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

  The author would like to thank his colleagues on the Guardian, in particular Ben Clissitt, and everyone at Aurum Press for their support and advice, especially Natasha Martin.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  2005–06 Annus horribilis

  2006–07 Annus mirabilis

  About the Author

  Index

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  TAKING ON THE WORLD (PART I)

  He’s an amazing man. Let’s establish that straight away. Sir Alex Ferguson is a manager of uncommon ability. He has brought football of butterfly beauty to Manchester United. He bought Eric Cantona, the rebel with a cause. He nurtured the Golden Generation. He discovered Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, the baby-faced assassin. He signed Wayne Rooney, the assassin-faced baby. He has brought trophies, glory, prestige and the kind of happiness, over twenty-five years, that United supporters once only dreamed of. No one has managed at the highest level for so long. Or with such competitive courage. Nobody has beaten the system like he has and accumulated so many trophies.

  When Ferguson swept into Old Trafford in 1986 Boris Becker was the teenage Wimbledon champion, Nick Berry was at number one with Every Loser Wins and Steaua Bucharest were in possession of the European Cup. It was the year of Chernobyl and Top Gun, Charlene marrying Scott, Andrew marrying Sarah, Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ and Wayne Rooney’s first birthday. Ferguson posed in the centre-circle for his first photo-shoot and, behind him, the Stretford End was a concrete terrace with steel fences topped with spikes.

  A quarter of a century on, Old Trafford is a gleaming all-seater stadium, the capacity has risen from 55,000 to 76,000 and the ‘Keep Off The Grass’ signs are in five different languages. It has been an epic journey of 6 a.m. starts, nerve-shredding football and relentless drama. He has outlasted thirteen different Manchester City managers. He has seen off Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown, and could easily add Cameron to that list as well. He has been knighted and immortalised and he has turned United into one of the most prolific trophy-grabbing machines in the modern game. In his own words, he has ‘knocked Liverpool off their fucking perch’. Twelve league titles, two European Cups, five FA Cups, one European Cup Winners’ Cup, four League Cups. Plus enough individual awards to fill a museum. Those of us who are football writers in Manchester should never forget how lucky we are to have witnessed it. Even in those moments when it feels like the hardest club in the world to cover.

  We journalists regale our friends with anecdotes and enjoy the certain social cachet that comes from dealing with him. We have boxed away stories for our grandchildren and our office walls are lined with signed books and photographs. But we know, deep down, that he doesn’t like what we do.

  Trying to establish a relationship with him is a continuous, Forth Road Bridge process. We’d love to swap numbers, to high-five after important victories, to bear-hug and clink wine glasses. But, deep down, we have all had to accept there is never going to be a day when he invites us back to his for scones and tea and some Scottish hospitality. Or a press conference when he finishes with the words ‘Drink, anyone?’ Ferguson, you quickly learn, has erected a brick wall around himself to keep out the national newspaper journalists who work on his patch. Even in the good times he likes to keep his distance. We see him once, twice, sometimes three times a week, and we travel around the world hanging on his coat-tails, season after season. Yet we are still not sure if we know him properly. He is always that little bit out of reach – which, on reflection, is probably just how he likes it.

  The caricature is of a flint-faced authority figure, steam shooting out of his ears as he stands in the dugout, menacingly chewing gum, ranting at the fourth official and pointing to his stopwatch. Yet that’s exactly what it is: a caricature. The real Ferguson is far more complex than the tabloid portrayal. He isn’t always ‘fuming’ or ‘exploding’. He doesn’t always ‘slam’ and ‘blast’. We have lost count of the number of times we have arrived for press conferences to find him waltzing with an imaginary partner through the reception area at Carrington, the club’s training ground. Or breaking into song as Kath, the receptionist, hoots with laughter and tells him to shush. On his worst days, he can be dictatorial, hostile and standoffish. But he can also be warm, charming and convivial, with kind edges and an infectious laugh. He would be on any guest-list for a fantasy-football dinner-party XI. Ferguson is a natural storyteller. He has an outstanding memory for the tiniest snippets of information and varied interests beyond the four white lines that have contained much of his life. He has taught himself French using audiocassettes. He has learned how to play the piano. He ‘gets’ jazz. He has a global knowledge when it comes to food and is a connoisseur of fine wines.

