The laughter takes the sting out of the air and the rest of the press conference is a light-hearted affair. But this is a huge story for the newspapers – the first time Mourinho has properly felt the lash of Ferguson’s tongue in his three seasons in England – and there is more to come when Ferguson sits down in front of the MUTV cameras.
‘I don’t know what the matter is with the lad,’ he says, and his use of the word ‘lad’ is a brilliantly subtle putdown. ‘He just seems to be having a go at everybody. He has questioned the regulations. He has questioned the referees’ integrity. He has questioned Liverpool’s integrity. And when you think about the history that Liverpool Football Club have got, Chelsea don’t even compare.
‘You just can’t go around saying these things all the time. But it tells you he has no respect for UEFA or anyone else but himself. To suggest we are changing the regulations is bringing a suspicion into the game that we are corrupt. Which is one hell of a statement to make. You bring that kind of suspicion into our game, which is the most honest in the world, and we’re finished, all the principles are gone.’
AHCUMFIGOVIN
1.5.07
The more we see of Mourinho the more it seems he is auditioning for Monty Python’s Silly Party. His response to Ferguson’s onslaught is that he doesn’t want to fall out with someone he admires, but he is still irritated by Ronaldo and describes him as having had a ‘difficult childhood’ and ‘no education’. It is an astonishing thing to say and Mourinho is on very thin ice. He has been getting increasingly personal and it is obvious a mindset exists at Stamford Bridge, perhaps because of their wealth, where they believe they should be able to say what they want, when they want, and get away with it. It is a dangerous way to live because, in football, you can light only so many fires before you torch yourself.
Mourinho has been talking about winning a Quadruple, but at the weekend Chelsea’s hopes of catching United all but evaporated with a 2-2 draw at home to Bolton Wanderers. It was a critical slip-up. They are five points behind with three games to play and their misery is exacerbated tonight in the second leg of their Champions League semi-final against Liverpool. The tie finishes 1-1 on aggregate and after extra-time it comes down to penalties. Liverpool go through and Mourinho looks as down at the final whistle as at any time since he came to Stamford Bridge. If he were Basil Fawlty – and sometimes it’s a close-run thing – this is the point where he would be reaching for the shrapnel wound in his knee.
United’s return leg against Milan is in the San Siro tomorrow night and when we asked Ferguson which team out of Liverpool or Chelsea he would like to face in the final he wouldn’t be drawn. He didn’t want to offend anyone or look overly presumptuous about reaching the final. ‘I’ll take anybody,’ he said. ‘I’ll play the Glenbuck Cherrypickers if I have to.’
We looked collectively blank and his eyes lit up.
‘Oh, come on, who are the Glenbuck Cherrypickers?’
Tim Rich of the Daily Telegraph was the only reporter who had heard of them.
‘They were Bill Shankly’s old village team.’
‘Correct,’ Ferguson yelped. ‘And what was a cherrypicker?’
‘Was it a hoist?’
‘A hoist?’ he exclaimed, shaking his head. ‘No, son, a cherrypicker used to stand at the top of the mineshaft and take the stones out of the coal.’
He looked thoroughly pleased with himself. ‘Education,’ he said delightedly, ‘it’s quite cheap, you know.’
He was in a genial mood when we arrived at Malpensa airport. While Chelsea were drawing with Bolton at the weekend, United came back from 2-0 down at fifth-placed Everton to score four goals in the last half an hour. It was another comeback of staggering proportions and at the final whistle we were treated to the sight of Ferguson cavorting on the pitch, jumping into Ronaldo’s arms and doing a theatrical ‘cut’ sign with his arms, as if to signify that it was all over. He promised the Bolton manager Sam Allardyce ‘two kisses and a cuddle’, which was a rather scary thought, but he still had Mourinho in his sights and turned on him again.
‘What he has said about Cristiano is below the belt,’ he said. ‘To bring class into it is totally wrong. Maybe his tactic is to try to unsettle the boy but he is barking up the wrong tree. It is below the belt. Very below the belt.’
