Football – Bloody Hell! (44 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

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Within a few months of his unfortunate analogy, the Royal Bank of Scotland was being rescued as a consequence of the collapse of the financial system. It was yet another hostage to fortune that Ferguson had offered with the Carrington champagne. But, because of his achievements, Ferguson was never going to be fully held to account for his unwitting role in the Glazers’ takeover. To the supporters, his acquiescence with successive carpetbaggers – the Irish, then the Americans – was the truth that dare not speak its name.
All the supporters could do was watch developments: the switching of debt to a bond which let the Glazers continue to draw money from the club in the form of fees and raised the possibility of ultimate repayment of the loan through the sale and leaseback of Old Trafford and/or Carrington. And still it was insisted, not least by David Gill and the Glazers’ spokespeople, that Ferguson could buy big if he wanted. And as Ferguson himself joined the chorus, the scorn of David Conn, as respected a writer on football and its finances as any since the subjects became inextricable, almost leapt from the pages of the
Guardian
.
‘Imagine how United might look without the Glazer debt,’ Conn wrote, outlining how the dividends paid by the club as a plc now appeared modest when compared with a ‘mountain’ of interest. ‘Had the takeover never happened, how fearsomely United could now be swaggering. Three times Premier League champions and European champions in 2008, with a record income of £278 million [and] a £91 million operating profit, not plundered to meet the interest. On top of that, £81 million from selling Ronaldo. Would the manager, in these debt-free circumstances, really spend the autumn years of his brilliant career grumbling about the price of players? Can he be pictured allowing Ronaldo and Carlos Tévez to depart, leaving him to admit that United’s thinner strike force is seriously reliant on one player, Wayne Rooney?’
Yet grumble about the price of players Ferguson did. As if he had never happily splashed United’s cash to get the best he could. Even as it was calculated that, since the Glazer takeover, he had spent only £32.4 million net – less than £6.5 million a season – on reinforcements, he insisted: ‘It’s nothing to do with the Glazers or David Gill. It’s because I am not going to pay £50 million for a striker who isn’t worth it. I could easily have spent the Ronaldo money, but I didn’t want to do it.’ He preferred to wait for ‘value in the market’. And, to be fair to him, the poor first season at Real Madrid of the French striker Karim Benzema, for whom he had refused to pay Olympique Lyonnais the required £35 million, did nothing to harm his case.
Towards the end of the 2009/10 season, Ferguson reiterated his scorn for the overpaid stars constantly being pushed his club’s way: ‘Agents get in touch with our chief scout and say this player will take a drop in wages from £10 million to £8 million a year. Oh, will he? That’s very good of him. Jesus Christ! So that’s only £42 million now in wages over a five-year deal instead of £50 million.’ Not far off. ‘So work it out. You bring in a player for forty-odd million and then you have to pay their salary on top. So with a five-year contract and wages you’re suddenly talking of paying £82 million for a player over the term of his contract – it’s ridiculous.’
He went on to declare that he would pay a £60 million fee for only one player – Ronaldo, whom he would take back any time – and to defend the acquisition of Owen. ‘He was a popular signing among the players,’ said Ferguson, ‘and we felt if we could get fifteen goals out of him it was good business. Unfortunately he got injured in the League Cup final where the pitch was a killer.’ No one asked Ferguson why, when the deficiencies of the Wembley surface were so well known, he had picked the notoriously injury-prone Owen in the first place.
And so he moved on to his concluding point: ‘The clamour to spend big will happen again but people are missing the point.’ During the season he had signed Chris Smalling, a highly promising English defender, from Fulham in a deferred transfer for a basic £10 million; Javier Hernández, a young Mexican forward, for £7 million; and Diouf. ‘That’s twenty-odd million on young players who will develop in the long term. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, isn’t it? The Glazers have given me £20 million for three players already and any time we’ve asked for money, like for Dimitar Berbatov, they’ve given it. There’s no criticism for me because there’s no criticism justified.’
Wisely, though, he avoided the ownership question in a final address to the fans after the Stoke match on 9 May, and was warmly cheered in consequence.
