Football – Bloody Hell! (42 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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In the shuffle that let Vidi
ć
back for the final, Park was left out; Ferguson preferred the destructive specialist Owen Hargreaves.
If Ferguson’s first Champions League final had been a slow-burner, this one fizzed from the start. Both teams attacked and Ronaldo wasted little time in exposing Michael Essien’s unfamiliarity with the right-back position. After twenty-six minutes, United’s own right-back, Wes Brown, crossed and a towering Ronaldo headed United in front. Chelsea equalised just before half-time when Essien shot and the ball deflected off Vidi
ć
and Rio Ferdinand to Frank Lampard, who scored as Edwin van der Sar lost his footing on the liberally watered surface.
Chelsea then commanded the midfield and might have won in normal time: Didier Drogba struck a post, just as Mehmet Scholl had done in 1999. Lampard hit the crossbar, as Carsten Jancker had also done in 1999, during the extra thirty minutes.
Any sympathy the neutral may have felt for Chelsea disappeared as penalties loomed. Throughout the match they had been diving, feigning injury and harassing the Slovakian referee, L’ubos
̆
Michel’. On one occasion they even kicked the ball out of play for a case of cramp – and wanted it back! What next would impel them to hold up the match, we wondered – slight breathlessness? Now a posse led by John Terry tried to bully Tévez and Vidi
ć
was slapped by Drogba. The red card cost Chelsea one of their prime penalty-takers.
The decider had gone to 2-2 when Ronaldo, of all people, had his kick saved by Petr
ech. The player of the European season appeared set to lose its biggest prize. Especially when Lampard scored. Hargreaves scored, as did Ashley Cole, and the United substitute Nani. Up stepped Terry to win the competition, but he slipped as he kicked and the ball flew behind the goal, forlornly glancing the post on its way. United were back in the contest. Anderson kept them there. After Salomon Kalou had scored, so did yet another substitute, Ryan Giggs. And finally there was Nicolas Anelka, who had been on the field less than a quarter of an hour. He had not wanted to take a penalty and his kick, struck to Van der Sar’s right, was confidently stopped by the diving Dutchman.
It was to a tearful Terry that most media eyes swivelled and, as the England captain crumpled in anguish, a member of the United contingent – the only one of seven who had served their country alongside Terry – went to him. Gary Neville, who was recovering from injury, got his suit soaked as he ran across the pitch to offer consolation. Only after this did United’s club captain and arch-supporter rejoin the celebrations. That was true sportsmanship from Neville, of the sort he and Ferguson had shown to Porto and Mourinho amid their own disappointment in Manchester four years earlier.
And it was conduct befitting the year; as Ferguson had often mentioned, it was the fiftieth anniversary of the Munich crash. Bobby Charlton enjoyed the moment with characteristic restraint. For all that the rub of post and bar had favoured them, Ferguson’s United were worthy winners.
Talking a Blinder
T
he final ended long after midnight in Moscow – 1.34 on Thursday morning.
Late on Friday morning Ferguson appeared at Carrington and helped to dispense champagne to journalists. Immediately his future came up. He would have two more years. ‘Three at the very, very, very most. I’ll no’ be managing at seventy. Definitely not. You have to think of time for yourself. And my wife’s getting older. You have to think about that. She deserves a bit of my time. In fairness she never brings it up. But I think she’d like it.’ We had heard all this before. ‘Yes, but the older you get the more guilty you feel about it.’
He was later to appear to go back on this, as Mourinho mentioned, but maybe that was partly to prevent the players from switching off as he felt they had on a previous occasion. At Carrington that late spring day, it seemed, the champagne was talking a good game and on the question of Ronaldo’s future it was more eloquent still, even implying that the Glazers would let the player ‘sit in the stand’ rather than let him follow the trail to Madrid.
‘Believe me,’ said Ferguson of the jewel he was to lose within a year, ‘he’ll no’ be leaving in the next two years.’ Almost spitting the name of Real, he compared the privacy of Carrington – he was proud that journalists called it Colditz – with Real’s training ground. ‘There’s three thousand bloody supporters watching the training every day. The press are there. The TV stations are there. It’s a jungle.’ Once again Ferguson insisted we could take it from him: Ronaldo knew where he was better off. The following summer found Ronaldo all in white on a vast catwalk at the Bernabeú, waving at 80,000 of those bloody supporters, the new king of the jungle and looking very happy to be there.
But that day at Carrington was all about United and how they would strengthen – speculation correctly had Ferguson eyeing Dimitar Berbatov at Tottenham – and expand. Ferguson reiterated his hope that the stadium, now holding 76,000, would grow to accommodate more of those wishing to appreciate not only Ronaldo but the maturity of Wayne Rooney.
He spoke so fondly of Rooney and the selfless adaptability that had enabled the manager to include Hargreaves in Moscow: ‘I just felt that, with Chelsea so strong in midfield, I had to give myself the option of Hargreaves [initially on the right] in case we needed to bring him into the central area at some point, which we did because of their dominance in the second half. They created a couple of chances. But bringing Hargreaves in stopped the rot.
‘In order to do that, we put Rooney wide right and I know it’s not his best position.’
Ferguson dwelt on Rooney’s selflessness: ‘He’s not a selfish player, not a selfish boy. He’s a committed winner and this leads him to make sacrifices to the detriment of his individual performance. As a team player, he is absolutely fantastic. He tells me things like “I can play centre-half – I played there for my school, you know.” And I have to tell him, “Wayne, but we’re playing Drogba today.” The attitude he’s got is a terrific asset to this club.’ And, quite clearly, to the manager. Rooney had taken the exemplar role, following in the line of Cantona and Keane.
