Alex Ferguson My Autobiography (24 page)

In training he practised getting to the ball faster. But when the play broke down he was inclined to walk. You couldn’t do that at our place. We had to regroup quickly or we would be too open, with too many players up the pitch. We needed people to react to us losing the ball so the opposition would be under pressure quickly. But he was capable of great moments. He also had a huge appetite, of Nicky Butt proportions. Head down at meal-times, and sometimes with food to take home as well.

Berbatov wouldn’t have featured in the Wembley game, even if he had been on the bench. I had been forced to take off Fábio and send on Nani, which left me with only two options. I wanted to get Scholes on because I needed an experienced player to orchestrate our passing, so Paul came on for Carrick. We had talked about Scholesy’s retirement for many months and I had tried to talk him round, to entice him with one more season, but his view was that 25 games a season were not enough. He also admitted his legs tended to be empty in the last 25–30 minutes. He had survived two knee operations and an eye problem that had kept him out for months at a time, yet he was still playing at that high level. Phenomenal.

The goal he scored at his testimonial that summer was a beauty. He gave Brad Friedel in goal no hope. It was a rocket. Eric Cantona, the visiting manager, was applauding. On Talksport later I heard a presenter say Paul wasn’t in the top four of modern English players. His assertion was that Gascoigne, Lampard and Gerrard were all better players. Absolute nonsense.

After our second Champions League final defeat to Barcelona, I had to ask: what is the problem here? Fact No. 1is that some of our players fell below the level they were capable of. A contributing factor might have been that we were accustomed to having most of the possession in games. When that advantage transferred itself to the opposition it might have damaged our confidence and concentration. There was some credence in the theory that our players were unsettled by having to play a subservient role: even a player such as Giggs, or Ji-Sung Park, who, in the quarter-final against Chelsea, tackled everybody and was up and down the pitch all day. We never saw him, in that way, against Barcelona, whose starting XI was: Valdés; Alves, Piqué, Abidal, Mascherano; Busquets, Xavi, Iniesta; Messi, Villa and Pedro.

They took the lead through Pedro from one of Xavi’s countless clever passes but Rooney equalised for us after a quick exchange with Giggs. But then the Barcelona carousel really started spinning, with Messi at the controls. He and Villa scored the goals that finished us off in Van der Sar’s last game for the club.

I made an error at half-time. I was still focusing on winning the game and told Rooney he needed to keep running into those gaps behind the full-backs. ‘We’ll win the game if you keep doing that,’ I urged him. I forgot the big issue with playing Barcelona. So many of their games were effectively won in the first 15 minutes of the second half. I should have mentioned that to my players. I might have been better assigning Park to mark Messi for the first 15 minutes and pushing Rooney wide left. If we had employed those tactics, we might just have sneaked it. We would still have been able to counter-attack. Those changes would have left Busquets free, so maybe we would have been driven back towards our box, but we’d have posed more of a threat, with Rooney attacking from a wide left position.

I had intended to replace Valencia after 10 minutes of
the second half, but then Fábio was attacked by cramps again
and I was forced to re-jig around his injury. My luck in finals was generally good. Favour deserted me in this one. On the balance of all those big games and the success I had enjoyed, I could hardly start pitying myself at Wembley, the scene of United’s win over Benfica in 1968.

We thought we might have a chance at corner kicks but they never came our way. As our defeat was confirmed, there was no smugness about Barcelona. Not once did they flaunt their superiority. Xavi’s first move after the final whistle was to make a move for Scholes’ jersey. Footballers should have a role model. They should be saying to themselves: ‘He’s where I want to get to.’ I had it with Denis Law. Denis was a year and a half older than me and I looked at him and said, ‘That’s what I want to be.’

In the days after that loss I began taking a serious look at the coaching in our academy. Gary Neville, Paul Scholes and I exchanged a lot of opinions. I looked at appointing another technical coach to the academy. Our club was always capable of producing great players and Barcelona’s next wave were not better than ours. No way. Thiago was on a par with Welbeck and Cleverley but there was no fear about the rest of theirs coming through.

