Alex Ferguson My Autobiography (12 page)

We had returned from America, after the Sporting Lisbon game, in a plane belonging to the Dallas Cowboys, who had rented it to us for the summer. Ferdinand, Giggs, Scholes and Neville enthused about Ronaldo all the way home: ‘Get him signed, get him signed.’

So Ronaldo came into the training ground knowing that our players knew all about him and had a sense of how good he was. I think that helped.

His first appearance was against Bolton at home on 16 August 2003, where he started on the bench. The Bolton defenders ended up in knots. The right-back rattled him straight away in the centre of the park, took the ball off him, but Cristiano got straight back up and demanded another pass. Right away. ‘He’s got the balls, anyway,’ I thought.

The next minute he was pulled down and won a penalty. Van Nistelrooy missed it. Then, of his own volition, Ronaldo moved out to the right-hand side and hit two superb crosses in. One was met by Scholes, who passed to Van Nistelrooy; his shot was parried by the keeper and Giggs tapped the ball in for the second goal. The crowd on that side of the ground responded as if a Messiah had materialised right before their eyes. The Old Trafford crowd build up heroes quickly. They see someone who gets their rears off seats and take to them right away. Ronaldo had the biggest impact on Manchester United fans of any player since Eric Cantona. He could never have matched the idolatry that came with Cantona, because Eric had all this defiant charisma, but his talent was instantly apparent.

The goal Ronaldo scored on the break in the Champions League semi-final at Arsenal in 2009 confirmed his majesty as a counter-attacker. The ball moved from Park to Rooney to Ronaldo with devastating speed. I always said to him: ‘When you’re going through on goal, lengthen your stride.’ By lengthening your stride you slow yourself down and your timing is enhanced. When you’re still sprinting, you have less coordination in your body, but when you slow your mechanics down you give the brain a better chance. He did that. You watch him.

In the spring before the 2004 FA Cup final in Cardiff, where we beat Millwall 3–0, Walter Smith, who had joined me as assistant manager in March, asked me about the various talent levels of all our players.

‘What about Ronaldo,’ he said, ‘is he that good?’

I told him: ‘Oh yes, unbelievable. Even in the air. He’s a magnificent header of the ball.’

Later, Walter said, tentatively: ‘You keep telling me this Ronaldo is a magnificent header of the ball. I see him heading the ball in training but never in a game.’

That Saturday, against Birmingham, Ronaldo scored with a superb header. I turned to Walter. ‘I know, I know,’ he said.

I had watched Millwall beat Sunderland in the semi-final and told my staff: ‘That Tim Cahill’s not bad, you know.’ Good leap for a little lad. No great talent on the ball, but he was a constant nuisance. A pest. You could have bought him then for a million. He would have scored a lot of goals in a good team. Dennis Wise was especially combative in that match. But there have been plenty of nasty little players like him down the years, the sort who prompt you to think: ‘I wish to Christ I was still playing.’ There will be plenty who would have said that about Dennis Wise. He would never have survived in the old days, I’m certain of that.

If you’re cute enough in the modern game, you can get away with a kind of underhand physicality. Wise would be good at leaving his foot in, arriving a fraction late. He played his game well. In the modern game it is hard to pick out genuinely thuggish players: those who step out to cause hurt. It hardly mattered, because Ronaldo destroyed Millwall that day.

The one political drama we had with Ronaldo was, of course, the 2006 World Cup, when he winked at the Portugal bench after Wayne Rooney had stamped on Ricardo Carvalho. This raised the brief possibility that the two men would fall out to such an extent that they would never be able to play together again. What saved the day for Ronaldo was Rooney, who was terrific. On holiday, I texted Rooney and asked him to call me. He suggested the two of them granting an interview together to show there was no bad blood.

The next day I ran it past Mick Phelan, who thought it might look a bit prompted and artificial. I decided he was right. But the generosity of Rooney was what impressed Ronaldo, who thought it might be impossible for him to go back to Manchester. He felt he had burned his boats and that the press would kill him. Rooney called him a couple of times to reassure him. It wasn’t the first time two United team-mates had clashed in the international arena. I’ll take you back to Scotland v. England in 1965, and Nobby Stiles’ first game for his country. Denis Law is standing in the Scotland line and Nobby shuffles over to him and says, ‘All the best, Denis.’ Nobby idolised Denis, who says, ‘Eff off, you English so-and-so, you.’ So Nobby is left there, stunned.

