Alex Ferguson My Autobiography (18 page)

In the autumn of 2010 he was brought down by West Ham’s Jonathan Spector in the penalty box, and I seized my chance to set a quiz question. How many penalties had Ryan Giggs won in his Manchester United career? Answer: five. Because he always stays on his feet. He stumbles but never goes down. I would ask him, after a heavy foul in the box, why he had declined to go down, which he would have been entitled to do, and he would look at me as if I had horns. He would wear that vacant look. ‘I don’t go down,’ he would say.

Ryan is a calm boy, very even-tempered in adversity. Strange to say, he was never a great substitute until his later years. He was always better starting a game. But he played a great role as a sub in the 2008 Champions League final in Moscow, and against Wigan when we won the League, coming on to score our second goal. He removed the doubt we had about him being a good impact player and was an amazing asset to have off the bench.

Giggs turned his back on the fame and the branding; he lacked the temperament for that level of exposure. His personality was more introverted. To lead that life, you need great energy to be trotting all over the world and putting your face in front of a camera. It also requires a certain vanity: the belief that this is what you were made for. You read about actors always knowing they wanted to be on the stage or in films. I never had that magnetic attraction to fame.

My hope was that players who had grown up with us would carry things on at Carrington and maintain the continuity, much as Uli Hoeness and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, say, had at Bayern Munich. They understand how the club functions and the standard of player needed to keep the show rolling along. Whether that leads in the end to management cannot be known, because it depends how the coaching side develops. But Giggs and Scholes are both intelligent men who understand United’s soul and were great players themselves, so all the right stuff was there.

Ryan could definitely be a manager because he’s so wise and players invariably respect him. His relative quietness would not be a barrier. There are plenty of non-vocal managers. But your character must be strong. To deal with a club like Manchester United, your personality has to be bigger than those of the players. Or, you have to believe it is, to control the whole picture. You have big players, wealthy players, world-famous players, and you have to rule over them, stay on top of them. There is only one boss of Manchester United, and that’s the manager. Ryan would need to cultivate that side of himself. But so did I, from 32 years of age.

At school we would be asked: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I would say: ‘A footballer.’ ‘Fireman’ was a more popular answer. To say ‘footballer’ implied no urge to be known across the world, merely to earn a living by playing the game. Giggs would have been that type.

You can be destined by your nature to chase a certain ending, and David Beckham always had that air of knowing where he was going. He was comfortable with that lifestyle and keen to attain that status. None of the others would have even dreamed about worldwide recognition. It was not part of them. Imagine Gary Neville with fashion photographers: ‘Can you bloody hurry up?’

They were all lucky to have the protection of really good families. The Nevilles are really solid people. The same was true for all of them. It was a blessing, for them and for us. They know the value of a good upbringing: keeping your feet on the ground; manners; respect for older generations. If I had called someone from an older generation by their first name, my dad would have clipped me on the ear. ‘Mister, to you,’ he would have said.

All that has disappeared now. All my players would call me ‘gaffer’ or ‘boss’. Lee Sharpe came in one day and asked, ‘How you doing, Alex?’ I said: ‘Were you at school with me?’

Even better, a young Irish boy, Paddy Lee, saw me moving up the stairs of The Cliff, as he was coming down, with Bryan Robson behind me, and said, ‘All right, Alex?’

I said: ‘Were you at school with me?’

‘No,’ he said, perturbed.

‘Well don’t call me Alex!’

I get the giggles now recalling these moments. Behind the fierce response I would be laughing inside. Wee Paddy Lee was terrific at animal impressions. Every Christmas he would do ducks, cows, birds, lions, tigers – everything. Even ostriches. The players would be rolling about. Paddy went to Middlesbrough for a year but didn’t quite make it.

Wee George Switzer was another. Typical Salford boy. In the training ground canteen he was brilliant at barking things out and disguising where it had come from, so the victim would scan the room trying to spot the perpetrator.

