Bye Bye Fergie? Sir Alex Ferguson at 70
After the best part of a quarter century at Old Trafford, Sir Alex Ferguson’s appetite for combat appears undimmed. But every party has to end sometime – could this season be the lap of honour for the greatest football manager ever?
Alex Ferguson was appointed by Manchester United in November 1986. To give you an idea of just how long ago that was, Stefani Germanotta, better known now as Lady Gaga, was eight months old. We didn’t have cable TV here in India, net was an alien invention and we’d probably never heard of a dishwasher. A pint of beer cost 82p in UK. A mobile phone battery came separately – in a suitcase – and Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister. That season a total of 14 league matches were shown on TV. And when Ferguson travelled to Oxford to oversee his first game (United lost 2-0) he might have bumped into a young undergraduate, name of David Cameron. The world has changed over the intervening 25 years. But through it all Fergie’s success – a rocky spell at the beginning excepted – has been guaranteed, inviolable. Football has evolved rapidly, but one face has not changed: Ferguson’s, still there, at the end of nearly every season, grinning as he waves yet another trophy at an adoring crowd.
He was at it again last season, which United ended – for the 12th time in the last 19 years – as league champions. What’s more, they reached the European Cup final and the semi-finals of the FA Cup, while their kids won the FA Youth Cup at a canter. For most clubs such achievement would be as rapturously received as a Creme Egg in a fat camp, but the bar is set ridiculously high at Old Trafford. “At Manchester United,” Ferguson has said, “we are motivated by the absolute requirement to be better than everyone else at everything.” For all the trophies, by his own exacting standards, Ferguson will celebrate a quarter of a century at Old Trafford later this year surrounded by a faint fog of failure.
In 1999, shortly after winning the unequalled treble of league, FA Cup and Champions League, Ferguson explained why he demands absolute control of the club. “Unless you have control you can’t have a vision, targets, dreams,” he said. “In football life, the only thing that gives you control is time and the only thing that buys you time is success. Not every manager has time, unfortunately.” Ferguson has had time.
Oodles of time. Aeons. Yet there he was, in the final and most important game of last season, watching Barcelona’s young tyros toy with his team like so many woodlice being tortured by borderline-psychotic schoolboys. “Nobody,”
Ferguson said after the final whistle at Wembley had ended his side’s misery, “has given us a hiding like that.”
Since his move from Scotland there have been few challenges that Ferguson has failed to conquer, few opponents which have bettered him without being bitten back, but this Barcelona team, perhaps the finest ever to play the sport, will surely be one of them.
Ferguson wouldn’t say that, of course. He has been here, seen it all before. In November 1994 he took his side to Catalonia where Johann Cruyff’s side, starring the brilliant Brazilian goalscorer Romario, the Bulgarian Hristo
Stoichkov and a young Spanish chap called Pep Guardiola, now Barça’s manager, humbled them 4-0. “The style and quality of Barcelona’s victory put the English champions depressingly into perspective,” wrote David Lacey in The Guardian , a phrase that could have been copied and pasted into any of the match reports this May. “It was a humbling experience for us,” said Ferguson that night. “We never matched the quality of Barcelona’s passing. We never really threatened at all.”
But that match did not break Ferguson.
Quite the opposite: it inspired him, and less than five years later he returned to Barcelona and conquered Europe, a stunning comeback in the final moments of the Champions League final leaving Bayern Munich helpless.
The big difference between Ferguson then and now is age. Then he was 53; on New Year’s Eve this year he will turn 70. But his reaction to the two results has been near-enough identical: immediately bringing new players into his squad. The month after that 4-0 defeat in 1994, in a match against Galatasaray which amounted to little more than a dead rubber, Ferguson gave a European debut to a young player, yet to feature in the league, called David Beckham. A further month later he shocked English football by signing Andy Cole from Newcastle for an English record fee. While we are yet to discover which future legends await promotion from the youth team, this summer he bought the goalkeeper David De Gea, the Blackburn defender Phil Jones and Aston Villa’s Ashley Young before any of his major domestic rivals had so much as dipped a toe into the transfer market.
It is clear that Ferguson’s drive remains undimmed despite his advancing age. The question his rivals have been plaintively asking for a decade or more – how long can he go on? – remains emphatically unanswered. He came close to retiring once, in 2002, United were hours away from announcing that he was to be replaced by Sven-Goran Eriksson when he > changed his mind. It shouldn’t have surprised them – in 1998, when he was but a mere strapling at 56, Ferguson admitted he was, “coming into the last lap of my life” but insisted: “I don’t believe in retiring.” Bryan Robson, Ferguson’s former captain at United and the man who was once – laughably, it seems now – considered most likely to replace him as manager, said two years earlier: “I just can’t see Alex ever leaving the place. They’ll have to carry him out with his boots on. He can’t get enough of the club. Age is not a problem with his desire. That desire is there all the time.”