Yes, Ronaldo did run to the referee to help get Rooney in trouble, which is common in the modern game. But Ronaldo was thinking only of one thing – winning that game for his country. He wasn’t thinking about playing for Man United the following season. That was a World Cup game. And he did regret it. When we visited him it was clear he understood the implications. The wink was misinterpreted. The manager had told him to stay out of trouble, so the wink was not to convey pleasure to the bench at his own role in Rooney’s sending-off. I believed him when he told me he was not saying, with that gesture: ‘I sorted him out, I got him sent off.’

We met at a villa in Portugal and had lunch. Jorge Mendes was present. Rooney calling him had helped to change Ronaldo’s mind and put him at ease. I told Cristiano, ‘You’re one of the bravest players to come to Manchester United, but walking away isn’t courage.’ I quoted the Beckham situation in 1998: ‘It was exactly the same as this. They were hanging effigies of him outside pubs in London. He was the devil incarnate. But he had the balls to fight it.’

Beckham’s first game after that incident had been against West Ham – the worst possible place to go after such a drama with England – and he was terrific. ‘You’ve got to get through it,’ I told Ronaldo. The next game in London for Ronaldo was at Charlton on a Wednesday night. To begin with I watched from the directors’ box, where there was a local guy screaming unbelievable abuse: ‘You Portuguese bastard’ was one of the politer epithets. Five minutes before half-time, Ronaldo received the ball, danced round about four players and hit the underside of the bar with a shot. That guy didn’t rise from his seat again. It deflated him. Perhaps he thought that his screaming had motivated him.

Ronaldo was fine, had a good start to the season and was getting on well with Rooney. These young lads will have their clashes. Rooney was going to be sent off anyway, but equally Ronaldo’s intervention was unhelpful. I was so relieved that the incident passed and we were able to keep him in the side that was to go on and win the 2008 Champions League final in Moscow.

In the summer of 2012, I attended a Q &A hosted by the BBC’s Dan Walker, with Peter Schmeichel and Sam Allardyce. A guy asked: ‘Who’s the better player, Ronaldo or Messi?’ My reply was: ‘Well, Ronaldo’s got a better physique than Messi, he’s better in the air, he’s got two feet and he’s quicker. Messi has something magical about him when the ball touches his feet. It’s as if it’s landed on a bed of feathers. His low sense of gravity is devastating.’

Schmeichel thought Ronaldo could play in a bad team while Messi could not. That was a fair point. But Messi would still produce great moments with the ball on his toes. Peter’s point was that Messi depended on Xavi and Iniesta directing the ball to him. Ronaldo is much the same in the sense that you need to keep feeding him. In all the times I’m asked I find it impossible to definitely say which is the better player because to relegate either to second place would feel wrong.

Almost as important to me as his brilliant displays in our colours was that we stayed close after he left for Madrid. Our bond survived our parting: a happy outcome in a game of transitory relationships.

R
OY
Keane was a player of energy, of guts and blood, with a fine instinct for the game and its strategies. He was the most influential presence in the dressing room in the time we worked together. Roy took a lot of the onus off me in making sure the dressing room was operating at a high level of motivation. A manager could never be dismissive of that kind of help from a player.

But by the time Roy left United in November 2005, our relationship had broken down. I have strong views about the sequence of events that led to him joining Celtic. But first, I should set out why he was such an immense driving force for our club.

If Roy Keane thought you weren’t pulling your weight he would be right on top of you, straight away. Many players faced his wrath for committing that crime and there would be no place to hide from him. I never felt that was a bad aspect of his character. In all my time, the strong personalities have helped shape the team’s actions. Bryan Robson, Steve Bruce, Eric Cantona: those players enforced the will of the manager and the club.

In my playing days, managers seldom interrogated players in the adrenaline-drenched moments straight after the match. The initial finger-pointing tended to come from the players, often in the bath. Or there would be confrontations while the water was still running: ‘You, you missed that chance, you …’

As a player I was always having a go at the goalkeepers and defenders for conceding goals. So I knew that if I missed a chance at the other end, I would be receiving it back with interest from those with the less glamorous jobs whom I had criticised on previous occasions. Those were the risks of being outspoken. These days, managers always have their say after the game. If they want to analyse, criticise or praise, there’s an area of managerial involvement right after the final whistle where influence can be brought to bear: 10 to 15 minutes.

With Roy there were episodes of great friction and drama as he tried to impose his will on the team. On one occasion, as I came into the dressing room, Roy and Ruud van Nistelrooy were at it, hammer and tongs. They had to be pulled apart by the players. At least Van Nistelrooy had the courage to stand up to Roy, because not everyone did. He was an intimidating, ferocious individual. His mode when angry was to attack, to lay into people.