Looking ahead is vital. We were on to Phil Jones long before that Champions League final. I tried to buy him in 2010 but Blackburn would not sell. Ashley Young was bought to replace Giggs. The goalkeeping situation was all settled in December. Granted, David de Gea had a torrid start to his United career, but he would develop. Smalling and Evans were outstanding prospects. We had Fábio and Rafael, and Welbeck and Cleverley were coming through; Nani was 24, Rooney 25. We had a nucleus of young talent.

We shed five that summer because with Jones joining it wasn’t going to be easy for Wes Brown or John O’Shea to make the starting XI. They were good servants to me. The horrible part of management is telling people who have given their all for you that there is no longer a place for them in your plans. After the Premier League title parade, in the rain, we returned to the school from where we had started the procession. I spoke to Darron Gibson and asked him how he saw his future. Perhaps it wasn’t the perfect place to begin that discussion, but he got the gist of what I was thinking. He was off on holiday that night so we needed to start the conversation. Wes Brown, I struggled to reach by telephone. It was horrible to let players of that experience and loyalty to me go.

I lost five players aged 30 and above and let Owen Hargreaves go. We were bringing back Welbeck, Cleverley, Mame Diouf and Macheda from loan spells, and signing three new players. The average age of the squad was reduced to around 24.

With Scholes and Neville, my plan was to let them roam about the place, with the youth team, academy and reserves, then the three of us would sit down for an assessment of how strong we were. I was going to place a big burden on them to shape the future, because they knew better than anyone what it took to be one of our players. It’s something I’d wanted to do for years and years: feed my top players into the stream.

Scholes was a man of excellent opinions. His assessments were brilliant. Always in one line. There were no maybes. When we had a problem with Van Nistelrooy, Paul was instantly clear that Ruud could not be allowed to cause disruption. His language was blunt. Gary asked him, ‘Are you sure, Scholesy?’ – just winding him up.

At that point, on the coaching side, we had Brian McClair, Mick Phelan, Paul McGuinness, Jim Ryan and Tony Whelan. They were all United players or academy graduates. I wanted to strengthen those areas. Clayton Blackmore and Quinton Fortune did a few bits on the development side.

After the inquest, I told myself: ‘When we play Barcelona next time in a Champions League final, I would have Jones and Smalling, or Smalling and Evans, right on top of Messi.’ I wasn’t going to let him torture us again.

T
HE
best piece of advice I ever received on the media front was from a friend called Paul Doherty, who was then at Granada TV. Great lad, Paul. He sought me out one day and said: ‘I’ve been watching your press conferences and I’m going to point something out to you. You’re giving the game away. You’re showing your worries. Look in that mirror and put the Alex Ferguson face on.’

Appearing beleaguered is no way to handle the press. Showing your torments to them is no way to help the team or improve your chances of winning on a Saturday. Paul was right. When he gave me that advice I was displaying the strains of the job. I couldn’t allow a press conference to become a torture chamber. It was my duty to protect the dignity of the club and all that we were doing. It was important to be on the front foot and control the conversation as much as possible.

Before I went through that door to face the world, I trained myself, prepared myself mentally. Experience helped. I reached the point in my Friday press conferences where I could see the line a journalist was pursuing. Sometimes they agreed a party line, telling one another: ‘Right, you start that, I’ll go the other way.’ I could read them all. Experience gave me that. Plus, the internal mechanism starts to work faster. I loved it when a journalist asked a big long question because it allowed me time to prepare my answer. The hard ones were the short questions: ‘Why were you so bad?’

That kind of pithy inquiry can cause you to elongate your response. You stretch it out while you’re trying to think, and end up justifying your whole world to them. There’s an art to not exposing the weaknesses of your team, which is always your first priority. Always. You might have a game three days later and that, too, should be at the forefront of your thoughts when being interrogated. Winning that game is what counts, not scoring intellectual points in a news conference.

The third objective is not to make a fool of yourself by answering stupidly. Those were the considerations working away in my brain as I was being grilled. The skills, that greater awareness, took years to acquire. I remember being on television as a young player and blubbing about a six-game suspension I had received from the Scottish Football Association. I said on air: ‘Aye, that’s the Star Chamber justice they operate in Scotland.’

Right away, a letter from the SFA came flying in to the club. Thinking you have a duty to be interesting, you can say something you regret. I was right that day in Scotland but I finished up having to write a letter to explain myself. The manager asked me: ‘Where the hell did you get that one from – the Star Chamber justice line?’

