Football – Bloody Hell! (39 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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Yes, said Magnier, there could be an out-of-court settlement, but it would be on his terms. There would be no half-share of the £100 million some had guessed the Rock might eventually earn, or anything like it. There would not even be the £7 million Ferguson had so rashly turned down, or even half of it. He got £2.5 million. Having lost the Rock, he was scarcely in the hardest of places. But the relaxing properties of the racecourse? Ferguson and Cathy were a sadder and wiser couple.
As Ferguson had often said of his football teams, however, the mark is made not by defeat but the response to it. On the night of 9 March, as he came to terms with Magnier’s victory, United went out of the Champions League at Old Trafford. They led Porto on away goals until the ninetieth minute, when Tim Howard could only claw down a free-kick from Benni McCarthy and Costinha stabbed the loose ball into the net. Porto’s manager celebrated wildly, running along the touchline in a coat that was to become familiar; the following spring José Mourinho was to return to Old Trafford in charge of Chelsea, its newly hailed champions.
In that 2003/4 season, he guided Porto to further victories over Lyon, Deportivo La Coruña and, in the final, Chelsea’s conquerors, Monaco, adding the Champions League to the Uefa Cup that Porto had won the previous season. At Old Trafford, they had been lucky in that Paul Scholes was denied a second goal before half-time by a flag erroneously raised for offside. But Ferguson took defeat with a sportsmanship that did him credit, especially given that United had failed even to reach the quarter-finals (the Champions League had finally abandoned the second group stage, instead having a round of sixteen) for the first time in eight years. As Glenn Moore noted in the
Independent
: ‘In times past, Ferguson would have headed, this morning, for the gallops. Now even that release is denied him.’
A few of us briefly entertained the notion that Ferguson might be entering his darkest spell since the winter of 1989/90. Only briefly. On the Friday after the European exit he looked forward to a derby at the City of Manchester Stadium (rivals City having moved from Maine Road in 2005) despite a rash of injuries: ‘I’m not telling you how many are out – you wouldn’t bloody believe it!’ United lost 4-1, but by now they had only one realistic target and eventually they hit it by beating Millwall, from the division below, at Cardiff in the FA Cup final. Along the way they had overcome Manchester City, Aston Villa, Fulham and in the semi-finals – with the unceremonious approach to tackling that often marked confrontations with their keenest rivals – Arsenal. In the final one goal came from Ronaldo and another two from Van Nistelrooy, who finished with thirty in all competitions. Only Arsenal’s Thierry Henry, who took the second of three Footballer of the Year awards, was more feared.
And Ferguson could look forward to the summer, in which he would watch Ronaldo’s Portugal put an England without Ferdinand out of the European Championship as Beckham failed from the penalty spot, knowing that the argument about who should profit from the sex-slave horse was behind him. As I wrote at the time: ‘Although we are told Magnier and McManus still want answers to the 99 questions they have put to the United board, anyone working on the assumption that the Irishmen are ethical zealots is probably also in the habit of saving extracted teeth for the fairies and going to sleep on the night of December 24 only after making sure the sherry and mince-pies are ready for Father Christmas.’
Ferguson had known that much about his adversaries. He had lost his high-stakes gamble and, in the process, his campaign for a long-term contract; he was handed a one-year rolling agreement. The board decided to publish payments to agents in future and not to use Jason or Elite. But the immediate threat to the manager’s position had been lifted and early the next season he would have Ferdinand back. The defender had incurred an eight-month ban for missing the drug test. He had appealed and, before the hearing, Ferguson was asked if he would obtain a reduction. ‘If he doesn’t,’ said Ferguson, ‘I’ll be going to the United Nations.’ Kofi Annan was spared that experience. But Ferdinand had to serve his time.
UNITED: RONALDO AND ROONEY
Wine with Mourinho
T
he 2003/4 season had been dramatic enough, but in a chilling way: one in which the wind of change had come all the way from Siberia.