  He is past retirement age, yet he seems to have an immunity to exhaustion. Complete strangers are often astonished about how friendly and charismatic he is. They are struck by how different he seems in real life from how he appears on television or in the press. They talk about a sexagenarian of fierce intellect and a student of human nature with an impressively high IQ and an astute appreciation of what makes other men tick.

  But then there are times when it is difficult to square his more appealing characteristics with his darker sides – the Ferguson who can be cold and ruthless and, in the vernacular of football, a bit of a bastard. His family probably wouldn’t recognise the grumpy journophobe who could argue a point without even the shadow of a leg to stand on. Or resort to the infamous ‘Hairdryer’ treatment, leaning into your face and shouting with such force it feels like you are in a wind tunnel.

  His press conferences can be tense, joyless affairs, crackling with friction. He can be impregnable, leaning back, hands behind his head, bored and fidgety, abrasive to the point of being monosyllabic and so downright exasperating you could drop a flowerpot on his head.

  His one-liners are legendary. One World Cup year we – ‘we’ meaning the Manchester press corps throughout this book – annoyed him, by having the temerity to ask if he planned to go to the tournament. ‘None of your business,’ came the answer. ‘Do I ask if you’re still going to those fucking gay clubs?’

  Then there was the time, at the end of a trophy-less season, when a Daily Telegraph reporter innocently asked what had gone wrong. ‘That’s a good question,’ Ferguson replied, with a vast grin. ‘But it would take a whole interview to get it and that’s an interview you’re never going to fucking get.’

  Alternatively, his press conferences can be entertaining and revealing, full of laughter and off-the-record anecdotes and bristling comments about what is wrong with the game and what should be done about it. He does not open up easily, but when the mood takes him he can disarm his audience with long, impassioned homilies about football, politics and the world in general. And in those moments you absorb every word and remind yourself that time in his company, with the shackles off, is both rewarding and fascinating.

  When Ferguson is on good form put aside the caricature of the empurpled curmudgeon with little red puffs of smoke coming out of his ears and think instead of a gregarious raconteur with an unstoppable enthusiasm for life. A man’s man, good for a drink and a game of golf and determined to grab life by the balls. A man so intensely competitive he would stop to watch two children playing a game of Pooh sticks.

  He is also a man of great humour. ‘What has happened to diving headers these days?’ he will ask, eyes twinkling. ‘You know, the kind of goals Denis Law, Tommy Lawton, Nat Lofthouse, Dixi
e Dean and Alex Ferguson used to score.’

  He will pick out a reporter who hasn’t shaved, or whose hair is a little unkempt, and ask whether he has walked into an Oasis concert. He will complain about someone’s match report and gently chide the journalist for thinking he writes for ‘the Dandy comic strip’. Ferguson takes pride in his repartee and in his ability to make people laugh, and he will often send himself up too. He knows how others see him. We tried to guess his team on one occasion and he interrupted with a smile: ‘Never try to read the mind of a madman!’

  Beneath that brusque exterior and ferocious partisanship there is a different Ferguson, one that is not seen often enough. The soft-focus Ferguson has been known to ring newspaper offices, demanding to be put straight through to the editor after hearing that a reporter who works on his patch might be in danger of being made redundant.

  When John Bean, the former Daily Express man, had a heart attack, the first contact he had from the outside world was a nurse bringing him a bouquet of flowers, with Ferguson’s spidery handwriting asking: ‘What have you been doing to yourself, you silly old tap dancer?’