Ferguson’s insatiable appetite for work was formed in Govan, where his father worked 68-hour weeks in the shipyards and got paid a princely £7 for the privilege. Alex Snr was a “strict disciplinarian… who taught me the values of life and the values within yourself.” Ferguson’s role models are all Scots who embody similar traits. There’s Johnny Boreland, his leader in the Boys’ Brigade between the ages of 12 and 16 – “an absolute fanatic for the game” – and the
Rangers managers Bill Struth and Scot Symon, under whom the fledgeling Fergie played. “He was absolutely dominant with the team,” he said. “All based on discipline. He didn’t say much, nor did he need to. He just had this overwhelming aura of authority.” Finally there’s Jock Stein, the former Celtic and Scotland manager who asked Ferguson to be his assistant with the national team. “Whatever the result,” Stein told Ferguson as they sat together on the bench before a World Cup qualifier against Wales in 1985, “let us not forget our dignity.”
Minutes after the game ended in a 1-1 draw Stein suffered a heart attack and died.
Ferguson’s combative nature – a former teacher reported that as a child he had the ability to “start a fight in an empty room” – helped him create an aura to rival Symon’s. At Aberdeen, where in six years he destroyed the dominance of the Old Firm, won three league titles, four Scottish Cups and the now-defunct Cup Winners’ Cup and forged his reputation, his rages were legend. Jim Murphy, who worked as a youth coach under Ferguson, said: “He might have been a grumpy, bad-tempered old bugger at times, but he could get 150% out of you.”
It took him a while to get into his stride at Old Trafford. Gordon Strachan, who had played under Ferguson at Aberdeen before joining United two years before him, had told his team-mates all about the fearsome dictator who had just been appointed. “He was like a pussycat for the first few weeks, three months even,” he said. “They were all looking at me ’cos I’d made him out to be Hannibal Lecter or something.” Norman Whiteside reported that, “he seemed in awe of the place. He would come up in training and say to me: ‘Big place this, isn’t it? Big club, this.’”
But his hard side soon surfaced, and the players started to call him The Spitting Cobra. “It used to scare the living daylights out of us,” said Mark Hughes. “Alex frightened a few of the boys to death,” said Bryan Robson. Graeme Hogg, who Ferguson jettisoned in 1988, described, “his rantings and ravings in the dressing-room when things are going wrong. He will bawl and scream at a player with his face inches away.” The full-back Colin Gibson said: “I don’t think it is very good man-management or anything clever – I think that’s just a guy who cannot take losing and has to bully someone to get rid of his anger.”
On occasions Ferguson used weapons – once, at Aberdeen, he threw a full tank of hot tea at his players (but missed). On another occasion he flung a bag of dirty washing at a player he was bollocking, and then bollocked him again for not removing the jockstrap that had settled on his head. Most famously, in 2003 he thwacked David Beckham in the head with a flying boot.
“It’s not ‘ruling by fear’ at all,” Ferguson insisted. “People respond to anger, don’t they? You don’t put fear into people deliberately, but how can any manager help losing his temper when a player isn’t giving 100%?”
At times Ferguson has treated players with such cold-hearted bastardliness it is a wonder to think that he was ever one himself. A limited but inevitably workaholic forward, he was at his sixth club when his career was curtailed by injury at the age of 32. Several years later, the doctor who delivered the fateful diagnosis admitted that he had exaggerated the problem in order to save the player, whose best days he decided were obviously behind him, further embarrassment. A place in Fergie’s bulging black book – he is not one to forget a grievance – was his inevitable reward.
As a player, Ferguson was twice on the receiving end of remarkably harsh decisions.
First he was abruptly and without warning left out of Dunfermline’s team for the 1965 Scottish FA Cup final, despite appearing in every one of their preceding games. “He didn’t take the decision particularly well,” his then manager, Willie Cunningham, said.
Four years later he once again had a chance to play in a Scottish FA Cup final, this time for Rangers. He was named in the starting line-up to face the club’s great rivals, Celtic, but two minutes into the match Ferguson allowed the man he should have been marking, Billy McNeil, to open the scoring. Rangers eventually slumped to a 4-0 defeat and his manager, Davie White, was so furious that Ferguson never played for the club again.
