Football – Bloody Hell! (41 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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Their most recent meeting had been earlier that year, when United knocked Inter out of the Champions League (Ronaldo scored the second of the goals that settled the tie after a scoreless draw at San Siro) and Mourinho said: ‘He was saying to me “Why should I stop? I feel strong, I feel happy, I have nothing to do at home, I love it – and I win!” I think the only thing that could push him out would be if he stopped winning. He’s a winner. He could not live without victories.
‘The period he was in trouble was the one when his pride was wounded – the period when Chelsea started winning. For two years, United won nothing [one League Cup, in fact]. Instead of giving up, he started to prepare a new Manchester United, which would again be champions of England and Europe.’
Was Ferguson a control freak? ‘I don’t know.’ But the word ‘control’ meant as much to Mourinho as Ferguson. ‘I think we both believe in control of the dressing room.’ Ferguson had that. ‘When people, for example, talk of the boot that flew at Beckham, or the “hairdryer”, I never heard one player criticise that moment of aggressiveness. Why? Because they respect that person so much. They recognise in him such power, such leadership, that he can do anything he wants.
‘There is only one thing I will not do and that is insult a player’s mother. I will never do that. Anything else, yes. Why? Because the players know I am not doing it to insult, to smash. It is because I want something.
‘The players trust Alex. They can be angry, of course, if he leaves them out of the team, but in the end they know he has the characteristics that bring success.’ And that kept them under his control. ‘It is a quality a coach must have.’
Ferguson also tried to obtain advantage by getting under the skins of referees, and of some of those opposing managers whose teams were perceived to threaten his. There had been his provocation of Kevin Keegan, and then the sometimes bitter rivalry with Arsène Wenger. Rafa Benítez was later moved to an outburst against him. But there had never been a dig at Benítez’s predecessor, Gérard Houllier, and the mind games with Mourinho tended to be conducted in a friendly spirit.
Asked if he had ever beaten Ferguson psychologically, Mourinho replied: ‘I never thought about it. We were different personalities, but neither was afraid of the other. No one could interfere with the stability of the other. Whatever I said, certainly, I did not think I could upset his self-confidence. He could block every word from outside.’
Mourinho, like Ferguson, was more aggressive with Benítez, whose team he once belittled even after Liverpool had knocked Chelsea out of the Champions League at Anfield – ‘only Liverpool’s crowd were better than us tonight’ – and Wenger, with whose purist footballing philosophy he disagreed. So did he treat Ferguson differently? ‘I think we both had a sense that we had to beat each other by football, not psychology. I always thought he was top at that level and his teams would be stable and prepared.’ So he played by different rules against Ferguson? ‘Yes.’
He had even been known to refer to Ferguson in private – and it was not Mourinho who told me this – as ‘Boss’.
But he tended to give at least as good as he got, even in that last full season Mourinho had at Chelsea, 2006/7, when United regained the title; there were two draws in the League and Chelsea beat United in the FA Cup final, the first back at a rebuilt Wembley which seemed to have everything except a decent pitch, with a Didier Drogba goal.
Ferguson’s good fortune had been that Mourinho, for all Chelsea’s money, could not accommodate every top player in the world. With the help of Peter Kenyon and influential agents, the club had arranged in 2004 for the new manager from Portugal to have Petr
ech in goal and Arjen Robben, whom Ferguson had long fancied, on the wing. Mourinho had asked for and got three Portuguese players: Ricardo Carvalho, Paulo Ferreira and Tiago. Claude Makelele, so good in the holding midfield role that they nicknamed it after him, was already there, with John Terry and Frank Lampard. No wonder they were to win the League twice. But Drogba was to be the centre-forward – and so they didn’t go for Rooney.
In a market complicated only by the ambitious interest in Rooney exhibited by Newcastle United, then, Ferguson had got the best young English player for many years. The fee paid to Everton would reach £27 million and even then be a snip. And for less than half that amount United had already got the boy destined to be the best in the world.
