This is the One: Sir Alex Ferguson: The Uncut Story of a Football Genius

by Daniel Taylor

  We have all been feeling pretty friendly towards the old man recently. Several sackloads of letters and anniversary cards have arrived at Old Trafford from supporters. The television schedules have been full of tribute programmes and the newspapers have been packed with eulogies. Words such as ‘genius’ and ‘legend’ have been used and a national debate has raged about where he stands in the managerial hierarchy. Is he better than Busby? Or Clough? Or Shankly? Or Paisley? Is he the greatest of all time?

  He has had some terrific press, but when we see him at Carrington he looks uncomfortable with all the attention. He is distracted and uninterested, bordering on rude, obviously wanting to get it over as quickly as possible. Ken Lawrence, a freelance journalist, sidles over to say ‘Congratulations’, but Ferguson shifts uneasily in his seat, looking distant and withdrawn, like a pools winner who has forgotten to tick the ‘no publicity’ box.

  He is not a showy man and he has asked for everything to be kept low key, with as little fuss as possible. He doesn’t want any nostalgic one-off interviews, or special media events, or photo opportunities of him cutting an oversized anniversary cake. Barclays, sponsors of the Premier League, have arranged a commemorative ‘Fergie and Friends’ lunch at the Manchester Hilton – but he plans to arrive through a back exit to avoid the cameramen.

  ‘My anniversary is hard to escape but I must admit I am finding it hard to come to terms with,’ he says. ‘My first intention was not to pay any attention to it at all, lest it confuse and distract me. But it has become obvious that it is going to be thrust upon me, whether I want it or not.’

  He doesn’t want a ‘carnival’ or a ‘circus’ and he is noticeably weary, close to rolling his eyes, when the questions start. No, he doesn’t have any anecdotes about his first memories of the club, or the struggles he had in his early years. He is asked if he remembers his first team talk, before a 2–0 defeat against Oxford United at the old Manor Ground, and he says he doesn’t. Then the talk turns to the time he nearly lost his job because of poor league results in the 1989–90 season. Does he ever wonder how life might have been so different? ‘No,’ he replies again, looking into the middle distance, unwilling to elaborate.

  We plug away for a few more minutes, groping for a way to make him open up, but his fingers might as well be in his ears. ‘The future’s more important to me,’ he explains. ‘You journalists are all going on about my twenty years here, what I’ve achieved and all the rest of it. But it really doesn’t matter to me. I prefer to move on.’

  Finally, he says something about his soup getting cold and wanders off.

  ‘Cheerio … and goodnight.’

  It is when he has jumped in his Audi and driven the 100 yards from the youth academy back to the main Carrington building that his colleagues explain why he has been so grumpy. Oliver Holt, the Daily Mirror’s chief sports writer and Sports Journalist of the Year, has written that he cannot join in the ‘orgy of back-slapping and misty-eyed remembrance’. Holt is one of Fleet Street’s more courageous journalists, with enough awards to fill a removals van, and in his weekly column he argues that Ferguson should have retired when he said he was going to, at the end of the 2001–02 season:

  The man is a living legend. He belongs in the pantheon with Paisley, Clough and Shankly. But strip it down and under his management Manchester United have won the European Cup once in twenty years. Celebrating his anniversary amounts to nothing more than a lazy and meaningless ballyhoo for a man who has stayed on too long. Whatever United go on to achieve this season, or in seasons to come, nothing changes the fact that Ferguson should have quit.

  The article was faxed to Ferguson when the team were in Copenhagen and it has been bugging him ever since. ‘It’s scandalous that some people think I should retire,’ he says. ‘There are people in the media saying I should hang my boots up. Well, I don’t think anyone has got the right to say that. It’s none of their bloody business. I’ve every right to work hard and still be here. Some people don’t want to work, but I do. It disgusts me. I want to work and I will continue working.’

  It is amazing that this seems to be the only article that has stuck in his mind when every other newspaper has carried page after page of flowery tributes. But there is history here too. Ferguson has never forgiven the Mirror for the way it treated him when Piers Morgan was the newspaper’s editor and even now it probably ranks as his least favourite tabloid.