I believe – and Carlos Queiroz was at one with me on this – that Roy Keane’s behaviour pattern changed when he realised he was no longer the Roy Keane of old. We’re certain of that. Acting on a conviction that some of his strengths had been stolen from him by injury and age, we tried to change his job description, for his benefit as much as ours.

We tried to alter his role by discouraging him from charging all over the pitch and making forward runs. Every time a team-mate received the ball, Roy would want it off him. That was an admirable quality. The religion at United was that when one of our players had the ball, we moved, and all the others supported the play. Roy was at an age where he shouldn’t have been doing that, but he could not accept the new reality.

I think he could see the truth of what we were saying to him, but to surrender to it was too threatening to his pride. He was a player constructed around his own passions. In the season prior to the fall-out, he was beginning to show physical signs of weakness in terms of getting back to fulfil his defensive duties. He wasn’t the same player – but how can you be, after hip operations, and cruciate knee ligament operations, and being on the front line of so many ferocious battles for so long?

The energy Roy expended in games was quite exceptional, but when you enter your thirties it’s hard to comprehend where you’re going wrong. You can’t change the nature that has driven you to so much success. It became transparent to us that we were no longer dealing with the same Roy Keane.

Our solution was to tell him to stay in that same area of central midfield. He could control the game from there. Deep down, I believe, he knew that better than anyone, but he simply could not bring himself to abandon his old talismanic role.

That was the long-term context to the confrontation that ended with him leaving the club and joining Celtic. He thought he was Peter Pan. Nobody is. Ryan Giggs is the closest you might come to that mythical ageless figure, but Ryan never had any serious injuries. Roy had some bad ones. His hip problem was the one that caused the biggest deterioration in his physical prowess.

The first major fracture in our relationship appeared in pre-season, before the 2005–06 campaign, on our trip to a training camp in Portugal. Carlos Queiroz went out to set it up because it had been his idea, and led us to the most marvellous facility. Vale do Lobo. It was out of this world. Training pitches, a gym and small houses, which were perfect for the players.

I arrived there at the end of my summer holiday in France. All the staff and players were nicely ensconced in their villas. But bad news awaited me. Carlos was having a nightmare with Roy.

I asked what the problem was. Carlos explained that Roy considered the houses at Vale do Lobo to be beneath the required standard and was not willing to stay in his. According to Carlos, Roy had rejected the first house because one of the rooms lacked air conditioning. The second threw up a similar problem. The third, which I saw, was a fantastic house. Roy wouldn’t take it. He wanted to stay in the next village, Quinta do Lago, with his family.

That first night, we organised a barbecue on the patio of the hotel. It was beautifully presented. Roy approached me and said he needed to talk to me.

‘Roy, come on, not now. We’ll talk in the morning,’ I said.

After training I pulled him to one side. ‘What’s going on, Roy?’ I started. ‘I’ve looked at the houses, they’re fine.’

Roy erupted, issuing a long list of complaints, which included the air conditioning. Then he started on Carlos. Why were we doing the pre-season here?, and so on. It was all criticism. It placed a strain on his relationship with us. He became quite reclusive, I thought, on that tour. I was disappointed. Carlos had worked his socks off to make the trip right for everyone.

When the visit was over, I resolved to bring Roy up to the office to at least get him to say sorry to Carlos. He was having none of it.

When we were embroiled in an argument once, Roy said to me, ‘You’ve changed.’

I replied, ‘Roy, I will have changed, because today is not yesterday. It’s a different world we’re in now. We have players from twenty different countries in here. You say I’ve changed? I hope I have. I would never have survived if I hadn’t changed.’

He said: ‘You’re not the same man.’

We had a real set-to. A proper argument. I told him he was out of order. ‘You’re the captain. You showed no responsibility to the other players. It’s not as if we asked you to live in a hovel. They were nice houses. Good places.’

The bad feeling didn’t subside. The deterioration in our relationship really started there. Then came the MUTV interview episode, in which Roy let rip at some of the younger members of the squad for supposedly failing in their duties. We had a rota for MUTV interviews, and on this occasion it was Gary Neville’s turn. On the Monday after we played Middlesbrough, I was not particularly interested when a press officer informed me that Roy was taking over the slot from Gary. It didn’t strike me as significant.

But apparently Roy had been giving the other players terrible stick about Saturday’s game. Cut to 4 p.m. I receive a call at home: ‘You need to see this.’

In the interview Roy described Kieran Richardson as a ‘lazy defender’, doubted why ‘people in Scotland rave about Darren Fletcher’ and said of Rio Ferdinand, ‘Just because you are paid a hundred and twenty thousand pounds a week and play well for twenty minutes against Tottenham, you think you are a superstar.’

