Football – Bloody Hell! (35 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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And never, in nearly twenty years since the insult was delivered, had he forgotten that old feeling of being ready to run through a brick wall for Ferguson. ‘To this day,’ Strachan added, ‘if anyone says something about him, I’m the first to stand up for him.’ Closely followed by his old friend Mark McGhee, whom Ferguson so suddenly and mysteriously ostracised.
Football – bloody hell!
UNITED: THE ENCORE
Goals Galore
A
fter the treble came the encore: a magnificent Premier League season featuring ninety-seven goals, a record (and, to put it in startling perspective, twenty-four more than Arsenal scored four years later when their ‘Invincibles’ went through a League season unbeaten). The competition in 1999/2000 included Wenger’s Arsenal, of course, a vibrant young Leeds United and a Liverpool showing signs of resurgence under Gérard Houllier. But United left them all trailing.
Yorke, Cole and the supersub Solskjær, who had set a record of his own by springing from the bench to score four times at Nottingham Forest the previous season, were finding the net so regularly that defensive problems could be absorbed. Stam was still sound, but alongside him Mikael Silvestre, the Frenchman whom Ferguson had bought from Internazionale for £3.5 million because of Johnsen’s injuries, inspired less confidence. Although usefully able to play left-back as well, Silvestre was never to make much more than a squad player.
Not that you could call his acquisition a Ferguson blunder; to identify one of those from his post-treble summer, you would cite Massimo Taibi. He also came from Italy – from Venezia, after being discarded by Milan – and cost £4.5 million and was not around very long. The problem was that Peter Schmeichel, now thirty-six, had left for a lighter workload at Sporting Lisbon. Ferguson’s first solution was to bring in Mark Bosnich from Aston Villa, where the Australian had become recognised as one of the Premier League’s top goalkeepers, but it soon became apparent that he lacked the work ethic demanded by the manager.
Taibi had four matches. In one against Southampton he conceded a goal so comically, letting it run between his legs, that someone dubbed him ‘the blind Venetian’. In the last of his four outings, United lost 5-0 at Chelsea. It was an extraordinary result for champions to sustain and, although the Italian was not wholly to blame, he was not picked again.
At the end of the season Bosnich was replaced by Fabien Barthez and this time Ferguson had got it right, though Barthez was hardly a discovery out of nowhere, given that he had won the Champions League with Olympique Marseille and both the World Cup and European Championship with France.
Bosnich went to Chelsea, where, in September 2002, he failed a drug test, incurring a nine-month ban from football. He later ascribed a cocaine habit to his relationship with the model Sophie Anderton. Eventually he rebuilt his career in Australia.
There was little else to report on the domestic front because Ferguson sent a limp gesture of a team to Aston Villa in the League Cup – Bosnich and Solskjær were the only semblances of first-teamers in a side beaten 3-0 – and United did not take part in the FA Cup at all, even though they were the holders. They were criticised for it, but the decision to go to Brazil for Fifa’s inaugural Club World Championship instead had been taken after a request from the FA themselves, who were bidding to bring the World Cup to England in 2006 and had Sir Bobby Charlton as the figurehead of their campaign. In the event Germany and Franz Beckenbauer were to win the Fifa vote, but United’s dilemma was genuine.
However, the benefits to United of a mid-winter break in sunny Rio de Janeiro (they did not seem to take the tournament over-seriously, even though David Beckham was sent off in a match against the Mexican club Necaxa) must have been taken into account. They would certainly have been discernible to Ferguson, who wanted his players as fresh as possible for the closing stages of both the domestic championship and the Champions League.
It was a bigger than ever Champions League. Indeed, it seemed to go on for ever as Uefa’s clubs all but killed the goose that laid the golden egg. There were two rounds of the group stage, which meant that successful teams would have played eight matches before Christmas – and even then been only a third of the way through the second group stage, with quarter-finals, semis and the final perhaps to come.
