Football – Bloody Hell! (30 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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Towards the end of the domestic season there had been outings for Beckham, Paul Scholes and Neville’s younger brother Phil. But in Europe it had been a case of evenings by the television, watching as Barcelona and Gothenburg went out in the quarter-finals to Paris St-Germain and Bayern Munich, who in turn were ousted by Milan and Ajax. Fabio Capello’s Milan had won the previous year’s final, beating Barcelona 4–0 with a performance hailed as one of the greatest ever given by a club side. But they could not overcome this young Ajax team of Louis van Gaal’s.
In goal was Edwin van der Sar (later to win the Champions League with United too). He was twenty-four. Among those in front of him were Michael Reizeger, Edgar Davids and Marc Overmars (all twenty-two) and Clarence Seedorf (nineteen). By the end of the final there had been significant performances as substitutes from the eighteen-year-olds Kanu and Patrick Kluivert, who scored the only goal against a defence featuring Paolo Maldini. Vienna hailed the new champions of Europe and never again, you might have thought, would we hear the words: ‘You win nothing with kids.’
Yet that was what Alan Hansen said on the very first day of the next season.
UNITED: APRÈS MOI LE TREBLE
Ted Beckham’s Lad
‘
Y
ou win nothing with kids.’
The assertion, made on
Match of the Day
a few hours after Manchester United had lost 3-1 at Aston Villa, was to dog Alan Hansen for many years. While it was a reasonable enough statement of the sweeping kind for any pundit to make, it ignored not only what Ajax had done a couple of months before but the entire history of United in the pre-Munich era.
Matt Busby’s team had been champions for two seasons when the tragedy occurred in February 1958. The team that might have brought the club its first Double in 1957 but for the injury inflicted on their goalkeeper, Ray Wood, by the Aston Villa forward Peter McParland in the FA Cup final (there were no substitutes) featured five players of twenty-two or under, including the nineteen-year-old Bobby Charlton. No fewer than eight had made their debuts as teenagers; it was a settled team, even though it contained only one player, John Berry, who was over thirty.
The team with which Ferguson started the 1995/6 season at Villa Park lacked Ryan Giggs, by now twenty-one, but still featured four players of twenty or under, including the eighteen-year-old Phil Neville. In addition two twenty-year-olds, David Beckham and John O’Kane, came on as substitutes. No fewer than seven of the thirteen had made their debuts as teenagers; most of them were to form the core of the modern equivalent of a settled team which, by the end of that season, had not only retrieved the League title from Blackburn but won the FA Cup.
In the space of less than a year, Ajax and Manchester United had proved that you win nothing with kids except the Champions League and the Double.
Before this, even Alan Hansen would have conceded that there was one competition you could win with kids: the FA Youth Cup. It began in 1953 and Busby’s United won it in each of its first five seasons. The team lists make poignant reading. Eddie Colman and Duncan Edwards, each of whom played in the first three finals, died at Munich (in Edwards’s case, fifteen days later). David Pegg played in two finals. In 1954 the team included three who were to perish, Colman, Edwards and Pegg, and two who were to survive, Charlton and Albert Scanlon. Charlton took part as late as 1956 and another survivor, Ken Morgans, in 1957.
Busby, while recovering from his own injuries, rebuilt the team as best he could, but while taking care not to turn his back on youth. By 1964, when United took the trophy again, the team run by Busby’s esteemed assistant Jimmy Murphy had George Best, David Sadler and John Aston, all of whom were to play in the European triumph over Benfica in 1968, the excellent goalkeeper Jimmy Rimmer and Bobby Noble, a full-back of extraordinary talent which injury was to dim.
There were to be two defeats in finals in the 1980s, each supervised by Eric Harrison, whom Ferguson was so gratefully to inherit. Norman Whiteside, Mark Hughes and Clayton Blackmore played in the first. The second featured the group who were to become Fergie’s Fledglings. The Manchester City team to which they lost – including Andy Hinchcliffe and David White, who were to represent England, and Paul Lake, who might have gone on to be an outstanding international but for injury – showed who were local top dogs in youth development. Until Ferguson took a hand. The snaffling of Giggs was only the start.