It was Roman Abramovich’s first season as owner of Chelsea and, although the team had finished a creditable second to the ‘Invincibles’ of Arsenal, he ended it by sacking the Italian manager, the affable Claudio Ranieri, whose desk had hardly been cleared when José Mourinho introduced himself.
For the Special One it was to be a far from ordinary inauguration to England’s Premier League – the 2004/5 season began with a visit to Stamford Bridge of Ferguson’s United – and Mourinho remembered it clearly, in detail.
Not least because of the culture shock: ‘It was the first time in my life I went to an important game without being with my team in a hotel. The game was at three o’clock and we met at Stamford Bridge at 12.30. For me this was a completely new experience. In Portugal, in Spain and in Italy people concentrate for one, two or even three days before – everyone else is outside the walls.
‘This was England, so I tried it the English way. I walked through the streets because my house was near the ground and, as I’m crossing the King’s Road with my assistants, I’m thinking – in a couple of hours we’re playing Manchester United! Stamford Bridge was empty. Everything was so quiet. Incredible!
‘I remember the game clearly too – a typical first game of the season. Not good quality. Not big emotion. A game for the first team to score.’ Eidur Gudjohnsen scored for Chelsea. ‘After that, we defended. We closed the door. They had a couple of chances, but we won.’
And afterwards Mourinho came to understand one of the traditions Ferguson enjoyed: that of sharing a good bottle of red wine.
They had got on well the previous season, despite Porto’s late victory and the linesman’s blunder that had permitted it. But those two matches in the Champions League did not signify the first acquaintance, even if Mourinho doubted that Ferguson would recall meeting him with Sir Bobby Robson back in 1996, when Robson was manager of Barcelona and Mourinho officially his translator (though Robson had seen enough of the younger man at Sporting Lisbon and Porto to have encouraged his involvement in training and match preparation).
Day after day, Robson would talk to Mourinho about the English game, its characteristics and its personalities. ‘Sir Alex was one of the legends,’ said Mourinho, ‘and even Bobby, who was a legend of English football in his own right, spoke of him with great respect. And of course Manchester United had a great meaning for me as well.’
One day Ferguson flew over with Martin Edwards and Maurice Watkins to arrange the transfer to United of Jordi Cruyff. The host delegation chose a restaurant. On one side were the Barcelona president, Josep Lluís Núñez, and vice-president, Joan Gaspart, with Robson and Mourinho. On the other were Edwards, Watkins and Ferguson. ‘And here I was,’ Mourinho recalled, ‘in the midst of a business deal between these two big clubs.
‘This was typical of how I learned about managerial stuff with Bobby. In Portugal or Spain, it would not have been normal for the coach to be involved. I realised then that England was different. It was a perfect example of what Bobby had been telling me.’
Even after a decade at United, Ferguson appears to have been just as hands-on as at Aberdeen when it came to transfers. He was very much involved in the Cruyff deal. ‘His ideas were very clear,’ said Mourinho. ‘He was fighting hard for his club. And an understanding of that dimension of management made me take an even greater interest in the English game, to fall in love with it even before I came.
‘I had always thought that the coach should not just do a training session a day, then go home and watch a couple of videos of the opposition and come in and do the same thing the next day. And here I saw the English style of management – and it was Sir Alex.’
At that time it was plain Alex. Nearly eight years later, Sir Alex’s United drew Porto in the first knockout round of Champions League. First they played at the Dragão and there was no opportunity for post-match memories of Barcelona. Towards the end United, who had led through Quinton Fortune, lost to Benni McCarthy’s second goal and had Roy Keane sent off for what seemed a light tread on the back of the home goalkeeper, Vitor Baía. ‘Most people thought Sir Alex was going mad about it after the game,’ said Mourinho. ‘But for me – especially now that I have got to know him – he was not mad. He was starting to play the second game.’
It began in the tunnel. ‘He and I were walking to the dressing rooms at the same time and he was shaking hands with me but not looking at me because the referee was coming behind us and Alex was complaining in his Scottish accent about the referee’s decisions. I didn’t interfere. I just let him get on with it.
