The Second Half (3 page)

We’d slipped up against Arsenal. A 0–0 draw should have been a reasonable result, but not when you miss a penalty. Beating them would have given us that bit of momentum. I would never have expected Ruud to miss a penalty. Because Ruud Van Nistelrooy was brilliant.

There was a Champions League game last season, United played Bayern Munich, and Danny Welbeck went through, one on one with the keeper. He missed it. Ruud Van Nistelrooy wouldn’t have. Ruud was the best finisher, ever, but especially in one-on-one situations, just the keeper to beat. When Ruud was going through, one on one, I never doubted him. Some players would be going, ‘Fuckin’ hell – hard and low? Or dink it over?’, but when Ruud was through there might as well have been no goalkeeper.

Ruud had his own traits; he could be moody at times – unlike me. But he was a good guy. He missed a Cup semi-final because of an injury – I think it was the one against Arsenal, at Villa Park, in 2004. He came down the morning of the game and said, ‘I can’t play, my knee’s sore.’

And I went, ‘What’s up with you?’

I had a sore hamstring myself.

He said, ‘Oh, I’ve been feeling my knee during the night.’

And I was, like, ‘It’s the Cup semi-final, for fuck’s sake.’

He said, ‘Well, I’ve only got one body, I need to look after it.’

I was thinking he was the fool, but I think now that I probably was. I played, and my hamstring was fuckin’ killing me. I think I actually had a torn hamstring. Ruud ended up playing in Spain till he was thirty-nine, and he still looks twenty-one. And I thought he was the idiot.

I got on well with Ruud. I got on well with all the foreign lads; I used to enjoy picking their brains. I wished I was a bit like some of them – a bit laid back, like Dwight Yorke, or clever like the Dutch lads when it came to looking after themselves. I wasn’t jealous; I was intrigued, curious about them. Not playing when you’re injured – that was pretty sensible. But I was conditioned to think that not playing if you weren’t 100 per cent fit was a sign of weakness, and that you should be strong and play when you were injured. But the clever lads won’t be limping around when they’re forty-five, and they won’t be having hip replacements. My tradition was different – ‘Don’t show you’re hurt, just get on with it.’ Don’t be weak, play when you’re injured. Brian Clough detested players who were injured. He’d have banned a lad on crutches from the ground. What we see as heroic, I think now is probably weakness.

‘Can you go for us?’

I’d take a painkiller, and play. No one put a gun to my head, but I wish I’d had the strength of character of the foreign lads. Even in their attitude towards moving clubs. Nemanja Vidić announced that he’d be leaving United at the end of last season. He didn’t torture himself with, ‘Oh, what’ll they think of me?’ He just said he’d be going and he had a good season for United. The foreign lads are not shy about making a good living. ‘I’ve had my two years here; I’ve had enough.’ They end up having great experiences, in different countries.

*

I scored in our 4–1 win over Leicester.

I didn’t score as many goals as I used to. My role in the team was changing. I was now more the sitting midfielder. I think the manager and Carlos Queiroz, his assistant, might have had their doubts about whether I had the discipline to do the job, because my game had been all about getting forward. But I was comfortable in the position, saving my body, using my experience. It fell into place; it suited me. I still liked the odd opportunity to get into the box. I would never have been the classic sitting mid-fielder like Claude Makelele; he wouldn’t budge. Playing against Leicester, I didn’t have to babysit the two centre-halves. I could still go forward, at the right time. If I saw a space or a gap, I’d take it. This time, the opportunity was there – a run behind the defenders; the keeper, Ian Walker, came out, I went around him, tapped it in.

At the start of the new year, 2004, we were at the top of the table. But we were used to that. We’d won fifteen, lost three – against Chelsea, Southampton and Fulham – and drawn one.

Some of the new players were taking time to settle in. Kléberson came in, but he had no luck. He picked up a bad injury. His girlfriend came to England with him. She was very young, and heavily pregnant. He found it hard to settle and get going – to get some good performances under his belt, a couple of good games, get his confidence going. Eric Djemba-Djemba – a really nice lad – struggled. He couldn’t get a good run of games. David Bellion came in from Sunderland. He was another nice lad, but I think the club might have been a bit too much for him. When I was a young kid at United, Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes were coming through. Now, the likes of Beckham and Jaap Stam were leaving and I’d look at some of the new lads and think, ‘No, they’re not the answer.’ It was just a step too far for some of them.

