Ferguson’s rejects had become a useful source of income to United. The youth ranks were producing players who, though not up to United’s requirements, would have respectable careers elsewhere. John O’Kane had gone for £400,000 a couple of years back. Curtis was to fetch £1.5 million and Mulryne £500,000. Terry Cooke went for £1 million and Chris Casper, of the golden generation, £300,000. And so it was to go on: among the hopefuls at Old Trafford or on loan to Royal Antwerp, with whom United had an understanding, in the 1998/9 season were David Healy, Danny Higginbotham and Ronnie Wallwork, all of whom were to play in the Premier League for other clubs. Higginbotham went for £2 million and Healy £1.5 million (Wallwork took advantage of the Bosman ruling, let his contract expire and went for no fee) and several others raised tidy sums.
Ferguson’s reserves got past Bury and Nottingham Forest before losing in the quarter-finals at Tottenham. The first team reacted to a slap in the face at Highbury, where Wenger’s Arsenal won 3–0 in September, by losing only two more matches all season. Both were in the League. They lost at Sheffield Wednesday in November and at home to Middlesbrough just before Christmas. At that stage Villa had been leaders for most of the season, but Gregory’s boys lost at Blackburn on Boxing Day, conceding top spot to Chelsea, who were then overtaken by United at the end of January.
By now United were in the FA Cup’s fifth round, having beaten Middlesbrough and Liverpool, each at Old Trafford and the latter in thrilling style, very late goals by Yorke and Solskjær outweighing an early one from Michael Owen. They were again drawn at home to Fulham, and then Chelsea, who forced a scoreless draw but were knocked out at Stamford Bridge, where Yorke scored twice without reply. This was on 10 March. The semi-final was to be against Arsenal – you could not accuse United of having it easy on this run – at Villa Park on 11 April. In the meantime, they had to deal with not only Newcastle, Everton and Wimbledon but two of Italy’s leading clubs. This was getting serious.
The European campaign had begun quietly with a 2-0 aggregate win over ŁKS Łódź, of Poland (only the champions, Arsenal, were exempted from qualifying), and quickly become very exciting indeed. The opening group match was the first of two 3-3 draws with Barcelona, for whom Rivaldo was outstanding in both matches. The high-scoring theme was maintained against Schmeichel’s old club, Brøndby, who were beaten 5-2 in Denmark and 5-0 at Old Trafford, and there were draws with Bayern, 2-2 in Munich and then, in the final group match, 1-1. By then Barcelona knew that their failure to win their home match with United meant no further progress, no chance of reaching the final at their own Camp Nou.
United then faced the first of their confrontations with the Italians. The wonderful flank play of Beckham and Giggs set up a 2-0 victory in the home leg against Inter, with Yorke again getting both goals, and the quality of the performance convinced Ferguson that his team were ready to cross the final frontier. Although Nicola Ventola pegged them back at San Siro, Paul Scholes’s late goal relieved any anxieties that the match might go to extra time. Again United had been comfortable in coping with high-class opposition; the performances were stacking up. Then, just before the famous FA Cup semi-final, came the next stage of the Italian challenge.
To Ferguson it must have felt like a remake of High Noon: his team against Lippi’s for a place in the final. Midway through the first half at Old Trafford, Antonio Conte struck and until the ninetieth minute it seemed the away goal would be the only one. Then Ryan Giggs gave United the encouragement they so desperately needed.
They had quickly to reset their minds to the FA Cup, for Villa Park loomed. There they drew goallessly with Arsenal, who had Nelson Vivas sent off, and so had to go back three days later.
With big matches coming thick and fast, Ferguson changed his team, starting with Sheringham and Solskjær up front and Jesper Blomqvist on the wing in place of Giggs, who sat with Yorke on the bench. Beckham, with a swerving drive, put United ahead, but the match seemed to be drifting away from them when first Dennis Bergkamp equalised and then Keane was shown a second yellow card and sent off. United held out until stoppage time, when Phil Neville brought down Ray Parlour, conceding a penalty. Bergkamp took it, Schmeichel saved. Still Arsenal appeared the likelier winners.