  He has grown to dislike the newspaper industry but he does not regard the whole of the species with disdain. Some of his oldest friends are football writers and he has never forgotten the journalists who backed him when it looked like he could be sacked early in his United career. When Steve Curry lost his job at the Express Ferguson was one of the first people on the phone to commiserate. When Bean was forced to retire on medical advice Ferguson called him to say: ‘Any time you want to come to Old Trafford give me a ring and there will be a seat for you in the directors’ box.’

  In 2003, David Meek, the former Manchester Evening News correspondent, was diagnosed with cancer. ‘I had to break the news to Alex that I would be unable to ghost-write his programme notes for the first time in sixteen years,’ Meek recalls. ‘He wanted to know why and when I told him I was going into hospital for an operation he looked me in the eye and said exactly what I wanted to hear: “You can handle it.” There was a huge bouquet waiting for me at the hospital. Then I was convalescing at home a week later and, out of the blue, the phone rang. There was no introduction. He didn’t even say who it was. A voice just growled down the line: “The Scottish beast is on its way!” He was at my front door twenty minutes later and the point is he didn’t have to do that. He’s an extremely busy man and it was the middle of the season and David Beckham’s will-he-go, will-he-stay saga with Real Madrid. “You’ll never guess what that Beckham wore to training today,” Alex said to me. “He had this bloody spingly-spangly tracksuit on – he looked like Gary Glitter!” We had a pleasant afternoon, chatting about football and families. I’ll never forget how kind and supportive he was.’

  No doubt there are some who prefer to see a different side but those who know Ferguson best say he has a heart the size of the Old Trafford trophy room. He can be overwhelmingly generous, a devoted worker for charities. He goes out of his way to attend the funeral of a loyal supporter, an unsung member of staff or one of his many old acquaintances. Often when his mobile is clamped to his ear he is offering advice and encouragement to a struggling manager. There are invitations for a sacked manager or coach to help him out with training for a few days. Cards are sent to injured players. Visits are made to schools or businesses run by friends of friends. Letters are sent to Elizabeth Thomson, his first teacher at Broomloan Road Primary in Govan, the district of Glasgow where he grew up.

  When George Best died nobody spoke more passionately than Ferguson. Or with greater warmth. And of who? Yes, a brilliant footballer and Old Trafford legend, but also someone who was never slow to criticise Ferguson. Best once recommended that Terry Venables should be brought in and told the newspapers he ‘wouldn’t walk round the corner to watch United play’. Yet Ferguson, usually such a grudge-bearer, came into his own after Best’s death. Nobody could have done more to represent United with greater dignity. Nobody could have been more eloquent in his tributes. ‘George burst on to the scene at a liberated time, with an explosion of music, the Beatles, style, fashion and a freer way of life,’ he said. ‘He carried the dreams of everyone in the Sixties. As well as his talent as a fantastic player, what remains in my mind is his courage. I can see him, even now, flying down the wing, riding tackles. He has left us with a million memories and all of them good. The best talent our football has ever produced.’

  This is the side of Ferguson his friends and colleagues cite. A man who often displays unusual consideration and warmth. There is the story of him visiting Anfield after the Hillsborough disaster, arriving quietly, making it clear he didn’t want any publicity, that it must be kept under wraps. He was the first public figure from outside Liverpool to travel to the stadium to show his grief and support and, without the media ever getting wind of it, he presented a substantial cheque for the disaster fund.

  Then there was the time, a couple of weeks before Paul Hunter’s death, when Ferguson sent the former world snooker champion a video message telling him he should be proud of everything he had achieved and praising him for his bravery and dignity in fighting his cancer. ‘He had never met Paul before but his message was so genuine and heartfelt,’ says Lindsey, Hunter’s widow. ‘He came across as sincere and kind. He said Paul was very special, a proud Yorkshireman, and that he could see similarities with Alan Smith. He said he was praying for Paul to get better and that he knew what a lovely lad he was. All we knew of Ferguson was this hothead football manager we saw on television. Yet he went out of his way to be so caring and that really touched us.’

