The players often trained on a local beach, stopping only when the incoming tide hit their makeshift goalposts, and they remembered the way Alex Ferguson tied the hood of his red cagoule tight to his face against the howling wind as he watched.
They trained in public parks, too, and on the ash surface of Pittodrie’s car park in the afternoons, to the astonishment of a Bayern Munich scout who turned up to watch them.
But it was not through mere brute force that Ferguson turned Aberdeen into winners in the early 1980s.