But we always had a good dressing room – and that’s vitally
important. I remember when Diego Forlán came in, and it wasn’t quite happening for him. If a player tried – and Diego did – we’d drag him with us; we’d try and help him. Plenty of praise in training, or during games; not getting on his back. Diego was honest, so in training you’d go, ‘Unlucky; it’ll come good tomorrow’, not ‘You can do fuckin’ better than that.’

I wonder about the current United dressing room. When a manager like Alex Ferguson is replaced, the new man needs a helping hand along the way. Does that mean that every player should like the new manager or his coaching staff, or love his new sessions, and everything about him? No. I look at the current players, and they should have been doing a lot better. It might be argued that it was up to the manager to motivate them. But not liking a manager, for whatever reason, can never be an excuse for not going out and doing your best. Looking at what happened to David Moyes, I have to conclude that he can’t have had a strong dressing room; he had a weak dressing room. If some of the players weren’t 100 per cent behind the manager, then they all slackened off. You can have personality clashes, dips in form; you can have injury crises, or the club can be going through a transitional period – but you still go out and do your best. I don’t think all of the United players went out and did that. They can’t have – because they ended the season so far adrift of the top. I watched them play, and I always thought, ‘You
can
do better.’

When Diego left, he had a chance to say goodbye to us. Often, players are just gone – another club, sometimes another country – but Diego did say goodbye.

‘I’m off, Roy.’

He shook my hand.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Villarreal.’

Villarreal were just starting to make noises in Spain.

I said, ‘Where’s Villarreal?’

And he went, ‘It’s twenty minutes from the beach.’

We laughed.

I went, ‘You got your dream move, Diego.’

Diego went on to have a brilliant career, and I wasn’t a bit surprised. But it just didn’t work for him at United.

I rang him when I was managing Sunderland, after we got promoted. He was in Spain.

I said, ‘Diego, would you fancy coming to Sunderland?’

He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I’ve got a get-out clause in my contract.’

I went, ‘Go on – tell me what it is.’

He said, ‘Thirty-eight million euros’, or something.

So, I said, ‘I’ll call you back’, but I never did.

I don’t remember there ever being a real bad lad – poor attitude, poor time-keeping – in the United dressing room. You might ask does being late make you a bad lad? Yes, it does, in a dressing room full of hungry players who want to keep winning trophies. If training starts at half past ten and a player is coming in at twenty past ten, I would class that as being late. Officially on time – but you’re late. If you can’t get in by ten o’clock, have a bit of banter, get your strappings done, your massages done, you’re late. Preparation is half the training.

I’d expected more of Verón. When he arrived in 2001, I was delighted. He played in my position but the competition was good for me, and the club. It would keep me on my toes. I never resented the arrival of new players, even if they played in the same position as I did. It didn’t quite happen for him – but, technically, he was a very good player. Maybe English football – the
conditions, the pitches, the weather – just didn’t suit his style of play. You’d end up scratching your head, sometimes.

With a lot of the foreign lads – and I think I understand this a bit more now than I did when I was a young player – it was the culture, or the weather – the environment – things that I took for granted.

‘What do you mean, the weather?’

I used to have conversations with Ronaldo and Mikaël Silvestre, and they’d speak to me about the weather.

I’d go, ‘Lads, when you signed, you must’ve known it fuckin’ rains a lot in Manchester.’

They’d go, ‘We knew, but we didn’t know it would be this bad.’

When we know that a player is getting fifty or sixty grand a week, we don’t have the patience to wait for foreign players to get used to the environment they’ve moved to. If they’re used to going for a cappuccino at half-ten at night, sitting on a balcony somewhere, and all of a sudden it’s dark at half-four and it’s fuckin’ freezing, that is going to change them. I know this, because they told me. Fabien Barthez and Laurent Blanc used to smoke together in the toilets, at half-time. They were French – they smoked. If it had been a couple of Irish lads, I’d have been shouting at them: ‘Yeh dirty bastards – get out!’

What was good, when I first went to United, was that there were people there to help me – the staff and, in particular, the players. Even a gesture from a player, to make you feel welcome. It might have been going for a pint – not that I needed much encouragement. I don’t know if that happens with the foreign players now, but you can’t underestimate its importance.