United, back from Brazil, topped their group but, after drawing scorelessly with Real Madrid in the Bernabéu, were knocked out at Old Trafford by the eventual winners.
After Roy Keane had sliced a cross past his own goalkeeper, Raimond van der Gouw, Raul scored twice, assisted by a piece of sorcery from Fernando Redondo that even United fans were moved to applaud. It was over. Beckham scored a dazzling solo goal and Paul Scholes put away a late penalty. The two further goals that were required in as many minutes proved beyond the powers of even Sheringham and Solskjær, whom Ferguson had sent on with the score 0-3. The holders were out. And it would take Ferguson another eight seasons to return to Europe’s summit.
Threatening to Quit
T
he next season, 2000/2001, saw United again win the domestic League and fall in the Champions League quarter-finals. Again they had to plough through twelve group matches before the competition acquired an edge, but immediately Hitzfeld and Bayern Munich wreaked a measure of revenge for 1999, beating United home and away. Leeds United went one better, losing in the semi-finals to Valencia.
Barthez contributed a mixture of excellence and eccentricity in goal, Wes Brown continued to impress at the back and up front Sheringham and Solskjær outscored Yorke and Cole. The FA Cup, from which United were removed by a Paolo di Canio goal for West Ham at Old Trafford, and the League Cup both went to Liverpool, who completed a hat-trick by beating the Spanish club Alaves in the Uefa Cup final.
Ferguson had much – in the form of Cantona – for which to thank Liverpool’s French manager and his relationship with Houllier remained excellent. If there were any mind games involved in their team’s collisions, Houllier never noticed them. ‘I think he had liked it when I defended David Beckham – I couldn’t understand why English fans were booing him [Beckham’s popularity had been affected by his red card against Argentina in the 1998 World Cup] – and another time when I praised the passion for United shown by Gary Neville. Phil Thompson, who was my assistant at Liverpool, wondered if I’d gone a bit too far there!
‘So Alex and I always got on well. He even told me he was gutted that I didn’t get Manager of the Year in that season when we won the trophies [the award went to George Burley, whose Ipswich Town finished fifth in the League].’
That season Houllier’s team beat Ferguson’s home and away in the League. Wenger’s Arsenal were the only other team to beat United until the closing stages of the season, when the title was won and Ferguson made a surprising declaration that his future might lie with another club.
He had been busy in the build-up to the concluding match, against Tottenham at White Hart Lane. On the Thursday he had attended a Labour election rally in Manchester alongside his friend Mick Hucknall, of Simply Red, and the veteran actor Sir John Mills. On the Friday he had raised football’s eyebrows by announcing that he would sever his connections with United on the expiry of his contract in the summer of 2002, a year hence. The intention had been to hand over the managership then and take an ‘ambassadorial’ role, but discussions between the club and his son Jason, who was now acting as his agent, had broken down.
This led some newspapers to bill the Saturday match as his last in charge of United. For a solid thirty minutes of the first half, which he spent in the directors’ box, the travelling fans chanted his praises. As a follower of politics, he might have noted with satisfaction that even Michael Heseltine had never received that long an ovation from the Tory blue-rinses. In the second half, which Ferguson spent in the dugout, Spurs scored twice and United lost 3–1. But they did keep their manager.
It would, Ferguson said afterwards, be for one year only. He was open to suggestions about what to do thereafter. If another club wanted him as their manager, let them say so.
In the meantime, he would approach the next season at United with relish: ‘I want to go out with my head held high, knowing I’ve enjoyed the sixteen years I’ll have completed with the club. That’s something worth remembering.’
As he spoke, Ferguson-watchers had to suppress pull-the-other-one smiles.