When someone mentioned Rooney’s wife, Coleen, the response from Ferguson was interesting: ‘Clever girl. Down-to-earth. Good.’ For some reason an image of Victoria Beckham came to mind and you sensed that Alex Ferguson had seldom been happier in his work than now. As Ryan Giggs had said of his own elastic career: ‘When you’re young, you think it’s never going to end. When you get older you get an appreciation of the finishing line. You want to enjoy every game . . . savour every moment.’
Not that Ferguson was relieved of life’s little problems. Such as the necessity, once more, to find a new assistant. Early in the spring Queiroz had been courted by Benfica and Ferguson, reluctant to lose him again, mentioned the Old Trafford succession. Then the Portuguese national team, with whom Queiroz had a history – he had supervised the development of the so-called ‘golden generation’ of Luís Figo, Rui Costa and others – asked him to be their guide to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, where he had also worked, as national team manager. He had to accept, and went with Ferguson’s best wishes.
Queiroz, an affable man whose love of the game ran deep, told me that Ferguson, when first hiring him, had summarised the job by mentioning the renowned Jaguar marque of sports car and saying: ‘Manchester United is one of those. Make sure it is ready to drive.’ Queiroz had done more than this. He had come to do too much for the taste of an ageing Keane, who moaned about his tactical ideas, and other players thought him gifted but obsessive, but Ferguson, into whose ear he was never slow to whisper advice, had such a regard for Queiroz that he frequently recommended him as his own successor.
Ferguson had developed a habit of tipping people for this elusive job (McClaren, for example) who would be likely to show gratitude by keeping him on as a valued confidant. But three League titles and a Champions League in his five seasons marked Queiroz out as a particularly high-class assistant. In Europe especially, Ferguson’s reputation had benefited from his acumen.
His role went to Ferguson’s old utility player Michael Phelan, who, though not as convincing as the urbane Queiroz in post-match interviews in front of the
Match of the Day
cameras (Ferguson still would not do those), shared in a third consecutive title celebration.
An extraordinarily eventful season, even by Ferguson’s standards, began with a scoreless Community Shield match against Portsmouth, who had won the FA Cup under his old friend Harry Redknapp. It involved a mid-season trip to Japan during which United became world champions, then a Carling Cup final in which he surrounded Ronaldo with reserves and yet still beat Redknapp’s Tottenham on penalties, then an FA Cup semi-final in which the reserves lost on penalties to Everton. There was a Premier League title triumph despite the best challenge yet from Liverpool under Rafa Benítez, who launched an attack on Ferguson’s dirty tricks, and finally a Champions League final defeat by Barcelona.
Ferguson also found time to blood an entire outfield team of youngsters, farm others out on loan and sell a couple, raising more than £6 million from Sunderland and Burnley for the striker Fraizer Campbell and defender Richard Eckersley, as if to prove that the income stream from United rejects still flowed.
Three of the youngsters – Rafael and Fabio da Silva and Rodrigo Possebon – came from Brazil. Kiko Macheda was from Italy (and you could still hear the howls of complaint from Lazio). Zoran T
š
si
ć
was from Serbia, Ritchie de Laet from Belgium. Jonny Evans, a central defender from Northern Ireland, had been impressive on loan at Sunderland and was ‘a Manchester United player’, swore Ferguson. So was another Irishman, the midfielder Darron Gibson, a calm player with a ferocious shot.
A couple of them looked the part, it was true, but we remembered how Ferguson had sung the praises of, among others, a winger called Luke Chadwick who was supposed to offer a more direct and challenging alternative to Beckham but who ended up in the lower divisions. So, when he tipped the English striker Danny Welbeck to make Fabio Capello’s squad for the 2010 World Cup, we reached for the salt cellar. In order to give them the best chance of making it, he had to keep their heads up. And, if it didn’t work out and they had to be sold, it would be the price that stayed up.
Rafa’s Rant
R
onaldo’s final season at United began in his absence. The previous season had been a long one for him, with the European Championship, and he returned to the side as a substitute in the fourth League match, a bruising 1-1 draw at Chelsea. He then started scoring as if he had never been away: eight in as many League matches. He was sent off in a 1-0 win at Manchester City, and quite bizarrely, after he had seemed instinctively to handle a corner in the City penalty area. But United gathered pace in December. They were just behind Liverpool when the statement that came to be known as ‘Rafa’s Rant’ was issued by the Anfield manager on 9 January.
Benítez was responding to a series of apparently crafty complaints Ferguson had made. About, for instance, fixtures being arranged in a way that put United at a supposed disadvantage. Benítez tried sarcasm: ‘There is another option – that Mr Ferguson organises the fixtures in his office and sends it to us and everyone will know and cannot complain . . .’
On referees, he mentioned an FA campaign and asked: ‘How can you talk of Respect and criticise the referees every week?’ Not just criticise them: ‘We know what happens every time we go to Old Trafford and the United staff. They are always going man-to-man with the referees, especially at half-time when they walk close to the referees and they are talking and talking.’ In the manner David Elleray had noted when he was a leading referee.
As for the mind games, it had got to the stage where Ferguson’s very existence was polluting the atmosphere. All he had to do was break wind and the press would portray it as an insult to a rival manager or club. At the start of the season, he had mentioned that Chelsea’s average age was higher than United’s and been accused of making mischief when all he had done was make a reasonable observation. That was hardly his fault. But his claim that the League fixtures were intended to hamper United by giving them difficult away matches in the first half of the season was nonsense and, as Benítez noted, any advantage in the second half of the season – which any manager would prefer – would go to United.

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