same red shirt would display the same self-confidence. Times change, of course, but Gothenburg Great McMaster remembers a period when he was part of a Dons squad who didn’t believe they could challenge the Old Firm before two managers steeped in the opposite sides of the Glasgow divide arrived in the Granite City and altered the footballing landscape in the late 70s and early-to-mid 80s.
The success of Sir Alex Ferguson, the former Rangers striker, became the stuff of legend at Pittodrie but McMaster believes the squad he inherited from Celtic icon Billy McNeill laid the foundations for glory that every Dons boss - including the current manager Jim Goodwin - has tried and failed to live up to.
Former left back McMaster, part of the team who won the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1983, hopes that Goodwin can take a step in the right direction by going to Hampden on Sunday and beating Rangers in the Viaplay Cup semi final because, like his previous gaffers, he is convinced the only way to make the Old Firm sit up and take notice is to beat them in their own back yard.
“That was drummed into us,” McMaster told Record Sport.
“The Boss (Ferguson) was big on that but Billy McNeill kicked it all to start with, to be honest. He was the one who first convinced us we could beat them home and away, and again, the fact he was a real Celtic man, he knew everything about how they ticked. Both of them knew how the Old Firm thought and they were able to turn that against them.
“Billy, for instance, would tell us never to turn our backs on the ball when the ref gave them a free kick, because they’d been trained to pounce when the opposition switched off. Billy would tell us that wee Jimmy Johnstone used to get kicked then told to keep going at the same full back time after time to get him booked and sent off. It was all just little things like that,
“It might sound simple, but Billy was the first one to make sure that we went down to Glasgow overnight the night before a game. Before that, we were on the 7.20am train out of Aberdeen in the morning of the match - that was some preparation for taking on Celtic or Rangers!
“Under Billy, we’d leave at 2pm on the Friday and go down to the Excelsior Hotel in Glasgow. But it was the Boss who really drilled into us we were going down there to beat them. Both of them.
“It’s a bit like the noisy neighbours. He knew that if we did it a couple of times, they’d be annoyed but then they’d start to fear us. That’s what happened. Big Alex (McLeish) and I were room-mates and so were Gordon Strachan and Stuart Kennedy. We’d go up the back of the bus to play cards on the Friday trips down to Glasgow and the boss would come up for a game.
“One day we started on at him, ‘Boss, when we win down there, we want chocolate biscuits next week as our win bonus, None of this Rich Tea nonsense - chocolate biscuits! He loved that. It showed how confident we were in our ability to go to Glasgow and win.”
More often than not they did because they had the confidence to take the game to their opponents. McMaster, now 67, hopes Goodwin follows suit at Hampden and insists that he believes the Irishman can come good at Pittodrie, even if he doesn’t think he helped himself in the early days of his reign.
The former Dons defender added: “I still think Jim is learning on the job. He went in there and annoyed a lot of people by getting rid of folk that knew what the club was all about, Big Billy and the boss didn’t do that - they listened to people who had been there, They didn’t get rid of them.
“Don’t get me wrong - the Boss could annoy us, He used to go on about St Mirren could do this, St Mirren could do that, and it used to drive us crazy. Eventually some of the lads were brave enough to tell him that St Mirren couldn’t win a corner against us, so please stop! And he did. He listened.
“Jim wanted his own people around him, which is fair enough, but I think he discarded people who could have been valuable to him behind the scenes. He should have bided his time with them and worked with what he had, just as the boss had done all those years earlier.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Jim Goodwin fan and he’ll do a good job and succeed. He’s got something about him. I dealt with him when he was at Alloa and I was scouting for Swansea a few years ago. I liked his manner. He just needs to listen to people more. I just don’t want Aberdeen going there with a 5-5-0 formation on Sunday. Give us a 4-4-2 or a 4-4-3 and let’s make a game of it.
“The last game against Rangers was proof that if we take the game to them it can work. They scored those two goals in injury time, but Aberdeen were the better team until he made a couple of substitutions that led Rangers off the hook.
“Taking Duk and Miovski off when they were terrorising the Rangers back four was a mistake. They’d have been delighted to see them come off, and there was still about 15 or 20 minutes to go.
“They must have thought they’d won a watch. Wee Duk is uncontrollable, so you’ve got a chance with people like that.”
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