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

by Daniel Taylor

  United We Stand is equally effusive. ‘The reason Ferguson’s ninth title win is so satisfying is because it was so unexpected. The consensus was that Ferguson’s logic seemed flawed. The Manchester Evening News told us that United would be going for Kaka, Gattuso and Patrick Vieira. Instead, we sold Van Nistelrooy, bought Michael Carrick and a new reserve keeper. Ronaldo’s Old Trafford future was questioned and Ferguson’s assertion that United could win the league seemed delusional. What happened next was staggering.’

  The front cover has the simple headline: ‘Champions’. On Red Issue there is a photograph of Ferguson holding the Premiership trophy. ‘I’ve got my hands full here, Jose,’ says the speech bubble. ‘Can you grab the polish?’

  ONE GAME TOO FAR

  19.5.07

  Chelsea 1

  Manchester United 0

  (after extra time)

  FA Cup final

  The first FA Cup final at the new Wembley. The stadium looks fantastic, its arch forming a giant Alice band on the London skyline, but United came here to win a trophy rather than admire the view and it is a dreadfully flat way to end the season. Wembley might be pleasing on the eye but there is one rule that has always applied to this stadium: it is impossible to enjoy unless you win.

  For the Chelsea supporters the memories will be cherished, from Drogba’s Cossack dancing in the post-match celebrations to Mourinho sticking up his fingers at Abramovich and the rest of the football world. Not two, but six – for each trophy he has won in his three seasons at Stamford Bridge. For the neutral it is a complete stinker of a match: 120 minutes of dreary, risk-free football. And for Ferguson it is his idea of hell: watching John Terry collect the trophy from Prince William, gritting his teeth as Mourinho goes on one of those fist-pumping touchline dashes, looking away as Lampard throws his shin-pads into the crowd and, all the time, knowing he has been tactically out-manoeuvred. It is a mixture of anti-climax, profound sadness and, above all, helplessness, and at the final whistle he doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself. Mostly, he wanders between his players, his hands in his pockets, saying very little.

  The Premiership matters much more than the FA Cup, of course, and when he and Cathy reach the French Riviera he should not torture himself too much with what might have been. Nonetheless, it is a gruelling experience, full of regret and what-ifs. The players look tired. It has been an arduous season. The pitch is spongy, speed-destroying and energy-sapping, and when the game kicks off United spend the first few minutes warily passing the ball around inside their own half, simply trying to get the measure of the surface. When Chelsea get possession they do exactly the same and the pattern is set. Slow starts are as traditional at cup finals as the crowd singing Abide With Me and booing the FA’s dignitaries but today, in this pristine stadium, it lasts for the opening forty-minutes. The first half has all the drama of someone blowing out a candle at bedtime.

  The standard improves as the game goes on but the surface is dead and Mourinho’s tactics are gratuitously designed to suffocate United. Outplaying United on the day football returned to Wembley would have created a legacy of young supporters around the world. But they don’t even try. ‘On our first day this week,’ he later reveals, ‘I asked the players: “do you want to enjoy the game, or do you want to enjoy after the game?” They said they wanted to enjoy after the game.’ In other words, do you want to contribute to a pretty game or do you want to win ugly? Mourinho ordered his players to double up on Ronaldo and keep a ‘minimum of six players’ behind the ball at all times. ‘People say United are a very dominant team but I don’t agree,’ he explains. ‘They are a team that kills opponents on the counter-attack so, first of all, don’t let them counter-attack.’ And there lies the Mourinho philosophy: controlled power, tight discipline and won matches.

  It is not entertaining but it is staggeringly effective. Football, to Mourinho, is an art – though not in the sense that a high-minded aesthetician such as Ferguson could ever comprehend – and his instructions pay off four minutes from the end of extra-time. An exchange of passes between Lampard and Drogba to create space, poor anticipation from Ferdinand and a split-second delay as Van der Sar leaves his line. The pause is long enough for Drogba to reach the ball first and clip his shot into the bottom corner. It is the goal that rescues Chelsea’s season and ensures Mourinho is in effect unsackable for another year. Ferguson has already brought on Solskjaer, anticipating a penalty shoot-out. There is no time to do anything and they fail to create a single half-chance before the final whistle goes. It is a dreadful way to lose.