Then Patrick Vieira, with the most wayward of passes, inadvertently picked out Giggs, who was on for Blomqvist. It was the 110th minute but, for Giggs, only the forty-ninth and his relative freshness was used to devastating effect. He started to run. With a faint sidestep he evaded Vieira’s gesture of a challenge. He also went outside Lee Dixon before cutting back in, drawing Dixon and Martin Keown together and spurting between them into the penalty area, where Tony Adams hurtled across but was too late to block a rising drive whose sheer pace left David Seaman helpless as it zipped into the ceiling of the net.
Off came Giggs’s shirt, which was whirled above his head, and Ferguson, grinning, applauded as he strode towards his new assistant, Steve MClaren, who remained thoughtful, impassive, scanning the pitch, as if seeking to identify factors that might endanger the likelihood of Giggs’s being the conclusive goal, setting aside the irrelevance of its beauty. It was nevertheless one of the FA Cup’s most memorable. And a significant moment in United’s history. ‘After it,’ Schmeichel was to declare in his reflections on an extraordinary multiple climax, ‘we felt invincible.’ By the time Ferguson faced Gary Newbon for the post-match interview on ITV, his task was to dampen euphoria. ‘Look, Gary,’ he said. ‘It could all blow up in our faces at the end of the day.’ Fans and players alike would be talking about this event for many years. But all it had done was put something in the bank. ‘We’re in the final. Now let’s go and win this League.’ There were seven matches left and United won the first, 3-0 against Sheffield Wednesday at Old Trafford, before heading for Turin and the most fanciful element, surely, of the treble quest.
Juventus, after all, clearly knew how to get to finals; they had been in the last three. They had conceded only eight goals in nine matches. They oozed class; Didier Deschamps and the incomparable Zidane had won the World Cup with France less than a year before. And, if there was any doubt that they had a cutting edge too, Pippo Inzaghi removed it by scoring twice in the first ten minutes at the Stadio delle Alpi.
So was that it for another year? But for Roy Keane’s finest hour, it probably would have been. It was in the twenty-fourth minute that Keane raged in to meet a Beckham corner and send a glancing header wide of Angelo Peruzzi. It was in the thirty-fourth that Yorke nodded Cole’s lofted pass out of the goalkeeper’s reach to put United ahead on away goals. And it was in the eighty-fourth, after both Yorke and Irwin had struck a post, that Yorke was brought down in the act of rounding Peruzzi but required no penalty kick because Cole was following up to score.
This time, Ferguson had Lippi beat. United were going back to Camp Nou for the final, and deservedly so. The only regrets were that both Keane and Scholes would be missing after collecting yellow cards in Turin.
A draw at Leeds on the Sunday left United behind Arsenal in the domestic rankings, but they had a match in hand and were to win it, at Middlesbrough through Yorke’s last goal of the season. His penultimate had given United the lead a few days earlier at Liverpool, but this match became turbulent and bitterly controversial: the nadir of Ferguson’s relationship with David Elleray, who left United with ten men after showing Denis Irwin a second yellow card for kicking away a ball that had run over the touchline.
Irwin had increased United’s lead with a penalty, but Jamie Redknapp, also from the spot, pulled a goal back and Paul Ince equalised near the end. Afterwards a fuming Ferguson said of Elleray in a televison interview: ‘We will not let this man deny us our title.’ More surprising to Elleray was the quip of his chairman. ‘Martin Edwards said that, if Arsenal won the title, they should give one of their medals to me,’ said Elleray, ‘and that led to the worst period of my career in refereeing, with death threats, police protection and eventually withdrawal from what would have been my last
match of the season.’
He admitted having forgotten the first yellow shown to Irwin, whom suspension was to rule out of the FA Cup final – but added that he would still have issued a second. ‘He’d kicked the ball forty yards. But I’d also given three penalties and when the match finished I was glad to see Bernie, the great policeman who used to look after the match officials at Anfield. He had this big old-fashioned truncheon, with all those nicks on it which I imagined came from cracking skulls around Toxteth, and he kept Ferguson away from me in the tunnel, which is very narrow at Anfield.
‘After that I had a really grim time. There was abuse in the street, telephone calls, hate mail. I think it was more because of what Martin said than Alex. But it was a combination.’