‘Hi boss!’ Or ‘Archie!’ to Archie Knox. For a long time it was impossible to nail the culprit. There were no clues in the sea of faces at mealtimes.

But one day I caught him. ‘All right, son?’ I said. ‘You do that again and you’ll run round the pitch till you’re dizzy.’

‘Sorry, boss,’ Switz stuttered.

Despite the image of me as someone who wanted obedience at all times, I loved people with a bit of devil in them. It was refreshing. You need self-confidence, a bit of nerve. If you’re surrounded by people who are scared to express themselves in life, they will be equally frightened when it really matters, on the pitch, in games. Those lads from the 1992 class were never scared of anything. They were mighty allies.

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adversity, the really illustrious clubs return to their cycle of winning. Maybe I was lucky to have joined United in a troubled phase of their history. The League title had not been won for 19 years and I inherited a culture of low expectation. We had become a Cup team, and the fans anticipated a good run in the knock-out competitions more than in League action, where their hopes were kept in check.

My predecessors Dave Sexton, Tommy Docherty and Ron Atkinson were successful men, but in their years there was no consistent or sustained challenge for the championship. The same was true of Liverpool in the years when United were on top from 1993 onwards, but I could always feel their breath on my neck from 25 miles away.

When a club of Liverpool’s history and tradition pull off a treble of cup wins, as they did in 2001, with the FA, League and UEFA trophies under Gérard Houllier, you are bound to feel a tremor of dread. My thought that year was: ‘Oh, no, not them. Anybody but them.’ With their background, their heritage and their fanatical support, as well as their terrific home record, Liverpool were implacable opponents, even in their fallow years.

I liked and respected Gérard Houllier, the Frenchman who took sole charge when the joint-manager experiment with Roy Evans was ended by the Anfield board. Steven Gerrard was starting to emerge as a youthful force in midfield, and they could summon two sensational goal-scorers in Michael Owen and Robbie Fowler.

The big cultural change was investing power in someone from outside the Liverpool religion. The succession of internal appointments from Shanks to Bob Paisley to Joe Fagan to Kenny Dalglish to Graeme Souness to Roy Evans maintained consistency of purpose. Towards the end of Kenny’s first spell in charge, you could sense a shift. The team had grown old and Liverpool were starting to make unusual purchases: Jimmy Carter, David Speedie. These were untypical Liverpool signings. Graeme Souness made the right move but too quickly, breaking up an ageing team too fast. One mistake was to discard one of the best young players, Steve Staunton. Graeme would admit that himself. There was no need to let Staunton go. Graeme is a good guy but he’s impetuous. He can’t get there quickly enough. And his impetuosity cost him in that period.

A virtue of dealing with Liverpool back then was that they would all come into my office mob-handed after the game. I inherited the tradition of every member of our staff going in to see them at Anfield and each one on their side reciprocating at Old Trafford. The Liverpool boot-room men had far more experience in that regard than me, but I learned quickly. Win, lose or draw, there would be a full turn-out and a rapport between the two managerial clans. Because there was such a divide between the two cities and such competitive tension on the field, it was even more important to retain our dignity, whatever the result. It was vital, too, that we concealed our weak points, and Liverpool were equally guarded in that respect.

Gérard had been a visiting trainee teacher in Liverpool during his course at Lille University, and had examined the club with an academic’s eye. He was not entering Anfield blind to its traditions. He understood the ethos, the expectations. He was a clever man; affable, too. After he was rushed to hospital following a serious heart attack, I said to him, ‘Why don’t you just step upstairs?’

‘I can’t do that,’ Gérard replied. ‘I like working.’ He was a football man. Heart trouble could not break his addiction.