His words are almost spat out. ‘Coming from a poor background does not mean you are uneducated and it does not mean you have no principles,’ he continued. Ferguson is so proud of his working-class roots in Glasgow he has a sign on his office wall reading ‘AHCUMFIGOVIN’ – i.e. ‘I come from Govan’. If there is one thing guaranteed to rile him it is snobbery, particularly when the offender comes from within his own sport. ‘The difference,’ he says, summoning one of his more devastating put-downs, ‘is that there are people from very poor backgrounds who have principles, whereas there are people who are educated but who have no principles at all – and that, without question, is the case here.’
REALITY CHECK
2.5.07
Milan 3
Manchester United 0
Champions League semi-final, second leg
Milan win 5-3 on aggregate
The music stops tonight. Ever since the demolition of AS Roma Ferguson has allowed himself to believe it was possible to win another Treble, and the disappointment is brutal, to say the least. The Champions League has conjured up some of his finer memories from his twenty years at the club but it has also left many scars and there can be few more chastening experiences than this master-class in the art of retaining possession. Milan’s is a symphony of brilliant forward play and suddenly, horribly, United revert to looking more than one level shy of greatness. They have come a long way in the seventeen months since they were knocked out against Benfica last season, but not quite far enough, and an audience with Ferguson is a melancholic experience. ‘I expected better,’ he says. ‘I really expected better.’
His words are delivered with unmistakable sadness. The Premiership might be the priority this season but Ferguson’s life in management has been dedicated to chasing the European Cup and here he is, eight years since the Treble, the most prolific British manager in history but still nowhere closer to winning the competition for a second time to secure his place in European terms alongside Clough, and put him only one behind Paisley.
The disappointment has to be put in context, and the United fans in the top tier of the San Siro can remind themselves that their team could be champions of England after the next round of Premiership fixtures. Nonetheless, everything has been going so well recently that tonight feels like a jolt to the system. Ferguson could be toasting his ninth title if United beat Manchester City in their next game and Chelsea fail to win at Arsenal but here, in torrential rain, soaked to the skin and with his hair flattened to his forehead, there is only the deepest form of despair.
Ferguson, it should never be forgotten, has accumulated more trophies than any other British football manager, past and present. Yet under his management the biggest club on the planet have reached only one European Cup final in twenty years. And tonight, as Kaka, Gattuso and Clarence Seedorf produce a level of football beyond the scope of Rooney, Carrick and Scholes, it is tempting to wonder whether the European dynasty Ferguson was so desperate to forge will ever materialise. Or whether we are kidding ourselves when we keep saying ‘next year’.
Maybe in the warm afterglow of a ninth championship it will not matter so much but Ferguson’s pathological desire is to win and it will not have escaped his attention that when United last played at Anfield the Liverpool supporters in the Kop stretched out a banner, over thirty feet long, mocking his record in Europe compared to Paisley’s.
Paisley 3 Ferguson 1
Nottingham Forest’s supporters also derive a wicked sense of pleasure from the fact Ferguson has never been able to emulate Clough’s achievements in the European Cup. Clough won it twice, in 1979 and 1980, and in his inimitable way he was never slow to let the football
world know of the disparity. ‘For all his horses, knighthoods and championships,’ he once said, ‘Alex hasn’t got two of what I’ve got … and I don’t mean balls.’
Ferguson never thought that worthy of a response – his relationship with Clough was never better than lukewarm – but there is one of Clough’s maxims with which he will empathise. ‘You win something once and people can say it’s all down to luck,’ Clough used to say. ‘You win it twice and it shuts the buggers up.’
Winning the league will be much more than a consolation prize but Ferguson sets his own standards and he has never hidden the fact it would be a permanent regret if the Nou Camp were to be a one-hit wonder. The European Cup, he says, is the pinnacle of his ambitions and no season passes by without him expressing sorrow that he has delivered it to Old Trafford only once before. ‘We should have done better,’ he will say. ‘We have consistently qualified for the quarters and the semis but we haven’t won enough trophies in Europe. Real Madrid have won it nine times, Milan have won it six times and then there are clubs like Bayern Munich, Liverpool and Ajax who have all won it four or five times. For a club like ours, we should definitely have won it more than we have.’