Better than Quaresma
Y
ou looked at Cristiano Ronaldo in the spring of 2008, as he carried United towards the championships of England and Europe, and saw the Manchester United player writ large, scoring a goal a match, thrilling crowds at home and abroad and preparing to collect every honour in the game – already he had followed Thierry Henry as Footballer of the Year and this season’s award would be a formality – and could hardly believe that Ferguson had thought long and hard about bidding for him.
Perhaps his greatest stroke of luck was described by Carlos Queiroz, whom Ferguson had appointed his assistant in 2002. In his year at United, before he left to become manager of Real Madrid, there had been several discussions about two young wingers at Sporting Lisbon, where Queiroz had been in charge. Ferguson was unsure whether to go for Ronaldo, then eighteen, or Ricardo Quaresma, who was eighteen months older.
‘I had always followed Cristiano’s career,’ said Queiroz, ‘and so delivered my opinion very strongly. We were not able to buy both of them – and I was sure about Cristiano. So when I left for Madrid I made him my target. He was top of the list I gave Jorge Valdano, the sporting director. But unfortunately for me – and luckily for Alex – he ended up joining United instead. And it happened through me because Sporting asked me to ask United to inaugurate their stadium [the Alvalade had been refurbished for the European Championship] by playing a pre-season friendly. So I went to Alex and he was happy to do it. Sporting won 3-1, Cristiano had a fantastic game – and all the doubts disappeared! Alex had to make a quick decision now. Otherwise Jorge and I would have got Cristiano.’
He cost United £12.4 million.
Quaresma went to Barcelona for £4.5 million, fell out with Frank Rijkaard, returned to Portugal in the deal that brought Deco from Porto and, after failing to revive his career with Mourinho at Inter, joined the Turkish club Be
ş
ikta
ş
in 2010.
Queiroz was soon working with Ronaldo anyway. He lasted ten months at Real, whose president, Florentino Pérez, had discarded Makelele to make room for Beckham and instituted a policy of surrounding
galacticos
with products of the
cantera
, the youth development system. A trophy drought ensued and Queiroz was one of its first victims after Real had collapsed at the end of the season, letting Rafa Benítez’s Valencia overtake them. Queiroz had kept in touch with Ferguson. ‘Alex was a great friend during that time. He told me to make my own decisions and not to worry because there would always be a job for me in Manchester. That gave me strength. It kept my spine straight during a difficult time. So, even though I was offered some extremely well paid jobs, including one in England [Tottenham had a reliably documented interest in him], I didn’t hesitate when he invited me back.’
Nor did Ferguson now hesitate when Queiroz suggested he take youngsters from Portugal. He paid Porto £18 million for Anderson, whom the fans hoped would be a more assertive Brazilian than Kléberson, and Sporting got £16 million for Nani, a winger who began like the next Ronaldo only to lose his way for a while. But Rooney and Ronaldo appeared to be acting like enough of a rejuvenation drug on Ferguson.
When Rooney was sent off during the 2006 World Cup in a match against Portugal and Ronaldo indulged in a sly wink at team-mates, the newspapers speculated that there would be pre-season trouble at Carrington. Ferguson scoffed. He knew his men. Rooney scored twice and Ronaldo once in the opening League match, a 5–1 victory over Fulham, and United led the table virtually all season.
Ferguson had rebuilt yet again. He had, in Edwin van der Sar, a £2.5 million signing from Fulham, his best goalkeeper since Schmeichel. Ferdinand, who had matured into one of the world’s best defenders, enjoyed the worthy partnership of Nemanja Vidi
ć
. Ryan Giggs was well into an Indian summer so wonderfully prolonged that in 2009 he was to be voted BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and Paul Scholes was prompting more cleverly than ever. Michael Carrick, from Tottenham, was an elegant, soft-shoed and often deadly addition to the midfield, notably in the 7–1 triumph over Roma at Old Trafford that signalled United were on the march in Europe once more.