It was David Pleat, Ferguson’s old friend, who proved more sage than Hansen. In 1992, when he was manager of Luton Town, someone mentioned that Manchester United seemed to be on the march under Ferguson and Pleat issued a further warning: ‘This is only the start. Have you seen their youth team? These kids are capable of dominating English football for ten years.’ So I went to see United’s youth team. It was to win the Youth Cup that season and lose the next season’s final to Leeds United and much detail of that first sight remains in the memory.
Except the score, that is; there are times when only the quality of the football matters and this was transcendental. The purity of United’s passing style made it so.
The match was against Morecambe’s reserves at The Cliff, on a dank Saturday morning. United had Kevin Pilkington in goal; a back four of John O’Kane, Gary Neville, Chris Casper and Steven Riley; a midfield of Keith Gillespie, David Beckham, Nicky Butt and Ben Thornley; then Paul Scholes lurking behind a centre-forward called Richard Irving, who, though he was one of the few not destined for the Premier League, did pretty well for himself in other areas, becoming an airline pilot – inspired by a visit to the flight deck on the way home from honeymoon in Mauritius – and setting up a property renovation company. Robbie Savage, whom Ferguson was always telling to get his hair cut, was among the substitutes.
Gillespie darted down one wing while Thornley plied the other with an elegant subtlety that reminded me of John Robertson, the Scot who had so wonderfully complemented the verve of Martin O’Neill in Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest teams (and who was to assist O’Neill in his managerial career). Scholes was a little magician. But the one who enthralled me was Beckham. He epitomised the style. Lean and upright, with floppy hair, he exuded the calm you seldom found in English footballers of even the highest class (the death of Bobby Moore in 1993 had been a reminder of that) and I had to tell someone about it, to share the excitement of the discovery.
There was only one other person. The car park at The Cliff, the only vantage point for those not allowed access to the pitch side where Harrison and the other coaches gathered (if Ferguson was watching, he would have been peering through the window of his office), offered a good elevated view and the fellow a few yards away was clearly accustomed to it. He had parked his big old-fashioned Rover and leant against the spare wheel strapped to the boot. I shuffled across, started a conversation and soon offered an opinion of the right-central midfield player who had my eye. ‘That number eight – he’ll get fifty caps for England,’ I said. ‘I hope so,’ said Ted Beckham. ‘He’s my son.’
Three years later, David Beckham made his fifth League appearance for the United in that opening match at Villa Park. It was his tenth League appearance in all – Ferguson had sent him to Preston North End for a couple of toughening-up lower-division months – and he came on as a substitute for Phil Neville, scoring United’s goal. Both Nevilles started, as had Butt and Scholes. O’Kane was the other substitute, replacing Pallister. With these kids United lost 3-1. With these kids they won the next five matches in a row. Then Cantona returned from exile after the kung-fu incident and, with these kids, took up where he had left off.
He was happily resettled in Manchester, with his wife in a little house that was startlingly unpretentious for a footballer. He felt loved again and Ferguson deserved a lot of credit for that, having flown to Paris to lift Cantona from the depths of his gloom at being cast out of the game in which he had finally felt at home. Cantona’s lawyer arrived at Ferguson’s hotel on a Harley-Davidson, handed him a helmet and drove him through backstreets to a restaurant where Ferguson and Cantona talked football like fans, delightedly raiding the fridges of their memories; the feast lasted beyond midnight and a unique manager/player relationship was strengthened.
Ferguson always made allowances for Cantona, wisely exempting him from the hairdryer treatment. He was the only exception. Once, the squad were invited to a reception at Manchester Town Hall and in advance Ferguson issued strict instructions about dress. Every player duly turned up immaculate in club blazer, trousers, collar and tie. Except Cantona. He wore a tracksuit and trainers. Any other player would have been sent home. Because it was Cantona, Ferguson pretended not to notice.
His sensitivity in handling Cantona had been noticed by Gérard Houllier. ‘Not once during Eric’s long suspension,’ he said, ‘did Alex criticise him. Never. Not a word. He showed loyalty. And every day, or two days at the most, he would call on him and have a coffee and a chat about what was going on at the club, while never mentioning the Selhurst Park incident. That was top-class management. You show care. You show interest despite the fact that the boy cannot play for your team. In the art of management, it was a lesson from the master. And, when the boy came back, all that faith and support was repaid.’