Expectation always bears down on Liverpool managers and I think that brand of pressure pierced Kenny’s defences in the end. At the time he abandoned the role of iconic player and moved into the dug-out, he possessed no managerial background. The same disparity undermined John Greig at Rangers. Possibly the greatest Rangers player of all time, John inherited a disintegrating team that could not be restored to an even keel. The emergence of Aberdeen and Dundee United was no help. Playing in the glamour role up front as one of Liverpool’s finest players and then graduating to manager almost the next day was very difficult for Kenny. I remember him coming to see me in the Scotland camp and asking for advice about a job he had been offered in management. It was only later I realised he had been talking about the big one.

‘Is it a good club?’ I had asked him.

‘Aye, it’s a good club,’ he said.

So I told him: if it was a good club, with good history, some financial leeway, and a chairman who understands the game, he would have a chance. If only two of those variables could be ticked off, he was in for a battle.

Without my intensive education at Aberdeen, I would have been poorly qualified to take over at Manchester United. I started at East Stirling without a penny. I enjoyed that, with 11 or 12 players. Then I went to St Mirren without a dime. I freed 17 players in my first season: they weren’t good enough. They had 35 before I started swinging my machete. There, I would order the pies and the cleaning materials and the programmes. It was a full education.

When Gérard started importing large numbers of foreign players, I thought the treble-winning season offered proof that the policy might restore the club to its pomp. The likes of Vladimír Šmicer, Sami Hyypiä and Dietmar Hamann had established a strong platform on which Houllier could build. Any Cup treble has to be taken seriously. You might say fortune smiled on them in the FA Cup final against Arsenal, because Arsène Wenger’s team battered them in that match before Michael Owen won it with the second of his two goals. It wasn’t the individuals that worried me around that time so much as the name: Liverpool. The history. I knew that if this upsurge continued they would become our biggest rivals again, ahead of Arsenal and Chelsea.

A year after that Cup treble, they finished runners-up, but then fell away to fifth after Gérard brought in El Hadji Diouf, Salif Diao and Bruno Cheyrou, from which many commentators drew a line of cause and effect. Cheyrou was one we looked at when he was at Lille. He had no pace but a nice left foot. A strong lad, but not quick. Diouf had a good World Cup with Senegal and made a name for himself. You could understand Gérard’s antennae twitching. I was always wary of buying players on the back of good tournament performances. I did it at the 1996 European Championship, which prompted me to move for Jordi Cruyff and Karel Poborský. Both had excellent runs in that tournament, but I didn’t receive the kind of value their countries did that summer. They weren’t bad buys, but sometimes players get themselves motivated and prepared for World Cups and European Championships and after that there can be a levelling off.

With Diouf there was a talent but it needed nurturing. He was a persistent thorn in your flesh, and not always in a nice way. He’d be silly on the pitch, but he had a right competitive edge about him, and he had ability. Joining an august club like Liverpool was not compatible with his rebellious side because he found it hard to conform to the discipline you need to be successful. Gérard soon found that out. With the number of high-intensity games you are going to play against Arsenal and Chelsea, you need players of a good temperament. And, in my opinion, Diouf had a dodgy one. Cheyrou just never made it. He didn’t have the pace to play in the Premier League.

The Spice Boy culture was another dragon Gérard had to slay. I would hear stories of Liverpool players nipping across to Dublin for recreation. I felt that Stan Collymore’s arrival was hardly conducive to stability. I nearly bought Collymore myself because there was an incredible talent. But when I watched him play for Liverpool, there was no great urgency about him, and I began to think what a lucky guy I had been for not buying him. I can only assume he would have been the same at United. Instead I took Andy Cole, who was always brave as a lion and always gave his best.

Before the upswing under Houllier, Liverpool had fallen into the trap that had caught United years before. They would buy players to fit a jigsaw. If you look at Man United from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, they were buying players such as Garry Birtles, Arthur Graham from Leeds United, Peter Davenport, Terry Gibson, Alan Brazil: there seemed to be a desperation. If someone scored against United they would be signed: it was that kind of short-term thinking. Liverpool acquired the same habit. Ronny Rosenthal, David Speedie, Jimmy Carter. A succession of players arrived who weren’t readily identifiable as Liverpool players. Collymore, Phil Babb, Neil Ruddock, Mark Wright, Julian Dicks.