  There are cinemas in Manchester that are smaller than Wembley’s ‘media theatre’ and when Ferguson arrives the red rose on his suit has already been discarded. His disappointment is measured in calm tones. Two or three players under-performed, he says. Rooney and Scholes have run themselves into the ground but he is disappointed with Ronaldo and a few others. He thinks the team look fatigued and he isn’t surprised it has been such a poor spectacle. ‘I had the feeling that would be the case,’ he says. ‘Chelsea are not the type to go gung-ho against anyone. They make sure they don’t lose first of all.’

  There is a subtle dig in there somewhere. Ferguson and Mourinho have been careful not to say anything derogatory about one another in the build-up to this game. But Mourinho doesn’t shake Ferguson’s hand at the final whistle. Ferguson will not have liked that and he also thinks Mourinho’s complaints about United’s penalty count have worked to Chelsea’s advantage. He is convinced United should have had a penalty – in the first period of extra time Michael Essien clipped Giggs’s heels as he shaped to shoot – and he believes the referee Steve Bennett was intimidated into not giving it.

  ‘It’s the same theme with Mourinho all the time,’ he says. ‘He puts the referees under pressure before every big game. There are twenty-two great players out there but all he ever talks about is the referee. That’s the way he is. Maybe it has worked for him today because I was disappointed with the referee, I must say. For an FA Cup final I expected better.’

  Bennett is not the kind of referee who thinks match officials should have to explain themselves to journalists. We knocked on his changing-room door after he had made a series of contentious decisions in a Manchester City match a few years ago. Bizarrely, he would not open the door by more than a couple of inches and insisted we wrote our questions on a piece of paper and put it beneath the door. Once we had done that, there was a five-minute wait before it was pushed back bearing single-word answers.

  It is at this point of the conference, anyway, that someone notices that the rose on Ferguson’s suit has disappeared and asks him where it has gone. ‘It’s lying in the dressing-room,’ he replies.

  Then he smiles for the first and only time. ‘Do you want it?’

  He is squinting to see who has asked the question. ‘We’ve lost and someone is talking about roses?’ he says. ‘Can I escape please?’ And on that note he rises to his feet and heads for the door. His hands are in his pockets – his hands always seem to be in his pockets when he is unhappy – but at least he is smiling.

  TAKING ON THE WORLD (PART II)

  In the Daily Telegraph, Tony Francis has called him The Man Who Can’t Retire. Gary Neville reckons it might be another ten years before Ferguson steps down. Ferguson is not saying and maybe doesn’t even know himself. The rest of us just have to guess. And hope that when the day finally arrives he is not denied a happy ending.

  The conventional path, at the age of sixty-five, would have been to walk away at the coronation of his ninth title, to bow out at the top and collect his gold clock for twenty years’ service. Except anyone who suggests that is showing a complete lack of understanding of what makes Ferguson tick. Football is the thing that makes sense of his life. It is an addiction. He has tried to fight it, but resistance is futile. Without football, the future looks blank and scary.

  He has tried the conventional route before and he hated it. He had planned to step down at the
end of the 2001–02 season, at the age of sixty. But life without football would feel like a prison sentence. ‘It was a mistake,’ he says. ‘As soon as I announced that decision I knew I was going to regret it. Spur of the moment, you see. You should never do things spur of the moment. A man of my age should have known better.’

  The story goes that Cathy kicked his feet as he was having a birthday nap and informed him she had been speaking to their three sons. ‘We’ve reached a decision,’ she told him. ‘I’ve had a chat with the boys and they think you’re off your head. Even if United have got a new manager you have to go elsewhere.’