  Morgan was an occasionally brilliant, yet ultimately flawed, editor, a great white in the world of tabloid sharks. He had an Arsenal season ticket and an Anyone But United mentality, and at times he seemed to goad Ferguson just for the sake of goading him. When United lost 5–0 at Newcastle in October 1996, Morgan was so delighted to see Ferguson on the wrong end of a thrashing that he decided it should be the newspaper’s front-page splash. His colleagues thought he had taken leave of his senses but he did it anyway, under the headline ‘5–0’.

  He also ran a very aggressive ‘Save the FA Cup’ campaign after United pulled out of the competition in 2000 to play in the World Club Championship in Brazil. All sorts of politicians, celebrities and football types backed the campaign and the Mirror splashed on it nearly every day for two weeks, regardless of what else was happening in the world. Ferguson was getting more and more wound up and snapped when the Mirror sent news reporters to ‘doorstep’ him at a champagne reception in Manchester. He allegedly yelled: ‘Tell your editor to fuck off back to Highbury and stagnate …’

  Morgan found this hugely amusing and took it as a victory for his campaign. Over time, it seemed to become his personal mission to get under Ferguson’s skin. A few months later Ferguson appeared in court charged with speeding on the hard shoulder of the M602 in Eccles. He claimed he had been dashing to the loo because he had terrible diarrhoea and his lawyers managed to get him off on the basis that there were extraordinary circumstances. The next day, Morgan posted some Imodium to Ferguson with a note saying: ‘Dear Alex, we Gooners have known you’ve been full of crap for years. Now we’ve got the proof. Love, Piers.’

  It was strange for a man as intelligent as Morgan to be so empty-headed: going to war with United was a terrible blunder. Yet Morgan was relentless in his apparent desire to get at Ferguson, sniping about him in public, belittling him in print. He also played an enthusiastic part in accelerating Jaap Stam’s departure from Old Trafford after Stam had brought out an autobiography which made personal attacks on Gary and Phil Neville and described David Beckham as ‘no mastermind’, and – the pièce de résistance for the Mirror – contained an admission that United should not have pulled out of the FA Cup. Nobody at United even knew Stam was writing a book. Morgan was particularly delighted because the Dutchman claimed Ferguson had made an illegal approach to sign him and was happy for his players to dive in European matches. The Mirror bought the serialisation rights for £15,000 – a snip, according to Morgan – and ran all the stuff relating to Ferguson on the first day.

  The following morning, Morgan took a call from Stam’s agent begging him to can the rest of the serialisation because Ferguson had hit the roof. ‘Bollocks,’ came the reply. ‘I’m an Arsenal fan and Stam will be out of Old Trafford by the end of the week, which means we will win the league.’

  Stam was sold within two weeks. ‘I rang David Dein at Arsenal and we had a good laugh about it,’ recalls Morgan. Except it didn’t stop United winning the league, ten points clear of Arsenal, and the Mirror has suffered ever since. Morgan’s vendetta drove away United-supporting readers, while Ferguson banned the newspaper for several months. Even though he has since let them back in, he hasn’t forgotten how they behaved.

  Morgan was sacked in 2004 and six months later the Mirror’s sports editor, Dean Morse, approached Ferguson, at a lunch to celebrate his 1,000th game as manager, and politely asked if there was anything he could do to improve the relationship between newspaper and club.

  ‘Yes,’ Ferguson replied, smiling. ‘You can fuck off and die.’

&n
bsp; KISS ME QUICK

  7.11.06

  Southend 1

  Manchester United 0

  Carling Cup fourth round

  There is nothing quite so depressing as a seaside town in winter. Southend in November is the sort of place Morrissey was presumably singing about in ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’ – a seaside town they forgot to close down. Only the hardcore United fans have been tempted to Roots Hall, with its peeling paintwork and Lego-like stands. Few, if any, will take the slightest pleasure from a night that ends with a pitch invasion and some youths in Tommy Hilfiger doing the let’s-all-have-a-disco dance as close as they dare to the away end.

  Going out of the League Cup doesn’t hurt United as much as it does other clubs but, as upsets go, losing to Southend is about as bad as it gets. It will not be talked about like the great FA Cup giant-killings: Hereford against Newcastle in 1972, Sutton versus Coventry in 1989, Wrexham against Arsenal in 1992. And Ferguson is not as down as he was after the draw against Burton Albion. But it is still a bad night. A definite embarrassment.