There is nothing much more he can add tonight but the words that do come are nearly all gracious. He talks of his side running out of legs. He pays tribute to Milan and he accepts they were the fresher, slicker, more enterprising team. What he might also say, however, is that in the single most important match of United’s season his most lauded players, the A-listers, went missing. All season we have speculated about this side being on the cusp of greatness but when we see the way Milan pass the ball maybe we should reassess what the term ‘greatness’ means.
At his press conference yesterday he seemed to be jotting something down and when we looked afterwards there was a piece of paper on his table with the words: ‘Milan 1 Man Utd 2’. We couldn’t be sure he had written it himself – it does not feel very Ferguson like – but tonight, amid a backdrop of theatrical thunderclaps, it quickly becomes clear that whoever did was guilty of gross over-confidence. The first goal comes after eleven minutes, the second after half an hour and Ferguson has made a calamitous blunder by recalling Vidic to defence. Vidic, a broken-nosed type of centre-half, has been marvellous all season, the steel to Ferdinand’s silk. ‘He comes from Serbia,’ the song goes, ‘he’ll fucking murder ya’ and in the context of trench warfare he would always be on the frontline while others are licking stamps back at HQ. But it is only four weeks since he broke his collarbone and the initial estimate was that he would be out until the FA Cup final in three weeks’ time. His reactions are ponderous, to say the least, as Kaka drills in the first and it is his mistake that leads to Seedorf doubling the lead.
At 2-0, the mind goes back to United’s semi-final against Juventus at the Stade delle Alpi in 1999. Then, like now, United were rocked by two early goals, only for Keane – having picked up a yellow card that would rule him out of the final – to inspire a three-goal comeback with a performance Ferguson later described as ‘the most emphatic display of selflessness I have ever seen on a football field’. Now, eight years on, United need another Keane, someone to inspire and cajole and take the game to the Italians. But no one steps forward. Carrick and Scholes allow the game to pass them by. Rooney and Giggs stay on the edges. Ronaldo, the best player in the Premiership, disappears. Milan are more confident on the ball: Kaka, Gattuso, Pirlo and Seedorf bossing midfield, pounding every blade of grass. Gattuso goes in so hard on Fletcher he loses a shin-pad although, tellingly, not the ball. Later on, he tackles Ronaldo, wins possession again and triumphantly punches the air. Alberto Gilardino scores the third with twelve minutes to go and when we check our notes at the final whistle we cannot find one occasion when United have forced Dida into a truly testing save. It is a drubbing.
When Ferguson walks into the pressroom the television is showing Liverpool’s goals from the 2005 final. He resists the temptation to put his foot through the screen and he faces the truth with dignity. His team simply could not cope, he says. His demeanour is as bleak as we have seen all season and he accepts what everybody already knows: they have been outclassed. ‘We’re obviously disappointed,’ he says. ‘Having done so well to get here, I have to say we never came out of the blocks. We lost two goals very cheaply and at this level you just can’t do that. You have to defend much better.’
For Ferguson, that fierce protector of his own, this is unusually forthright criticism. ‘We needed to see through the opening twenty-five minutes without cutting our own throats but both goals were very cheap,’ he continues. ‘We shouldn’t be losing goals like that. In credit to Milan, they were very well prepared for the game. They were much sharper to the ball, pressing us very well. But I still expected more from my team. The name of the game in Europe is don’t give the ball away. Unfortunately we did give the ball away. Milan kept the ball far better than us.’
He is gracious and dignified, but mostly he is just despondent, and there is a sympathetic tone to our questions. The Italians, however, are not so sensitive and there is a brief interrogation in which they want to know whether a) the Champions League is ‘too big’ for Rooney and Ronaldo and b) why the team is so perennially ‘unsuccessful’ in Europe. ‘What do Manchester United lack in the Champions League?’ one reporter asks. ‘You always arrive at the semi-final or the quarter-final, but what do you lack? What do you need to become a team as great as Milan?’