  It is scarcely imaginable what could have come of United if Lady Ferguson hadn’t been so pro-active. ‘I needed someone to kick me,’ her husband admits. ‘I wouldn’t have done it myself.’ He was worried about having to ‘kowtow and say I’m sorry’ and United had already lined up Sven-Göran Eriksson to replace him. Ferguson’s first call was to the club’s legal director Maurice Watkins. ‘I told him I’d changed my mind and he went: “I knew it, I knew it. I told you that you were off your head. Now you have dropped me right in it.’‘’

  Five years on, he has added two league titles, an FA Cup and a League Cup to his collection. As he looks to the future, the thought of retirement seems to alarm him more than the prospect of Abramovich bringing in another batch of the world’s most ostentatiously extravagant players. Ferguson has given his life, and measured it out, in terms of football. How else would he get his kicks? What else is there? Playing the piano? Reading books on wine?

  The answer is nothing, but he is going to have to cut himself free one day. Retirement isn’t something he can file away in a drawer. And here is the milliondollar question. How will he make his retreat? The sporting world is full of heroic figures who have badly blundered when it comes to deciding how, and when, to make the break. The stories are legion of managers finding that without the exoskeleton of football their lives become shapeless and empty. Ferguson must never allow his name to be added to the list.

  Most managers live on borrowed time, knowing they will eventually be moved on. But in Ferguson’s case he has won so much and done so much he is in the rare position where he can choose his own day of departure. And that, perhaps, is the hardest bit.

  It is certainly not something he likes to talk about. Ask Ferguson about his plans for retirement and he will usually fudge the question, change the subject or make a joke of it.

  ‘I don’t want to go anywhere,’ he told us on one of the last occasions. ‘I’m enjoying the company of you gentlemen too much.’

  Then he turned to Diana Law and gulped with laughter. ‘Di,’ he said, ‘mark me down as the liar of the year.’

  Pressed further, all he will say is that he wants to carry on for as long as he is a) happy and b) healthy. He is energised and enthusiastic. He is still as sharp as a pin and losing the FA Cup final will only harden his resolve. Between them, Abramovich and Mourinho have provided a unique challenge but it has slowly brought the best out of Ferguson. ‘Why should I retire?’ he argues. ‘That’s the easy option. I don’t know how long exactly I’m going to last but I’m enjoying it and I’m going to carry on doing this job until I stop enjoying it.’

  The only time he has allegedly considered quitting in recent years came after everything had blown up with Keane. Sir Bobby Robson tells the story of visiting Ferguson at home in Wilmslow in late-November 2005, with United ten points behind Chelsea and the newspapers full of crisis headlines, and being dismayed to find his friend at such a low ebb. Ferguson, he says, was in a bad way, thinking about the future, and confided that he was considering ‘packing it in’.

  ‘I was almost angry with him,’ Robson recalls. ‘First, I demanded to know what the heck he was going to do instead. Secondly, I asked him, having worked so hard to build a great club and a great young team, why would he want to hand it over to someone else and risk it being spoiled?’

  Robson managed to talk him round but Ferguson is clearly not as immune to the pressure as we all assume. It may have been only a passing phase, a bad day or a spur-of-the-moment thought, but maybe the tumultuous start to that season, Keane’s expulsion, Chelsea’s dominance and the added pressure of the Glazer takeover affected him more than we will ever know. Everyone has their bad days and their low moments.

  The pressure in football is so suffocatingly draining there is a trend in the modern game for managers to take gap years. Gordon Strachan and Alan Curbishley have both stepped away from the dugout for a breather and when Paul Jewell left Wigan Athletic he was so emotionally wrecked his chairman Dave Whelan spoke of fearing for ‘his health and mind’. But here is Ferguson, a generation older than Jewell and still going strong. Shankly left Anfield at the age of sixty. Clough, his face ravaged by the excesses of drink, bid farewell to management at fifty-eight. Paisley lasted until he was sixty-four and Busby closed his reign at Old Trafford when he was sixtytwo. When the arguments start about who is the greatest manager of all, nobody should forget how Ferguson has beaten the system.