We remembered the leaks from him at around the same stage of the title-retrieval season of 1995/6, when he had been demanding a six-year contract to take him to the age of sixty. We suspected we were watching just another, albeit particularly dramatic, piece of negotiation – and so it proved – but my report for the
Sunday Telegraph
did add: ‘He has always been determined to avoid the fate of the other great long-serving managers, notably the Scots with whom he most closely identifies: Jock Stein, who left Celtic after being offered the ridiculously inappropriate post of lottery manager; Bill Shankly, who said he wanted a clean break with Liverpool and became embittered after it happened; and of course Sir Matt Busby, whose continuing presence at Old Trafford was blamed for the failure of two successors, even if Ferguson, who came to the club much later, often expressed gratitude for the old man’s advice.’
The further example of Scot Symon, whom Rangers so callously dismissed soon after he had signed Ferguson, I overlooked amid the urgency of the moment, but this had undoubtedly left a deep and lasting impression on him. Ferguson had developed a theory that management had become an increasingly complicated task, not least because of the proliferation of the media and the activity of agents, and that he could alleviate the burden of his successor as team manager by remaining at the club.
Sensing this during an interview before Christmas 2000, I had asked if Steve McClaren might be moved into the job with Ferguson as general manager, on the Italian model. ‘That will be the club’s decision,’ he replied. ‘But I don’t think it would be easy for any one person to come in and do the job the way I’m doing it.’ This was when he referred to the strength he had drawn from Busby: ‘I was desperate to talk to Matt. One of the things people don’t understand about managers is that sometimes you’re alone and you don’t want to be alone. People assume you’re too busy.’
It was an argument that failed to persuade the board, despite the promotion from deputy chief executive of Peter Kenyon to replace Martin Edwards that year. Various ideas were explored – Ferguson might become a global envoy for the club, like Sir Bobby Charlton, or supervise youth development, or both, taking the title of president once held by Sir Matt – but negotiations kept stalling and a factor might have been the approach to them of Ferguson’s representative. Jason Ferguson shared his father’s fiery temper – he had it to a far greater degree than Darren, while Mark was relatively tranquil – and would sometimes show it during the discussions. Not every party to the talks thought this was such a helpful tactic.
Eventually his father had to go to the brink. Hence the end-of-season announcement that negotiations had failed and the threat that he might join a rival after his final year with United. It worked. To Kenyon’s satisfaction, the board awarded Ferguson £3 million for the next year and thereafter a five-year contract worth a total of £7.5 million.
The Business with Jason
S
ometimes Jason got in the way. As a child, he had from time to time annoyed staff and directors at Aberdeen Football Club with his scamperings. On one occasion, as a teenager, he had danced on the Wembley pitch after United’s FA Cup final replay victory, briefly occupying the attention of police and stewards until his father intervened.
Upon settling down to the world of work, Jason had done well as a researcher with Granada television after being eased in by Paul Doherty, the head of sport and a friend of his father’s. Andy Melvin, a former football reporter from Aberdeen who also knew his father, then got Jason into Sky when Rupert Murdoch’s satellite broadcaster won the Premier League rights and here Jason truly impressed, rising to senior football director at the age of twenty-seven.
If only he had stayed in television.
Encouraged by his father, who thought him underpaid at Sky, he became an agent, a director of a little firm called L’Attitude in which his wife already had shares. In this venture Jason joined Kieran Toal, a former United youth player, and the man with the funds, Andy Dodd, who was a member of the Alex Ferguson network to the extent that he managed Mick Hucknall.
Jason continued to act for his father, helping to organise a testimonial year that was reported to have raised £1.4 million, some of which was donated to a cancer charity. In his autobiography, Ferguson had given a moving account of his dismay at conditions on the ward in which his late mother had been treated, and raged at ‘the Tory government’ for ‘vandalising the National Health Service’; the charity bore his mother’s name.
In the autumn of 2000, while the parties due to negotiate Ferguson’s future were tuning up, United received an invoice for £25,000 from L’Attitude in connection with the transfer of Massimo Taibi to the Italian club Reggina for £2.5 million (£2 million less than United had paid). The money was reluctantly paid. But that proved the biggest earner of L’Attitude’s short life and, after several vain attempts to make money on the rejects from United’s youth system, the firm went out of business.

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