Elleray, who intertwined refereeing with his duties as a housemaster at Harrow School, was often portrayed as United’s (and therefore Ferguson’s) arch-enemy. Yet he spoke of pleasant encounters. ‘There’s a great contradiction with him. Once I did a match at Old Trafford and got there extremely early with my guest for the day, Bill Davis, who was the head of the Combined Cadet Force at Harrow. We ran into Alex three or four hours before the kick-off and I told him Bill was an avid United fan. ‘Fine,’ said Alex. ‘Just leave him to me.’ And he took this guy away and personally gave him an insider’s tour of the stadium. They were away nearly an hour.
‘Another time Alex was chief guest at the Independent Schools FA six-a-side tournament in Manchester. He was talking to all those schoolmasters about pressure on young players, and talking a lot of sense. He could just have turned up and spoken at the lunch but instead stayed for the whole tournament, right to the awards at the end, going round talking to the boys, having his photograph taken with them and generally being the diplomat par excellence.
‘Every time I’ve encountered him away from a match, I’ve been impressed. The analogy I’ve always used is with people who become very different when they get behind the wheel of a car. When he gets close to a match, he becomes a different person. How much of that is studied I’m not sure.’
We were speaking early in 2010, at a time when Ferguson appeared to be criticising referees every time United failed to win. He had attacked Alan Wiley’s fitness after Sunderland drew at Old Trafford, Chris Foy’s timekeeping when Leeds United pulled off a shock win there in the FA Cup and Mark Clattenburg’s perceived inconsistency in a drawn match at Birmingham; it was all bizarrely, even tediously, excessive. If Ferguson could behave so scornfully in public, how intimidating had he been in the privacy of a stadium’s bowels?
‘For me,’ said Elleray, ‘he was never as bad as the media made out. A lot of the ranting and raving after the match you could ignore. You get it from plenty of managers and you’re used to it. But Ferguson was quite clever and I think he was at his most dangerous at half-time. With a comment as you were coming off the field or going back out – to get into your brain for the second half.’
Such as? ‘A lot of the time he’d be complaining that you weren’t protecting his team. There would be something like “You need to get a grip on them [the opposition] – otherwise there’s going to be a problem.” I remember he had a go at me at the interval of that semi-final against Crystal Palace, for not protecting Keane. He’d been tackled and his foot was cut and it was made clear to me that he was going back out in not a very good mood.’ In the second half, Keane responded to another aggressive challenge with a stamp on Gareth Southgate that left Elleray with little room for discretion.
Elleray later heard a story about Ferguson: ‘Manchester United were playing at Chelsea and Alex was unhappy with the referee chosen for the game. When asked who he would like instead, Ferguson said “David Elleray”. On being told, “But you don’t like David Elleray!” he replied, “Whether I like him or not is immaterial – he protects my players.”’
Winning Plenty Without Kidd
Elleray was nevertheless in need of protection himself – and from threats of rather more than a cut foot in the fearful aftermath of Anfield – when United regained the leadership, so that victory over Tottenham at Old Trafford on the final day of the 1998/9 season would win them back the title. They won 2-1.
By now only the result mattered, but United’s performances had betrayed a jaded air that was understandable. There had been a tense and scoreless draw, for instance, at Blackburn, who were thereby relegated. Their manager was Brian Kidd, who had resigned as Ferguson’s assistant during the season.
Kidd’s replacement was Steve McClaren, who had built quite a reputation in a short time under Jim Smith at Derby County. McClaren was the ice-cool figure next to Ferguson amid the celebrations of Giggs’s winner at Villa Park. His first few months were certainly proving eventful.
Ferguson, in his autobiography, which was published towards the end of that year, at times referred gracelessly to Kidd. He acknowledged the high value of Kidd’s work for him at United, where the former European champion had graduated from youth development to first-team training with distinction. He made no secret of how he had urged Martin Edwards to improve Kidd’s contract the previous summer, when Kidd had told the chairman he was wanted by Everton as manager. But he was acid in his references to the personality of a man who, it was true, had little in common with Ferguson’s straight-shooting soulmate Archie Knox. For example: ‘When I put to him [Kidd] what Martin Edwards had said, he chuntered on for ages in a manner that had become familiar to me . . .’