  To put it into context, Southend have not managed a league win in a dozen attempts and are rooted to the bottom of the Championship. In their last game, they were 3–0 down after twenty-two minutes to Wolves. This is the first time they have ever made it past the third round and they have absolutely no history of giant-killing. United are top of the Premiership, with twenty-eight points out of thirty-three. And this is the real deal too, a team packed with fêted names: Rooney, Ronaldo, Smith, Brown, Silvestre, Heinze. When the team-sheets are handed out in the pressbox half an hour before kick-off, the reporter from the Southend Evening Echo puts his head in his hands and says, ‘Oh, Jesus, no … I was hoping they might play their kids.’

  He doesn’t seem very confident as he asks the club’s press officer, ‘Can you remember the year we lost 9–1 to Brighton for our record defeat? This could be a bad one.’

  What happens next is Steptoe and Son meets Roy of the Rovers.

  Playing in attack for Southend is Freddy Eastwood, a Romany gypsy who lives in a static caravan next to a dual carriageway in Basildon, with his wife, Debbie, his son, Freddy junior, and (post-Footballers’ Wives) his daughter, Chardonnay. After half an hour, the referee blows for a free-kick. Eastwood measures out his run-up, twenty-five yards from goal, then hits his shot. Eleven thousand people are watching, hushed. Then they realise, a second after it has happened, that the ball is in the back of United’s net.

  There are two-thirds of the game for United to find an equaliser. They go straight down the other end and hit the post, but it is not until stoppage time that they get behind the Southend defence again, and Richardson can’t make proper contact on his shot. The final whistle goes. Then comes the bizarre sight of the team bottom of their league, with one point in twenty-four, jogging round the pitch on a lap of honour while Eastwood, an unlikely hero, sprays champagne into the crowd.

  Ferguson keeps his composure. He is a dignified loser and he shakes the hand of every member of Southend’s coaching staff, and several of the players’ hands too. He thanks the referee and the two linesmen. Then he does his bit for MUTV in a corridor that smells of stale sweat and liniment. ‘This is a great reminder to everybody that football can smack you in the face,’ he says. ‘I may have been here twenty years but I’m not impervious to it. It can come up and smack you right in the face.’

  He is philosophical. ‘We don’t like defeats at Manchester United but sometimes we have to accept them,’ he says. ‘There will be no suicides, no mass sackings, no need for counselling. We are disappointed because our club can’t accept being beaten in any kind of competition, even a friendly. But we’ve lost only three times this season so there isn’t much wrong with us. I know we’ll be crucified by certain journalists but there’s no need for a knee-jerk reaction. Our form in the league has been good and there’s no need to go overboard.’

  MORE IMPORTANT MATTERS

  11.11.06

  Blackburn Rovers 0

  Manchester United 1

  The Southend Evening Echo has dedicated twenty pages to what the Independent describes as ‘the biggest night in Southend since the pier burnt down’. The club have rushed out a special-edition commemorative mug, for £5.99. T-shirts are available for a tenner, showing a picture of the scoreboard at the final whistle. Or for £25 you could buy a framed photograph of Freddy Eastwood’s goal, signed by the man himself.

  Eastwood isn’t talking about it though. Richard Rae, one of the Guardian’s football writers, tracked him down in Essex but was turned away from his gypsy site by a woman who swore more than Billy Connolly. A couple of kids with BMXs and muddy knees confirmed he was at the right place, but it didn’t seem worth hanging around. When the Guardian photographer turned up, a group of men piled into a flat-bed truck and chased their cars back on to the A127.

  For a lot of United supporters it’s history already. Southend was an embarrassment, there is no other way to describe it, but the Carling Cup is not a competition that captures their imagination. It is the Premiership, the FA Cup and the Champions League that matter this season and there is an impressive response from the players today.

  Blackburn away, with a howling gale and aggressive opponents, is the kind of game where any team with realistic aspirations of being champions has to stand up, fight and dig out a result. There is a question mark hanging over United but they dominate the game from the first minute to the last. Saha scores the winner and Ferguson has taken off his unhappy head, Worzel Gummidge-style, and replaced it with the happy one.