  Geoff Thomas, the former Crystal Palace player who has successfully battled leukaemia, was equally astonished when he organised a re-match of the 1990 FA Cup final and Ferguson threw himself into the project, offering to manage the United team and going out of his way to help with the arrangements. Likewise, we journalists were surprised the morning after United had gone out of the 2007 Champions League semi-finals to Milan to see him on television arriving for Alan Ball’s funeral at Winchester Cathedral. The previous night, we had sat with Ferguson in Malpensa airport waiting for a delayed flight home and he was clearly devastated. When the plane finally arrived the baggage went missing and we were kept on the runway for another hour. We didn’t get into Manchester until 5 a.m. and Ferguson must have been physically and emotionally drained. Yet he somehow made it to Winchester by midday, paying his respects to one of England’s World Cup heroes.

  As for us, the football writers, you certainly never forget the first time you meet him. His eyes squint, his brow creases. He leans forward. ‘Who are you?’ he might demand. You aren’t sure where to look or what to call him. You try not to show weakness but it isn’t easy.

  His favourites tend to be older journalists such as Hugh McIlvanney of the Sunday Times and Bob Cass of the Mail on Sunday although, even then, it is always on Ferguson’s terms. It is when reporters below the age of forty turn up that he sometimes gets edgy. One London-based reporter from the Daily Star – in his mid-thirties and married with kids – came on a European trip and politely held out his hand to introduce himself, only for a look of astonishment to cross Ferguson’s face. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Do they get them straight from school these days?’

  He drives us mad sometimes, but he is wrong when he says the press hate him. You hate the man who has stolen your wife. Or keyed your car. Or burgled your house. But Ferguson? Not a bit. Some journalists have grievances. Legitimate ones too. But how can anyone not have a soft spot or, at the very least, a sneaking regard for someone who has filled one of the most demanding jobs in sport for twenty years?

  The problem is that it is unfathomably difficult to predict whether we are going to get him on a good or a bad day. One minute, he will be singing at the top of his voice, as if he didn’t have a care in the world. The next, his mood changes and he will be staring at you with hard, penetrative eyes.

  We want to like him, of course, and we want him to like us.
We want to get on, to have an understanding. Nonetheless, there have been times under his management when it is not just respect when we go to see him. It is genuine anxiety.

  Generally, the stronger the manager the less reticent he is when speaking to the press and the less sensitive he is to what we write. But Ferguson is different. He has been known to ban reporters for criticising his players. He will convince himself we are trying to lay traps and complain that we do not ask enough about the actual football. Then we will try to engage him in conversation about tactics and he will sarcastically shake his head and say, sorry, he forgot we were the ‘experts’.

  Alistair Campbell, his close friend and former government spin-doctor, sums up the Ferguson media relations strategy: ‘I’m just doing this because of contractual obligations but you are all…’

  And yet we would sit outside Ferguson’s door for hours if it meant getting a few minutes on tape.

  On good form Ferguson is gold dust – trenchant, droll, controversial, forthright, never boring – and when he wants to get something off his chest our sports editors will gratefully clear the pages. This is an era when most football managers see nothing and say even less. Yet Ferguson has never been one for surrounding himself with an entourage of puffed-up advisors. He resists any temptation to descend into deliberate blandness. He doesn’t talk about his players giving it 110 per cent. Or of taking each game as it comes. He would rather speak in plain English.

  What we have is a basis of understanding. Yet Ferguson is the only manager in England who refuses to speak to the press after Premier League games or the early rounds of the FA Cup and Carling Cup. His policy is generally one of avoidance. He will speak to us after Champions League ties (UEFA will fine him otherwise), but the Football Association and the Premier League turn a blind eye in the domestic competitions and he has decided he just doesn’t need the hassle. ‘I don’t get the press coverage I think I’m entitled to,’ he says, ‘and I no longer see it as part of my job to fulfil their interests.’