Gérard bought a wide mix of players to Anfield: Milan Baroš, Luis García, Šmicer and Hamann, who did a fine job for him. I could see a pattern emerging in Gérard’s recruiting. Under Benítez I could observe no such strategy. Players came and went. There was a time when I looked at his first XI and felt they were the most unimaginative Liverpool side I ever went up against. In one game against us, he played Javier Mascherano in central midfield and had his back four, as usual, but played Steven Gerrard wide left, with Alberto Aquilani off the front. He took Dirk Kuyt off and put Ryan Babel on the left, moving Gerrard to the right. The three played in a pack through the middle. Babel was on as an outside-left but not once did he work the touchline. I can’t know what his orders were, but on the bench I remember saying it was a good time to bring him on, wide left, against Gary Neville. I told Scholes: warn Gary to concentrate. But Liverpool played with hardly any width at all.

Apparently Benítez came to our training ground as a guest of Steve McClaren, but I don’t remember meeting him. We received lots of visits from overseas coaches and it was hard to keep track of them all. We had people from China and Malta and groups of three and four from Scandinavian countries. There was also a steady flow of other sportsmen: the Australia cricket team, NBA players, Michael Johnson, Usain Bolt. Johnson, who runs a spring training programme in Texas, impressed me with his knowledge.

Soon after Benítez arrived, I attended a Liverpool game and he and his wife invited me in for a drink. So far, so good. But our relationship frayed. The mistake he made was to turn our rivalry personal. Once you made it personal, you had no chance, because I could wait. I had success on my side. Benítez was striving for trophies while also taking me on. That was unwise.

On the day he produced his famous list of ‘facts’ detailing my influence over referees, we received a tip-off that Liverpool would stage-manage a question that would enable Benítez to go on the attack. That’s not unusual in football. I had been known to plant a question myself. Put it this way, our press office had warned me, ‘We think Benítez is going to have a go at you today.’

‘What about?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, but we’ve been tipped off,’ they said.

So, on television, Benítez puts his glasses on and produces this sheet of paper.

Facts.

The facts were all wrong.

First, he said I intimidate referees. The FA were scared of me, according to Rafa, even though I had just been fined £10,000 by the FA two weeks previously, and I was failing to support the Respect campaign. The Respect initiative had started that season, yet Rafa was going on about my criticism of Martin Atkinson in a Cup tie the previous year, before the new guidelines had come into place. So he was wrong in the first two things he said. The media loved it, even though the facts were inaccurate. They were hoping it would start a war, that I would launch a rocket back.

In fact, all I said in reply was that Rafa was obviously ‘bitter’ about something and that I was at a loss to explain what that might be. That was me saying to him: look, you’re a silly man. You should never make it personal. That was the first time he tried those tactics, and each subsequent attack bore the same personal edge.

My inquiries told me that he had been irritated by me questioning whether Liverpool would be able to handle the title run in, whether they would buckle under the pressure. Had I been the Liverpool manager, I would have taken that as a compliment. Instead Benítez interpreted it as an insult. If I, as Manchester United manager, was talking about Liverpool and dropping in remarks to make them wobble, my Anfield counterpart ought to know they’d got me worried.

When Kenny was in charge at Blackburn, and they were out in front in the title race, I piped up: ‘Well, we’re hoping for a Devon Loch now.’ That stuck. Devon Loch popped up in every newspaper article. And Blackburn started to drop points. We ought to have won the League that year but Rovers held on. There is no doubt we made it harder for them by raising the spectre of the Queen Mother’s horse performing the splits on the Aintree run-in.

The advance publicity had been that Benítez was a control freak, which turned out to be correct, to a point that made no sense. He displayed no interest in forming friendships with other managers: a dangerous policy, because there would have been plenty from lesser clubs who would have loved to share a drink and learn from him.