They had come through a group featuring Benfica and Lille but that quarter-final was a revelation. After a 2–1 defeat in the Olympic Stadium, United ran riot, Carrick and Ronaldo scoring twice each and Rooney and even the French full-back Patrice Evra chipping in along with Alan Smith, a £7 million signing from cash-strapped Leeds who had returned after horrifically breaking a leg at Liverpool.
Again it was Italian opposition in the semi-finals – shades of being drawn Juventus after Inter in 1999 – and, after Ronaldo had opened the scoring against Milan at Old Trafford only to have the brilliant Kaká reply twice, there was time for Rooney to equalise and then, in the ninetieth minute, hit the winner. United were badly prepared for the second leg and Milan won 3–0, Ferguson blaming it on tiredness even though the preceding programme had not been inordinately heavy and Milan had much the older side. Milan went on to beat Liverpool in Athens.
Ronaldo matched Rooney in scoring twenty-three goals that season. It was a remarkable return for a winger, even one who could pop up in the goalmouth and head them in like an old-fashioned English centre-forward, but we had seen nothing yet.
After Schmeichel, van der Sar
T
he 2007/8 League season began with a scoreless match against Reading. It was not until the last match of September, a 1-0 win at Birmingham City, that Ronaldo got his first League goal, but in twenty-nine appearances thereafter, three of them as a substitute, he scored a further thirty.
In the FA Cup, from which United were removed by Portsmouth with Ferguson and Queiroz delivering scathing verdicts on the referee, Martin Atkinson – they thought he had let Portsmouth players get away with too many fouls on the star man – Ronaldo scored three more.
And in the Champions League he got no fewer than eight. His forty-second and last of the season helped United to defeat Chelsea in Moscow. And that was just for his club. With three in European Championship qualifiers that season, he had taken his total for the Portugal campaign to eight in twelve matches and in the tournament itself he was to notch one in three before the 3–2 quarter-final defeat by Germany. Only then did he have a holiday.
The highlights of United’s unbeaten progress through the Champions League group stage had been Ronaldo’s winners on a sentimental journey back to the Alvalade and again when Sporting made the journey to Old Trafford; although United had already qualified for the next round, it was a truly memorable goal, an example of his ability to develop state-of-the-art techniques, a free-kick from nearly thirty yards struck so that it cleared the defensive wall, bending in and then outward so that the goalkeeper was helpless as it found a corner of the net.
Ferguson sent virtually a reserve side to Roma for the concluding group match and still drew 1–1. No one could live with any of the English clubs that season; three marched to the semi-finals and the exceptions, Arsenal, fell only to Liverpool, who in turn lost their semi-final to Chelsea.
United, after drawing in Lyon, beat the French champions with a Ronaldo goal and then reacquainted themselves with Roma in the quarter-finals, winning 2–0 away and then at home through a goal from Carlos Tévez, whom Ferguson was supposed to have signed from West Ham United but in fact was owned by a company in which his agent, Kia Joorabchian, had an involvement. West Ham, who lied to the Premier League about the so-called ‘third-party ownership’, were heavily fined, but Tévez was allowed to play on for Manchester United. He stayed until, at the end of the 2008/9 season, Ferguson decided he was not worth the £25 million or more that Joorabchian was demanding and the Argentine went to Manchester City.
In the semi-finals there followed a tactical triumph for Ferguson and the unquestionably influential Queiroz in Barcelona, where Scholes, now thirty-three, and Carrick were excellent in protecting a defence lacking Vidi
ć
from the threat of Samuel Eto’o and Lionel Messi. Park Ji-Sung, the industrious South Korean, also did a fine defensive job for the manager, helping to secure a scoreless outcome. Scholes won the second leg with a thrilling drive. Ferguson had publicly promised Scholes a place in the final if United got to Moscow. It was a bizarre thing for any manager to guarantee, but how Scholes had vindicated him. And so United proceeded to meet Chelsea on the Luzhniki Stadium’s artificial surface, which was to have quite a bearing on the match.

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