Ferguson doesn’t properly address the second part of the question but when he dissects the performances of Rooney and Ronaldo it is unusual to hear him accepting criticism of his players. ‘They have had a disappointing night,’ he agrees. ‘Wayne did okay but Cristiano had a disappointing night, and he knows it. They’re still young, still improving, and when you see the professionalism and experience in the Milan side it’s a good indicator of where we want to be. But that doesn’t apply just to Rooney and Ronaldo. It applies to all the players.’
There is, he points out, still a league title to be won but when we next see him, in the departure lounge at the airport, he is sat in silence with his hands in his pockets, clearly suffering.
CHAMPIONS OF ENGLAND
7.5.07
United beat City 1-0. Chelsea drew 1-1 at Arsenal and, finger by finger, Jose Mourinho’s grasp has been prised off the Premiership trophy. It has been an epic battle but Chelsea have finally waved the white flag and Ferguson sheepishly admits he has a ‘fuzzy’ head when we see him today. He spent last night celebrating with family and friends in Wilmslow and, live on Sky Sports, he managed to spill champagne down his trousers in his excitement. He was meant to be popping it open in the style of a Grand Prix champion but drenched himself instead. True to form, he found it hilarious.
There are television cameramen waiting for him in the car park at Carrington. He has agreed to a one-off press conference and they follow him through the double doors and up the winding stairs, and when he gets to the top something happens that has never happened here before.
It is applause – a standing ovation, no less – and it is long and respectful and thoroughly deserved. When the clapping dies down Ferguson puts his hands out and does the old Tommy Cooper joke: ‘Who told you to stop?’ So the clapping starts again. And when Diana Law comes up the stairs he starts another round of applause just for her. Clapping with the rest of us and jigging with laughter.
His cheeks are glowing as he goes around the room, shaking hands, patting a couple of his favourites on the back, and then something else happens that has never happened here. He orders us champagne. ‘There’s a big bottle of bubbly in my office,’ he calls over to one of the press officers. ‘Send someone over. There are some plastic glasses here (pointing at the coffee machine) so let’s get a drink for these boys.’ And in the rows of seats, we are looking at ourselves, thinking: ‘Bloody hell!’
The next hour is slightly surreal: sipping champagne from supermarket cups, reminiscing over the last couple of ye
ars and sharing a little piece of the glory with a man who, this time eighteen months ago, was unanimously rejected as a dead man walking.
One thing is for certain: never again will anyone in this room doubt Ferguson’s capacity for battle nor suggest that age has warped his talents. Never again will we leave ourselves in a position where, genuinely, it would not be inappropriate for one of us to tug on his arm and say: ‘Jesus, Alex, we got it wrong, didn’t we?’
He seems to sense our embarrassment. ‘You lot are so bad,’ he says. ‘You really aren’t the best judges, are you?’
He starts to laugh as he chides us for having ever dared to question him. ‘Don’t worry, I know you were forced into it by your idiots of editors. And I know you won’t report that! Because if you do, they might just ask if you agree …’
We cannot help but feel slightly sheepish as we ask whether he was badly affected by the criticism. ‘Listen,’ he replies, ‘I’m experienced enough to know it is the name of the game. If you are not doing well at this club, you are going to get criticism. But there’s no point taking it personally.’
It feels a little incongruous to point out he has, in fact, spent the last twenty years taking criticism personally. What we are witnessing here is Ferguson at his very best, holding court, making a mockery of all those claims that he had passed his best-before date. ‘Even when we got knocked out against Benfica I felt that if we stuck together we would develop into a really good team,’ he says. ‘We made our decisions. Then it was just a case of sticking together. We looked at the squad, we knew there was enough youth and certainly enough ability. What we tried to instil in the players’ minds was that we had to get a good start. For the previous two seasons nobody went with Chelsea early on and they had a clear run. We felt we could be there with them. But we did better than that. We managed to stay in front of them. Which was not easy because Chelsea were chasing all the time.’
This is the One: Sir Alex Ferguson: The Uncut Story of a Football Genius Page 27