  When the act of retirement finally comes the lesson of history is that he must make a clean break. The old-timers at Old Trafford still remember the problems when Busby stepped down in 1969 but stayed on as general manager and then director. They talk about how quickly the team deteriorated and how his replacement, Wilf McGuinness, found it too tough an act to follow, lasting only eight months before being sacked. ‘I thought I would be given the time to do a good job,’ McGuinness recalls. ‘But at Manchester United you live in a fairytale world. Everything is beautiful until it isn’t.’

  Busby returned as manager for another six months before handing over to Frank O’Farrell, who was never accepted by the senior players. Probably because he wasn’t Busby. O’Farrell says the jury had been sent out before he had sufficient time to present his case, and the verdict was ‘guilty of not producing a miracle in eighteen months’. United did not win the league again until Ferguson’s first title in 1993.

  For us – the football writers – there will be a strange sense of loss when Ferguson does finally pack it in. Life will be a lot duller without him. He is not a hero of ours, exactly, but we all admire him in different ways and he will probably be fully appreciated only when he is no longer around. Of course he can be infuriating but he would say the same about us as well and, having put the 2005–06 season behind us, he has almost become cuddly at times in his ninth championship-winning year.

  An educated guess is that Ferguson has two more seasons left in him. But it would be no surprise if he were still in the dugout at the age of seventy. Or maybe Neville’s correct and Ferguson will still be haranguing journalists, referees and opposition managers as a white-haired geriatric in 2017. Life at Old Trafford might be an emotional rollercoaster but Ferguson will forever be the boy in the front seat, his arms in the sky and a huge grin on his face, asking to go around one more time.

  This is the One

  Daniel Taylor has covered Manchester United for the Guardian since 1998, and lives in south Manchester with his wife Zoe. This is his second football book, following on from the critically acclaimed Deep into the Forest. He has also written a second book about Ferguson, Squeaky Bum Time – The Wit and Wisdom (& Hairdryer) of Sir Alex Ferguson.

  Index

  Aberdeen (1), (2), (3)

  Abramovich, Roman (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), (9)

  AC Milan (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  v Manchester United (1), (2), (3)

  Allardyce, Sam (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  Alonso, Xabi (1)

  Anderson, Dave (1), (2), (3)

  Anthony, Paul (1), (2), (3), (4)

  Argentina (1)

  Arlott, John (1)

  Armfield, Jimmy (1)

  Arnesen, Frank (1), (2)

  Arsenal (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8)

  trophies (1)

  v Chelsea (1), (2), (3), (4)

  v Manchester United (1), (2), (3)

&nbs
p; v Wrexham (1)

  AS Roma (1), (2)

  v Manchester United (1), (2)

  Atkinson, Ron (1)

  Attenborough, David (1)

  Ball, Alan (1)

  Ballack, Michael (1), (2), (3)

  Barcelona (1), (2), (3)

  v Chelsea (1)

  Baresi, Franco (1)

  Barnet, v Manchester United (1)

  Barton, Joey 25 Barwick, Brian (1), (2)

  Bates, Matthew (1)

  Batt, Peter (1)

  Bayer Leverkusen (1)

  Bayern Munich (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8)

  v Manchester United (1), (2)

  BBC, AF’s feud with (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Bean, John (1)

  Beccantini, Roberto (1)

  Becker, Boris (1)

  Beckham, David (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7)

  Bellion, David (1)

  Ben Haim, Taib (1), (2)

  Benfica (1), (2), (3)

  v Manchester United (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Benitez, Rafael (1), (2), (3), (4)

  Bennett, Steve (1), (2)

  Bent, Darren (1)

  Bergkamp, Dennis (1)

  Berry, Nick (1)

  Besiktas (1)

  Best, George (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

  Birmingham City (1)

  v Manchester United (1)

  Blackburn Rovers (1), (2)

  v Chelsea (1)

  v Manchester United (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8)

  Blair, Cherie (1)

  Bolton Wanderers (1)

  v Chelsea (1), (2)

  v Manchester United (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6)

  Boothroyd, Adrian (1)