The press office had phoned David Gill right away. It was stopped pending a decision from me on what we ought to do with the tape. ‘OK, get the video to my office tomorrow morning and I’ll have a look at it,’ I said.

Jesus. It was unbelievable. He slaughtered everyone. Darren Fletcher got it. Alan Smith. Van der Sar. Roy was taking them all down.

There was no game that week and I was due to go to Dubai to visit our soccer school. That morning Gary Neville called me from the players’ dressing room and asked me to come in. Down I went, expecting Roy to have apologised. I took my seat. Gary promptly announced that the players were not happy with the training. I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘You what?’ I said. Roy had a major influence on the dressing room and I believe that he had used that influence to try and turn the situation. Listen, Carlos Queiroz was a great coach, a great trainer. Yes, he could be repetitive with some exercises, but that’s what makes footballers: force of habit.

I let them have it. ‘You pulled me down here to complain about the training? Don’t you start, the pair of you … Who are you talking to?’ And I walked out.

Later, Roy came up to see me and I told him, ‘I know what’s happened.’ Then I started on the video. ‘What you did in that interview was a disgrace, a joke. Criticising your team-mates. And wanting that to go out.’

Roy’s suggestion was that we should show the video of the interview to the players and let them decide. I agreed and the whole team came up to see it. David Gill was in the building, but declined my invitation to take a seat for the show. He thought it best to leave it to me. But Carlos and all the staff joined the audience.

Roy asked the players whether they had anything to say about what they had just seen.

Edwin van der Sar said yes. He told Roy he was out of line criticising his team-mates. So Roy attacked Edwin. Who did he think he was, what did Edwin know about Manchester United? Van Nistelrooy, to his credit, piped up to support Van der Sar, so Roy rounded on Ruud. Then he started on Carlos. But he saved the best for me.

‘You brought your private life into the club with your argument with Magnier,’ he said.

At that point, players started walking out. Scholes, Van Nistelrooy, Fortune.

The hardest part of Roy’s body is his tongue. He has the most savage tongue you can imagine. He can debilitate the most confident person in the world in seconds with that tongue. What I noticed about him that day as I was arguing with him was that his eyes started to narrow, almost to wee black beads. It was frightening to watch. And I’m from Glasgow.

After Roy had left, Carlos saw I was quite upset. Never in his life, he said, had he witnessed a scene of that nature. He called it the worst imaginable spectacle in the life of a professional football club. ‘He needs to go, Carlos,’ I said. ‘One hundred per cent,’ he said. ‘Get rid of him.’

I was away until the following Wednesday, but phoned David Gill from Dubai and told him, ‘We need to move Roy out.’ His response was that, from the accounts I had given him, there was no choice. He said he would need to speak to the Glazers, who approved the move. I agreed with David Gill that the club would pay Roy’s contract up and honour his testimonial. No one could say we had treated Roy unjustly.

When I returned from the Middle East, David instructed me that the Glazers were coming over on the Friday, and that he had phoned Michael Kennedy to say we wanted a meeting with him. We called Michael and Roy into the meeting and set out our decision, with all the details.

Roy said publicly later that he was disappointed I didn’t end his Manchester United career on my own. But after the original confrontation, I was finished with him. There was no way I wanted another war with him or even to get involved with him again.

I walked out to the training pitch and told the players, and registered the shock on each face.

I always felt that my best moments as a manager were when I made quick decisions based on irrefutable fact, on conviction. It was so clear to me what I had to do to stem this crisis. If I had prevaricated, it would have given Roy more strength in the dressing room, more confidence in his own mind that he had been right, more time to convince everyone he was correct in his behaviour. And he was not right. What he did was wrong.

There was so much to look back on, so much to process as Roy Keane became an ex-Manchester United player. High on the list would be the 2002 World Cup, and Roy flying home after a bust-up with Mick McCarthy, the Republic of Ireland manager.

My brother Martin had taken me for a week’s holiday for my 60th birthday. At dinner I didn’t take my phone along with me, but Martin had taken his, and as we left, it rang. It was Michael Kennedy saying he had been trying to contact me. Michael made it clear there had been an eruption in Saipan, where the Republic of Ireland team had arrived to prepare for the World Cup. ‘You need to talk to him. You’re the only man he’ll listen to,’ Michael said. I was baffled. I couldn’t imagine what Michael could have been so distressed about. He told me the story of Roy’s confrontation with Mick McCarthy. The number Michael gave me was no good so I suggested Roy should ring me instead.