As was to prove the case with David Beckham after the 1998 World Cup, when he was sent off against Argentina, and Cristiano Ronaldo, in 2006, when his sly wink after the dismissal of Wayne Rooney enraged the English media. Both were liberally to repay Ferguson for standing by them.
The impact of Cantona’s return was not dramatic. Not at first, understandably. Indeed, there was a tricky spell leading to Christmas, when only three points were taken from five matches. But January and February found United recovering their momentum, closing on the leaders from the start, a Newcastle United invigorated by Kevin Keegan with Keith Gillespie, the makeweight in the deal that had taken Andy Cole to Old Trafford, looking much the better part of the bargain, and the glamorous David Ginola on the other wing; with Peter Beardsley and Les Ferdinand up front; and then, in the last third of the season, Faustino Asprilla, a Colombian of dazzling skills and infuriating individualism who, in the eyes of many observers, was to prove one egg too many for the good of the pudding.
Certainly Asprilla’s arrival coincided with a dip in Newcastle’s form, of which United took advantage by winning through a Cantona goal at St James Park in early March. That was in the midst of a six-match run in which Newcastle dropped fourteen points and United, dropping only two in eleven matches, overtook them. The stage was set for a remarkable piece of television on the night of 29 April.
I Will Love It . . . Love It
T
he star wore headphones. Kevin Keegan stood in an interview area at Elland Road, Leeds, after his team had defiantly won their third match in succession and told Andy Gray in the Sky studios: ‘You’ve gotta send Alex Ferguson a tape of this game, haven’t you? Isn’t that what he asked for?’ Ferguson had, of course, being playing mind games before Newcastle went to Leeds, goading Howard Wilkinson’s home players, who were in mid-table, still nursing the wound of a League Cup final defeat by Aston Villa and drifting to the extent that they were to take only one point from their final seven League matches.
‘Well,’ said Gray, ‘I’m sure if he [Ferguson] was watching it tonight there would have been no arguments about the way Leeds went about their job and really troubled your team.’
Keegan, emotion rising as he recalled Ferguson’s complaints to the League fixture arrangers, went on: ‘And we’re playing Notts Forest on Thursday [three days later] and he objected to that! That was fixed up four months ago. I mean – that sort of stuff. We’re bigger than that.’
Richard Keys, co-presenting alongside Gray, played devil’s advocate: ‘But that’s part of the psychology of battle, Kevin, isn’t it?’
Gray: ‘No, no . . .’
Keegan: ‘No.’
By now he was emphasising his points with a stabbing finger. ‘When you do that about footballers, like he said about Leeds, and when you do things like that about a man like Stuart Pearce [the England left-back and a member of the Nottingham Forest team who, having lost 5–0 to United at Old Trafford the previous day, were to hold Newcastle to a 1–1 draw at the City Ground later in the week] . . . I’ve kept really quiet, but I’ll tell you something – he [Ferguson] went down in my estimation when he said that. We have not resorted to that. But I’ll tell him now if he’s watching it. We’re still fighting for this title. And he’s got to go to Middlesbrough and get something. And I’ll tell you something – I will love it if we beat them, love it.’
This entered football’s mythology as the rant that cost Newcastle the title. In fact, the title was all but United’s as Keegan spoke. They had only that single match at Middlesbrough to play. It was their second in eight days and even a narrow victory would require Newcastle to win their concluding two by a combined margin of eight goals (in the event that would have been ten goals because United won 3–0 at Middlesbrough). The visit of Tottenham to St James Park would be Newcastle’s third match in seven days; it was a minor reversal of the situation United had faced at the end of the season when Leeds beat them to the title. Now Newcastle ran out of steam, drawing with both Forest and Tottenham. But Andy Gray’s little interjection on the side of Keegan as he had delivered his outburst stuck in the mind. Sometimes Ferguson’s mind games were at the expense of the game’s dignity. Yet he was to cross that line so often in the years to come that, in retrospect, Gray might seem almost puritan, a killjoy. Not that Ferguson was the only culprit. But it is fair to say that the standard of sportsmanship Gray was defending became a casualty of war in the Ferguson years.

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