We’d lost Beckham. It was sad to see him leaving, but the writing had been on the wall. It had got to the stage where I think
it suited both Becks and the manager to part ways. Some moves suit everybody, and this was one of them.

There was tension between him and the manager. There’d been the incident after the FA Cup fifth-round game the previous season, when Arsenal beat us 2–0 at home. Ferguson kicked a boot on the floor in front of him and hit Becks over the eye. So, Becks going to Real Madrid – when these deals happen, you don’t fall off your chair. It happens. Players leave under different circumstances. I don’t even remember if Becks said goodbye. The game is horrible like that. Jaap Stam left – he was just gone! The wives are gone, the kids are gone. They haven’t gone to a club down the road; they’ve moved to another country. At the time, you think, ‘That’s the game.’ It only seems strange afterwards. But that’s the gig – it’s life.

I suppose, as a player, there’s a selfish side to the way you look at it. ‘I’ve got to look after myself a bit when players are coming and going.’ Becks had been a brilliant servant to the club, but he wasn’t being shoved out the door. There are certain deals that suit everyone – the player, the club he’s leaving, the club he’s going to. It’s the machine – players in, players out. I knew: it was Becks one minute, and it could be me the next.

I was in the dressing room when Ferguson kicked the boot. I thought it was quite funny – although not at the time. We were still upset because we’d been beaten by Arsenal, at Old Trafford. They’d knocked us out of the Cup, in front of our own fans. It was claimed later that the manager aimed his kick but that was utter nonsense. He kicked the boot – managers kick boots every day of the week. But the fact that it hit Becks was a pure accident. It could have hit anybody, or nobody. But Becks – of all people. It cut him above the eye. A manager can’t be hitting players, or grabbing hold of them. But the fact that it was Becks made it almost comical. And the manager didn’t mean to hit him. If you
tried it a million times, you wouldn’t be able to do it. It was an accident.

But I didn’t like it. The media attention, the sensational reporting, didn’t help the club.

I remember the club doctor, Mike Stone, coming into the dressing room after training and telling Rio to go up to the medical area for the test. The drug-testing people were waiting for him there. They could turn up at any time.

He forgot, and left. It slipped his mind, and he paid the price for it. He was banned for eight months. He wasn’t given the benefit of the doubt, which was a bit harsh, I thought. Why couldn’t they have gone to his house that afternoon? The whole system could have been a bit more flexible. But not doing the test seemed to be regarded as the same as failing the test.

He suffered for it, and so did the team. If it had been me, and the doctor had said I had to do a drugs test, I’d have gone and done it. It wasn’t something I’d have forgotten. It wouldn’t have been like collecting a letter at the office, or remembering your boots. When a doctor says you’ve to do a drugs test, it’s not an everyday thing. But, then, some people are genuinely forgetful.

This was Manchester United, so it became the big story. But I wondered at the time why they didn’t just follow Rio, go to his house that afternoon. But then, from the doctor’s point of view, you treat people like mature adults. You tell a man to go up for a drugs test, and you expect him to do that. In any other workplace, it would have happened. We can give footballers the benefit of the doubt – ‘Ah, they’re footballers, they live in a bubble, they’re a bit out there.’ But we also have to go, ‘Fuckin’ hell’, sometimes. Just do the drugs test.

I don’t think I was annoyed at the time, and I don’t think the other players were either. But, ultimately, the team suffered. I
didn’t look at Rio and think that he’d been up to no good, or that there was a hidden reason for what occurred. I think he genuinely forgot. We all paid the price. He was a very good player and we missed him, especially in the second half of the season when the crunch games were coming up.

I’d been tested myself a lot of times. It happened mostly after matches and, I think, twice at the training ground. It was a pain in the arse, although I never had a hostile or negative attitude towards it. I just thought people were doing their jobs. If you won, you’d want to be celebrating with your team-mates and, if you lost, you’d be fed up. After games, you’re dehydrated. At the ’94 World Cup, I was tested after the Holland match, in Orlando, Florida. I was there for about three hours; and this was immediately after we’d been knocked out of the World Cup. I would imagine that if we’d won the game I’d have pissed a bit quicker.