Not that anybody told him that was going to be his fate. But one evening that summer, while with the first team on their pre-season tour of Denmark, he telephoned his wife for a chat.
She had heard on the radio that Rangers had released a statement saying he would never again be selected. Grief-stricken, he wandered down from his hotel room and got stuck in at the bar. “I walked into the hotel and there was Alex Ferguson, drunk,” his former team-mate, John Greig, said of that evening. “We were stunned because that was very unlike him. But there he was, wearing bright red pyjamas, shouting and bawling with everyone standing around, looking at him. I felt really sorry for him.”
You might think that such rejections would have made Ferguson less likely to be similarly cold-hearted with his own charges. Instead, though, they had the opposite affect. “The feeling of rejection and failure when I was discarded by Rangers was a real bad one,” he later said. “Yet out of that adversity, I found a sense of determination that has shaped my life. I made up my mind then that I would never give in.”
On another occasion, he put it more bluntly: “Sometimes you have to be cold, clinical, and make judgements without compassion.”
And Ferguson has never failed to do so.
Most famously, the goalkeeper Jim Leighton, having played under Ferguson both at Aberdeen and at United, spending over a decade as his first-choice No1, was discarded between the 1990 FA Cup final – drawn 3-3 > with Crystal Palace, in the days before penalty shoot-outs – and the replay. Leighton, broken, was never the same again. “I cannot find it in my heart to forgive him,” he said, many years later. This year, before the Champions League final, he did it again. “I was just so disappointed and ashamed that I was left out of the squad,” said Dimitar Berbatov, the Premier League’s top scorer, who found himself without a place even among the substitutes and watched the game in the privacy of the dressing room. “I cannot hide my emotions and I did not want people to see how sad I was. It hurt me a lot, but this was the manager’s decision.”
There have been others: Jaap Stam put something he shouldn’t in his autobiography; Paul Ince became overly cocky; David Beckham started hanging around with pop stars; Dwight Yorke had a very public fling with Jordan. All were swiftly dumped. “Sometimes success changes people,” he once said, speaking of Ince. “It isn’t a problem for me, but it can be a problem for players. Some people change with success.”
Others have been jettisoned after the manager detected a marginal downturn in form or focus. “I have got a mechanism to deal with complacency,” he has said, rather chillingly.
“I am waiting for the signs, and the players will know it when they have made a mistake.” But his judgement is usually sound, and few players have flourished elsewhere after leaving Old Trafford for purely sporting reasons – Ruud Van Nistelrooy and Diego Forlán, who never really settled in Manchester in the first place, spring to mind. But anyway, his methods are worth the occasional mistake: his squad must be massively motivated by the knowledge that they are never more than a couple of below-par performances from being handed a one-way ticket to Bolton.
That much was clear from their performances last season. In his 2002 autobiography Roy Keane wrote that United’s players, “weren’t hungry fighters any more… that desire wasn’t there. None of us had it, not in sufficient quantities.” The same accusation could not be made of the 2010/11 vintage, whose incredible ability to conjure victory from the jaws of defeat saw them, for example, recover from 2-0 deficits to win at both Blackpool and West Ham.
But clearly a truly great team would never have allowed themselves to fall to the brink of defeat against such opponents. Never mind Barcelona, Ferguson knows his side must improve if they are to remain ahead of Chelsea
– who suffered their worst league run in 15 years in the middle of last season and still nearly overhauled United by its end – or the rapidly-improving Manchester City, or Kenny Dalglish’s resurgent Liverpool, or Arsenal, where Arsène Wenger appears to be permanently just one piece away from completing a very impressive jigsaw.
But there is one way that Ferguson could bring a bit of Barcelona’s brilliance to Lancashire, and that is by inviting the man who has coached the European champions to preeminence to take his place. Guardiola has spoken about his desire to spend “one more year” in charge at Nou Camp, while over in Madrid Real manager José Mourinho, who bonded with Ferguson over a shared disdain for failure and appreciation for fine wine while the Portuguese was at Chelsea, may also be available in the summer of 2012. Given his age, Ferguson or his employers might find the opportunity to capture one of the two most credible candidates for the job hard to ignore. The Scot’s obsession with success cannot blind him from the issue of his succession.
“It’s difficult for me to say when my position will be available. It will be my health that decides,” Ferguson said earlier this year. “But if I was told, ‘Alex, you are too old, we have decided to turn the page’, no problem.” Could this season form the final chapter?
From the August 2011 issue of FHM India.
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