No More the Champions
T
he season had brought only one trophy – Aston Villa had been beaten in the League Cup final – but United had run Chelsea close in the Premier League, acknowledging that a record nineteenth title and unprecedented fourth in a row would not be theirs only on that last afternoon, in which they beat Stoke 4–0 while the visiting supporters gleefully celebrated each of the eight goals Chelsea put past Wigan Athletic without reply at Stamford Bridge; United had needed Chelsea to drop points. Ferguson’s greatest frustration, however, had been visited in Europe.
It had been a season in which Ferguson had sometimes seemed to be caricaturing himself, blaming referees for several of United’s defeats and, when they were beaten on away goals by Bayern Munich in the Champions League, calling their players ‘typical Germans’ for having encouraged the referee to send off United’s young defender Rafael da Silva for incurring a second yellow card that, to most neutral observers, looked justified. No German member of the Bayern team had, in fact, been involved. But that was not the point.
High though emotions may have been running in the aftermath of a bitter defeat – Ferguson was still furiously chewing gum as he spoke to the television interviewer afterwards – it was a needlessly hackneyed insult, one whose character reminded Ferguson-watchers of his supposedly jocular remarks about another nationality a few years earlier: ‘When an Italian tells me it’s pasta, I always look under the sauce, just in case.’
This defeat by Bayern, in the quarter-finals, cost Ferguson a date to which he had been looking forward. Earlier in the season, while United and the rest of Europe’s more fancied clubs had been making their usual steady progress through the group stages, José Mourinho’s mobile phone vibrated at the Inter training ground outside Milan. On it was a text message from Ferguson with a cheery PS that read: ‘Let’s meet in Madrid in May.’ As it transpired, only Mourinho could turn up. Arjen Robben’s controlled volley at Old Trafford put United out, but Inter marched on to the final at the Bernabéu, past Chelsea and then Barcelona to a meeting with not Ferguson but Louis van Gaal, whose Bayern Munich were comprehensively beaten.
Ferguson made no secret of his frustration. Right up to the week of the final, he seethed about United’s absence.
From the start of the domestic campaign – though he had taken with good grace an extraordinary defeat at the raucously jubilant home of Alastair Campbell’s beloved and newly promoted Burnley – there had been something of a scattergun approach to referees.
Alan Wiley, who had taken charge of a 2–2 draw at home to Steve Bruce’s Sunderland in which United played poorly, had supposedly exemplified the deficient fitness of Premier League officials (a point ridiculed by statistics showing that Wiley had covered more ground than all but four of Ferguson’s players, and all but three of Bruce’s).
Chris Foy had been berated for having allowed only six extra minutes at the end of the FA Cup tie in which Leeds United, then of League One, triumphed 1–0 at Old Trafford (the former referee Graham Poll explained in a newspaper article why Ferguson had got that one wrong too). And then, after a 1–1 draw at Birmingham, Ferguson went for the hat-trick.
‘I’ve been watching Mark Clattenburg for a while,’ he said, with the air of a Politburo member who had been reading too much
Pravda
or (to be more literal) a Manchester United manager who’d done too much MUTV, ‘and I’ve not seen a softer sending-off in a long time.’ This time video evidence revealed Darren Fletcher’s two yellow cards as open and shut cases. Even by his own standards, Ferguson was overdoing it. The line between pique and mind games had become blurred.
His team’s performances could be just as erratic. United were doing their manful best to cope with an unusually heavy list of casualties but sometimes the additional strain of a midweek Champions League encounter proved too much for the squad. They lost limply at Liverpool in October, were all too predictably beaten at Chelsea the next month and then encountered one of Ferguson’s dodgy Decembers, going down at Aston Villa and Fulham. But things picked up when Manchester City, whose nouveau-riche crowing and brandishing of Tévez had been nicely put down by Ferguson’s reference to ‘noisy neighbours’, were subdued over two legs of a League Cup semi-final and Patrice Evra spoke tellingly: ‘Sir Alex . . . was jumping up and down like a child after that game. You could be forgiven for thinking he had never won a game before!’