I couldn’t hide the origins of my speech. ‘I was reading a book and just thought it sounded good,’ I told him.

Of course my longest and biggest media bust-up was with the BBC, which lasted seven years until I decided enough was enough in August 2011. There were many annoyances from my perspective, including an article in
Match of the Day
magazine, but the step too far was a documentary called
Fergie and Son
, broadcast on 27 May 2004, on BBC3, which featured a horrible attack on my son Jason. They looked at the transfers of Jaap Stam to Roma and Massimo Taibi to Reggina in relation to Jason’s involvement with the Elite Sports Agency. Before the broadcast went out, the United board cleared me, Jason and Elite of any wrongdoing in transfers, but decided that Jason could no longer act for the club on transfer dealings.

The BBC would not apologise and the allegations they made were not true.

In the aftermath, Peter Salmon of the BBC came up to see me and I told him, ‘You watch that programme and tell me whether it does the BBC credit.’ I wanted to sue them, but my solicitor and Jason both opposed the idea. Salmon assumed his old friendship with me from Granada TV would end the standoff.

‘The BBC’s a Manchester firm now,’ he said.

‘Great,’ I said. ‘And you need to apologise.’ No answer. His plan was to get me to address the
Fergie and Son
programme in an interview with Clare Balding. Why would I do that? But we did agree to differ in the end and I resumed my interviews with BBC staff. By then I had made my point.

More generally Sky television changed the whole media climate by making it more competitive and adding to the hype. Take the coverage of the Suárez biting incident in the spring of 2013. I was asked about it in a press conference. The headline on my answer was: ‘Ferguson feels sympathy for Liverpool’. They asked me a question about Suárez and I said, ‘I know how they feel because Cantona received a nine-month ban for kung-fu kicking a fan.’ My point was – never mind ten games, try nine months. Yet they ran a headline suggesting I felt sorry for Suárez.

Another headline was: ‘Ferguson says José Mourinho is going to Chelsea’. The question they had asked me was: ‘Who will be your main challenger next year?’ I replied that Chelsea would be there next season and added that if the papers were right and Mourinho was going back, it would give them a boost. The headline became: Ferguson says Mourinho’s going back to Chelsea.

I had to text Mourinho to explain. He texted back and said, ‘It’s OK, I know, I saw it.’ That headline ran every ten minutes. Mourinho did end up back at Chelsea but that’s not the point.

So there was an intensity and volatility about the modern media I found difficult. I felt that by the end it was hard to have relationships with the press. They were under so much pressure it was not easy to confide in them. When I first came to Manchester, I was wary of some but wasn’t guarded in the way I was in my final years. Characters like John Bean and Peter Fitton were decent lads. Bill Thornton. David Walker. Steve Millar. Decent guys. And I had my old friends from Scotland.

On tours we used to have a night out with the press lads. One evening we ended up back in my room and Beano was in striking form, tap-dancing on my table. Another night I was in bed, at about 11 o’clock, when the phone rang and a voice said: ‘Alex! Can you confirm or deny that you were seen in a taxi with Mark Hughes tonight?’

It was John Bean. I told him, ‘It would be very difficult, John, because he was playing for Bayern Munich tonight in a European tie.’

John said: ‘Oh yes, I watched that game.’

I banged down the phone.

John then turns up on the Friday. ‘A million apologies, Alex. I know you’ll accept my apology.’ And sat down.

Latterly we had a lot of young reporters who dressed more casually than the men I had known in my early years. Maybe it was a generational thing, but it just didn’t sit well with me. It’s a difficult job for those young reporters because they are under so much pressure from their editors. Forget off the record. It doesn’t exist any more. I banned a couple of reporters in 2012–13 for using off-the-record remarks. I banned another for saying Rooney and I never spoke in training sessions – and that everyone at the club could see it. Not true.

I didn’t read all the papers, but from time to time our media staff would point things out that were inaccurate. The process can drain you. Years ago I used to take action, but it ends up costing you money. As for an apology, 40 words tucked away on page 11 was a long way from a story with banner headlines on the back page. So what was the point?