‘At that moment, I think, he felt he was in trouble. I think Manchester United had gone into the game with respect, of course, but expecting to beat Porto. And now he knew Porto was a team of some resources too. And so he started, as I have done all my career – and he’s the master at it – to play the next game before it starts. In this case he was trying to create an atmosphere in which his own team would want revenge.
‘He went into the press conference, mentioned that Porto had won a few titles and said maybe we had got used to buying them at the supermarket! He was trying to put the knife into his own players while making mine – young boys, mainly, unaccustomed to the Champions League – feel a little low, as if they had not deserved to win.’
After Porto had prevailed at Old Trafford, there was pandemonium in their dressing room. ‘You would have thought we had won the World Cup,’ said Mourinho. ‘And then there was a knock on the door. It was Alex, with Gary Neville. As they came in, everybody fell silent, respectful. The party stopped. The party was over. And, as Gary Neville went round shaking hands with my players, Alex shook hands with me and said that, after the press conference, I was invited to come to his office for a drink.
‘What a special person it was, I thought, who would do anything to win but, if he lost, still do that. At that moment I made a decision. It was that, if I ever came to England, I would follow this example.
‘I remembered something Bobby once said to me when we were at Barcelona. We had lost a game we should have won – it was against Hercules of Alicante – and I was devastated. “Don’t be like that,” he said. “Just think of the happiness in the Hercules dressing room. If you think of that, you won’t be too sad. You’ll share a little bit of the happiness of the others.” And I wanted to come to that culture.’
When he did, however, he proved an often poor loser. Certainly not as sporting as Ferguson at his best. And sometimes as graceless as Ferguson at his worst.
At least in public. With fellow managers he was popular and observed the customs. Especially with Ferguson. ‘Beforehand,’ said Mourinho, ‘we would play our game with words. Then there would be the game on the field. And afterwards – win, lose, draw – our tradition was to have a bottle of wine.
‘He started it. He always had one in his office. So I decided it could not always be him and brought a bottle myself, a good one, Portuguese. And that started a competition. Who would bring the best bottle? Who would bring the most expensive? He came with a fine Bordeaux, I would retaliate – always with a Portuguese wine – and so it went on.’
Pizza with Wenger
N
o Gewürtztraminer from Alsace would have crossed Ferguson’s lips. Not at that stage anyway. His relationship with Arsène Wenger, his most consistently difficult opponent since the Alsatian’s arrival at Arsenal in the autumn of 1996, had been far from cordial, at least when the media were around. Privately it was much warmer than the public perceived, according to Wenger, who had said in 2001: ‘When we meet – at airports or in Uefa meetings, things like that – we don’t hit each other. In fact sometimes it’s quite fun.’
They had a great deal in common: they were football men to the core, workaholics with a passion for passing football, youth development and winning, although not necessarily in that order, as their falls from dignity in defeat testified. One difference was almost a nuance: while Wenger was often the most sour of losers, he was never an ugly winner.
The best known illustration of this took place in October 2004 and became known as ‘Pizzagate’ because the player who hurled a slice of pizza at Ferguson after a stormy match at Old Trafford became the subject of a cover-up on both sides. But the main drama, to which neither Ferguson nor Wenger has referred in public, might have got genuinely violent.
It was a head-to-head between the managers in which fists might have been raised but for Ferguson’s wise restraint. More than once, he has said that his Govan upbringing taught him never to shrink from confrontation in the dressing room; hence the ‘hairdryer’. This, however, was just outside the dressing room and a different instinct, fortunately for all concerned, prevailed.
A lot had seemed to be conspiring against Ferguson at the time. Not least the feeling that he had met more than his match in Wenger, whose gift for language – indeed languages, for he spoke several and was usually described as ‘urbane’ or ‘professorial’ – Ferguson had been foolish enough to prompt. He had claimed that United, although they had finished fifteen points behind an unbeaten Arsenal the previous season, had played the more attractive football. When this was put to Wenger, he smiled and replied: ‘Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.’

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