  GLASGOW

  20.11.06

  There is always a unique sense of occasion when an English team plays in Glasgow. United take on Celtic tomorrow, in a contest between Britain’s two biggest clubs, and when we see Ferguson today there is a boyish excitement in him. We can see it in his face and hear it in his voice. His eyes sparkle, never seeming to fix on anyone or anything, and his accent progressively gets more and more Scottish.

  When he comes into his press conference, at a hotel on the shores of Loch Lomond, he is smiling even before he lowers himself into his seat, scanning the room to pick out a few familiar faces and winking at a couple of his favourite reporters. He is looking forward to the game, United’s first-ever competitive fixture at Parkhead, and enjoying being back in the city where he grew up. But the first piece of news, he says, is that he plans to drop Paul Scholes because he once scored the winner for England against Scotland. For that, he deserves to be punished. Scholes is sat beside Ferguson, smiling politely, as this little comedy routine unfolds around him. Ferguson is sorry, he says, but Scholes has dug his own grave. He looks at his player with an expression of c’est la vie. If Scholes is going to upset so many great people, he has nobody to blame but himself.

  Ferguson is in full flow when, mid-sentence, someone’s phone goes off. It is one of those bloody awful ring-tones – Gary Numan or something – and nine times out of ten an interruption like that would genuinely annoy him. Instead, he simply tuts with mock outrage, shaking his head in an exaggerated fashion, as if to say: ‘Tch, kids today.’ He sighs theatrically, playing up to the cameras, and then his shoulders are jigging up and down with laughter.

  ‘You … un … professional … so … and … sos.’

  Ferguson, it seems to us, is always on good form when there are Scottish reporters around, always that little bit happier in their company, as if it takes him on a nostalgic trip down memory lane.

  Some of the Scots came down to Carrington for his last briefing and he made sure he put on a good performance. He talked about his days at Aberdeen, where he was the manager from 1978 to 1986, and the pride he had taken in breaking the Old Firm’s hegemony, winning three league titles, three Scottish Cups and, in 1983, the European Cup Winners’ Cup. He spoke about the atmosphere we should anticipate at Celtic Park and the passion of the Scottish supporters. He wondered whether it was something they put in the porridge.

  Then his eyes l
it up and he picked out someone in the front row. ‘Christ almighty,’ he spluttered, ‘you’re going grey!’

  ‘Anyone would go bloody grey coming here to see you,’ came the reply. Ferguson hooted with appreciative laughter.

  The Scottish reporters tend to subscribe to the theory that he has mellowed with age, that his fuse was a lot shorter when he was managing north of the border.

  At Aberdeen his closest friends included newspapermen such as Jim ‘Scoop’ Rodger of the Scottish Mirror and Glenn Gibbons of the Scotsman. But he also had a little black book in which he kept track of how often the Glasgow-based journalists failed to make the 300-mile round trip to his press conferences, making a note whenever they chose to go to Celtic or Rangers instead. He would turn on them if he hadn’t seen them for three or four weeks and accuse them of snubbing his club and being biased towards the Old Firm. ‘They don’t want to come to Aberdeen,’ he would tell his players. ‘They think they’re a superior people down in Glasgow.’

  Back then, his nickname among his players was ‘Furious Fergie’, eventually shortened to just ‘Furious’. And the stories of his temper are legend.

  One favourite is of the time a player turned up for training with a perm. Ferguson, a short-back-and-sides man even in the era of Slade and Marc Bolan, made him wear a balaclava, telling him never to report to the club again in such a bloody awful state.

  Gordon Strachan tells a story, from the 1986 World Cup finals, about not being able to sleep in the team’s hotel in Mexico City. Not because of the humidity, or mosquitoes, but because he was in the next room to Ferguson – Scotland’s interim manager after the death of Jock Stein – and was so in awe of him that he would lie awake at night listening to his nervous cough through the wall. Strachan, now manager of Celtic, has a long and occasionally acrimonious history with Ferguson going back to the days when he played for him at Aberdeen. He remembers that Ferguson ‘put the fear of death into players’. In one dressing-room rage he kicked the laundry basket with such force that a pair of pants catapulted through the air, landing on the head of one of Strachan’s team-mates. Ferguson didn’t even notice until he had stopped blowing his top. Then he looked up and exploded again. ‘And you can take those fucking pants off your head. What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’