In banning reporters I would be saying: I’m not accepting your version of events. Again, I was in a strong position, because I had been at Man United a long time and had been successful. If I had been some poor guy struggling on a bad run of results, the scenario would have been different. In most cases I felt an underlying sympathy because I knew that extrapolation or exaggeration was a product of the competitive nature of the business. Newspapers are up against Sky television, websites and other social media channels.

Any Premier League manager should have an experienced press officer, someone who knows the media and can act quickly on stories. You can’t stop them all but you can warn the author when the facts are wrong and seek corrections. As a backup, a good press officer can extricate you from trouble. Every day, for 24 hours, Sky News is rolling. A story will be repeated over and over again. Dealing with the press is becoming more and more problematic for managers.

Say Paul Lambert is having a bad time at Aston Villa. The press conference is bound to be dominated by negativity. Only someone who knows the press can train a manager for that. When I had my bad spell at United, Paul Doherty told me: ‘You’re tense, you’re bait for them. Before you get in that press conference, look in the mirror, rub your face, get your smile on, get your act together. Be sure they can’t eat you up.’

That was marvellous advice. And that is what you have to do. Most times you have to go with the flow and make the best of it. A standard question is: do you feel pressure? Well, of course you do. But don’t give them a headline. I held my press conferences before training. A lot of managers hold theirs afterwards. In that scenario, you are concentrating on your training session and not thinking about the press. For a 9 a.m. press conference I would have been briefed by Phil Townsend, our director of communications, on what might come up.

He would tell me, for example, that I might be asked about the Luis Suárez biting incident, say, or the Godolphin doping scandal in racing, or a possible move for a player such as Lewandowski. I always started by talking about players who would be available for that particular game. Then the emphasis would usually switch to issues around the game, personalities. The Sundays would often look to build a piece around one subject. Michael Carrick’s good form, for instance.

I was generally fine in press conferences. The most difficult challenge was how to address the problem of bad refereeing. I was penalised for making remarks about referees because my reference point was the standards I set for football, not match officials. I wasn’t interested in the standards referees set themselves. As a manager I felt entitled to expect refereeing levels to match those of the game they were controlling. And as a group, referees aren’t doing their job as well as they should be. They talk of refereeing now as a full-time job, but that’s codswallop.

Most start at 16 or so, when they are kids. I admire the impulse to want to referee. The game needs that. I wanted to see men such as the Italian Roberto Rosetti referee here. He’s 6 feet 2 inches tall, a commanding figure, built like a boxer, and he flies over the pitch, calms players down. He’s in control. I liked to see the top referees in action. I enjoyed observing proper authority, properly applied.

It would have been hard to get rid of a Premier League referee on grounds of incompetence or weight. They all have lawyers. The union is very strong. Plus, young referees are not coming through, so they cling to the ones they have.

Refereeing was the one area of the game where maybe I should have walked away from interviews without expressing my opinions. The following week, I might be the beneficiary of a decision in our favour; so to go overboard after one bad decision could be interpreted as selective outrage.

I support The Referees’ Association. At Aberdeen I would bring them into training to help them get fit. I like standards. I like to see a fit referee. And I don’t think that levels of fitness are high enough currently in the English game. How far they run is not the correct standard of measurement. It’s how quickly they cover the ground. If there’s a counter-attack on, can they reach the right end of the pitch in time? In fairness, if you look at our 2009 Champions League semi-final against Arsenal, when Rosetti was the referee, he was still 20 yards behind the play when we put the ball in the net. It took us nine seconds to score. So you’re asking the referee to run 100 yards in nine seconds. Only Usain Bolt could manage that.

As a rule, I felt that the Football Association tend to go after the high-profile targets because they know it will bring favourable publicity. If you look at the Wayne Rooney incident against West Ham, when he swore into the camera, we felt they pressurised the referee, and Rooney ended up with a three-match suspension. The justification was that it’s not nice for children to see a player swear into a TV camera. I can see that, but how often have you seen players swear over the years?

It was never really possible to work out who was running English football’s governing body. You would get Exeter schools having a say. Greg Dyke, the new chairman, has to reduce the numbers involved in decision-making. A committee of 100 people can’t produce sensible management. These committees are set up to honour people’s ‘contribution to the game’ rather than make the organisation run smoothly. It’s an institutional problem. Reformers go in there 6 feet 2 inches tall and come out 5 feet 4 inches.