That the fires burned as strongly as ever was emphasised by Wayne Rooney: ‘There are days when I don’t want to see the manager. Even after we have won a game maybe 2-0 or 3-0, we can go in the dressing room and everyone is smiling and happy and we think we have played well and done all right. Then he comes through the door and just lets loose. Everyone is looking around and thinking, “What’s wrong?” But that’s the way he is. He is a perfectionist.’
But even with Rooney in brilliant form, relentlessly striving to make up for the losses of Tévez and, especially, Ronaldo, scoring a career-best thirty-four goals in all competitions, the team remained short of perfect.
Chelsea demonstrated as much in April as, well rested thanks to their Champions League knockout by Mourinho’s Inter (United had spent the midweek in Munich), they came to Old Trafford and were much the better side, even if it took a Didier Drogba goal that should have been disallowed for offside to give them all three points. They went on to be worthy champions in Carlo Ancelotti’s first season, as Ferguson generously admitted.
The Footballer of the Year, though, was rightly Rooney. Ferguson accompanied him to the Football Writers’ Association dinner and, after paying tribute to his star player, sat back on the top table to watch Rooney be briefly interviewed by Sky’s Jeff Stelling and tell a story involving the manager. At the beginning of the season, Rooney said, Ferguson had asked him to score more goals with his head. ‘I said to him last season it was me crossing the ball – I asked him if he wanted me to get on the end of my own crosses.’ As the audience laughed, the hitherto beaming Ferguson retained his smile, but with apparent difficulty.
He had hardly been more amused when David Beckham returned to Old Trafford with Milan in March, shortly before the former England captain sustained the Achilles-tendon injury that ruled him out of the World Cup.
Beckham had spoken affectionately about Ferguson in the build-up to the match, calling him a ‘father figure’, but, when the first question put to Ferguson at his briefing was about Beckham, the manager reacted with sarcasm. ‘That was three seconds – bloody hell!’ he said. ‘Can’t you build it up a bit?’ Beckham played only as a substitute and, Milan having lost 4–0, left the arena wearing a green and gold scarf provided by one of the legion of dissident supporters. He later felt obliged to explain that it was not a significant gesture.
All in all, the occasion turned out pretty much as Ferguson would have wished. The past was gone. United would live to fight another day and, despite what Ferguson was to call the ‘absolute travesty’ of Munich, another season.
THE LEGACY
‘Not Today but Tomorrow’
F
or most managers United’s achievements in the 2009/10 season would have constituted success. Yet so accustomed had we become to Ferguson lifting prizes more glittering than the League Cup that he went on holiday without garlands. Nothing he or his team had done earned more praise than an eloquent tribute to Sir Bobby Robson which Ferguson delivered at Durham Cathedral during the much-loved former England manager’s memorial service on 21 September 2009.
Without notes, as ever, he captured the essence of Robson as seen by his peers: ‘Bobby never lost that enthusiasm. That enthusiasm, you just can’t explain it – special people have got it.’ According to Ferguson, Robson had even influenced one of his decisions to stay on at Old Trafford by inquiring ‘You’re not going to retire, are you?’ in a tone that left room for only one answer. ‘He always influenced me,’ said Ferguson. From way back in 1981, after Aberdeen had beaten Ipswich Town. ‘In true Robson fashion, he finished by saying, “Go and win it – anyone who can beat my Ipswich team must be able to win the Cup.”’
Ferguson had mounted the pulpit steps a day after a dramatic 4-3 victory over Manchester City at Old Trafford. A few weeks later, though, came dismal defeat at Liverpool and, when United went to visit the leaders, Chelsea, it was hard, for those of us trying to preview the match in our newspapers, to recall one with a fellow member of the established top four in which they had gone as such underdogs.
And yet the song I could not get out of my head was ‘My Back Pages’. When Bob Dylan wrote it in 1964, Ferguson was forsaking the toolmaker’s trade for a full-time contract with Dunfermline and, given his mainstream musical tastes he would more likely have been listening to Sinatra or the ‘awful Glaswegian’ mentioned by Gordon Strachan than the poet Dylan. But a couple of lines seemed apposite to what Ferguson had so gloriously made of his life in football, so I used them to introduce a piece in
The Times
:

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