Would Ferguson have liked to be the victim of such indiscretion? Almost certainly not. Nor would he have appreciated the interference Glenn Hoddle, as England manager, had to to put up with in the World Cup summer of 1998. Then, Ferguson broke with convention in criticising Hoddle for asking David Beckham to appear at a media conference after he had been dropped for a match against Tunisia. This seemed none of Ferguson’s business, at least in public – if he had deemed it in Manchester United’s interest to console the player, Beckham’s number was in his phone – yet he chose to air his views in a newspaper column. Hoddle described it as unprofessional.
Ferguson’s critique of Kidd was more wounding. He doubted that his long-time assistant was made of management material. However gratuitous, this was not an unreasonable opinion and almost as Ferguson’s book hit the streets, Blackburn’s owner, Jack Walker, came to a similar conclusion. Kidd was sacked.
Ferguson’s own stock could have been no higher after the glory of Barcelona. Picking the team to face Bayern there had been complicated by the suspension of Keane and Scholes, although Keane would probably have missed the match anyway due to an injury sustained when Gary Speed tackled him aggressively in the opening minutes of the FA Cup final. The captain was replaced by Teddy Sheringham, who soon scored the opening goal of a drearily one-sided match against Newcastle; Paul Scholes made it 2-0 in the second half and United became the first club to complete a hat-trick of Doubles.
Even in such an important match, Ferguson managed his resources, starting with Ole Gunnar Solskjær up front instead of Dwight Yorke, who came on for Andy Cole. But Yorke and Cole were always going to take the field for the European climax. Sheringham and Solskjær sat on the bench. Peter Schmeichel, of course, kept goal and, because Ronny Johnsen was fit, the back four picked itself; the others were Gary Neville, Jaap Stam and Denis Irwin.
The problem was how to arrange the midfield without Keane and Scholes; clearly Nicky Butt would take one of the central positions and Ferguson, though he claimed always to have regarded David Beckham as a wide player, gave him the other. He later explained: ‘I wanted him on the ball. I needed a passer in the central midfield and I wasn’t worried about people rushing by Beckham because Jens Jeremies was doing a holding job with Lothar Matthaus and Stefan Effenberg was very much a playmaker, not the type to go bursting past anyone.’
The wide-right role went to Ryan Giggs, with Jesper Blomqvist on the left. ‘The idea was to get some penetration through Giggs beating men, Beckham passing and Blomqvist using his left-foot ability.’ Aske
d why, of the two left-footers, Giggs, the superior player, was asked to switch, he replied: ‘I didn’t think Blomqvist would have the confidence to play on the right.’ Besides, Giggs could do some damage. ‘Their slowest player was the left-back. Tall lad. Went to Manchester City.’ Michael Tarnat was indeed troubled by Giggs’s pace and trickery. But little else went to Ferguson’s plan.
After only six minutes, Johnsen fouled Carsten Jancker and, after Markus Babbel had craftily manoeuvred Butt out of United’s defensive wall, Mario Basler shot through the gap. And 1–0 was how it looked likely to end when the first substitute appeared in the sixty-seventh minute, Sheringham replacing Blomqvist.
Sheringham was told to play on the left and occupy Babbel as part of the aerial battle; the central defenders, Sammy Kuffour and Thomas Linke, were not especially tall, so there might be some potential there. Giggs changed sides to play behind Sheringham with Beckham on the right and Butt in the middle of a three-man midfield that was almost immediately swamped.
It seemed that Hitzfeld had utterly won the tactical contest because his first substitute, the elegant midfielder Mehmet Scholl, who had come on four minutes after Sheringham, linked with Effenberg to take control. Schmeichel saved from Effenberg but could do nothing when first Scholl cleverly chipped against a post and then Jancker, with an overhead kick, struck the crossbar.
United looked soundly beaten when the clock showed ninety minutes and up went the illuminated board. On it was ‘3’. In the first of those minutes, Schmeichel ran the length of the pitch to meet a corner – without Ferguson’s permission – and caused confusion amid which the ball was miskicked to the edge of the penalty area, where Giggs scuffed what could only have been an attempt at a shot back into the goalmouth for Sheringham, with yet another miscue, to equalise.
Football – Bloody Hell! Page 25
