Football – Bloody Hell! Read online

  Also by Patrick Barclay

  Mourinho: Anatomy of a Winner

  FOOTBALL – BLOODY HELL!The Biography of Alex FergusonPatrick BarclayYellow Jersey PressLONDON

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  Copyright © Patrick Barclay 2010

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  Extracts from The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell (Hutchinson, 2007)

  First published in Great Britain in 2010 by

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  To The Moon

  Contents

  NO DOUBT ABOUT IT

  Among the Idiots

  A Hero and an Inspiration

  The Rich Loam of Home

  IN THE BEGINNING

  A Govan Childhood

  Street and School

  Tools of the Trade

  A Saint at Perth

  Into Europe with Dunfermline

  Learning to Coach

  Playing for Scotland?

  Rangers: Welcome to Hell

  Fighting at Falkirk

  The University of Life

  EAST STIRLINGSHIRE

  Small Wonders

  SAINTS ALIVE: THE LOVE STREET YEARS

  Building on Baldy

  Stark Improvement

  A Nest of Vipers

  Rancour and Defeat

  The Forgotten Man

  ABERDEEN

  An Emotional Battering

  Ferguson is Working

  Making Winners

  Chastened by Liverpool

  Strachan and the Shankly Tapes

  Fooling Bayern

  Beating Real Madrid

  Flailing at Ferguson

  Great Stuff, Lads

  After Strachan and McGhee

  Doing Deals

  Snubbing McGhee

  Life and Death with Big Jock

  Aberdeen, Itchy Feet and Scotland

  It’s Barcelona or United

  At the World Cup

  Pittodrie Postscript

  MANCHESTER UNITED: EARLY DAYS

  A Chat with Bobby Charlton

  Drinking to the Past

  Turning Off the Fans

  Youth Culture

  Jousting with Graham

  Strachan Leaves the Nest

  Welcome to Hell

  You Bastard!

  UNITED: STEPS TO GREATNESS

  Beating Barcelona

  Dreaming On

  Darren’s Hamstring

  Ah, Cantona . . .

  Seeing Red, Seeing Himself

  European Nights Off

  UNITED: APRÈS MOI LE TREBLE

  Ted Beckham’s Lad

  I Will Love It . . . Love It

  Putting on Spectacles

  New Labour: His Part in its Victory

  Arsenal on Top

  Le Déluge

  Winning Plenty Without Kidd

  What a Knight

  Managing to Hurt

  UNITED: THE ENCORE

  Goals Galore

  Threatening to Quit

  The Business with Jason

  No Wenger, No Eriksson – Ferguson Stays

  To a Long Life

  The Iraq Diaries

  The Rock and a Hard Place

  Magnier’s Gloves Come Off

  Sadder and Wiser

  UNITED: RONALDO AND ROONEY

  Wine with Mourinho

  Pizza with Wenger

  Fighting Back

  Meet the Glazers

  The Winter of Keane

  José and the Boss

  Better than Quaresma

  After Schmeichel, van der Sar

  Talking a Blinder

  Rafa’s Rant

  Beaten by Barca

  Ronaldo Goes, the Debt Grows

  No More the Champions

  THE LEGACY

  ‘Not Today but Tomorrow’

  Heroes

  Power and Control

  Where Stands He?

  Loyal to the Last

  Bibliography

  List of Illustrations

  1. Alex Ferguson reading the headlines (Offside); Dunfermline Athletic (Offside)

  2. Rangers manager Scot Symon with his assistant manager David White; Rangers’ Alex Ferguson looks innocent while Celtic’s Billy McNeill is injured on the floor (both PA Photos); Ferguson takes on Billy McNeill (Colorsport)

  3. Ferguson at Falkirk (Offside)

  4. Ferguson with his family, 1977 (Getty Images); Ferguson at the industrial tribunal, 1978 (Press Association)

  5. Aberdeen celebrate winning the league in 1980; Gordon Strachan celebrates scoring in the 1982 Scottish Cup final (both PA Photos)

  6. Aberdeen’s Mark McGhee during the 1983 European Cup Winners’ Cup Final against Real Madrid (Colorsport); Patrick Barclay, Gordon Simpson and Gerry McNee (courtesy of the author)

  7. Ferguson on open-top bus shows off the European Cup Winners’ Cup trophy (Offside); Aberdeen line up for the 1983 Scottish Cup final

  8. Jock Stein with Ferguson (PA Photos); Scotland team for World Cup match with Denmark; Graeme Souness (both Getty Images)

  9. Martin Edwards at a press conference with Alex Ferguson (PA Photos); Bryan Robson; Norman Whiteside (both Colorsport); Paul McGrath (Getty Images)

  10. Mark Robins celebrates (PA Photos); Lee Martin scores the winning goal in the 1990 FA Cup final; Les Sealey and Ferguson celebrate winning the 1990 FA Cup (both Getty Images)

  11. Mark Hughes scores against Barcelona in the 1991 European Cup Winners Cup final (Colorsport); Hughes celebrates winning the trophy (Getty Images)

  12. Brian McClair, Steve Bruce, Dennis Ir
win, Hughes and Mike Phelan hold the FA Premiership trophy, 1993 (Getty Images); Eric Cantona (PA Photos); Manchester United celebrate Cantona’s goal in the 1994 FA Cup final (Getty Images)

  13. Eric Cantona scores in the 1996 FA Cup final (PA Photos); Ferguson with the FA Cup and the Premiership trophy (Getty Images)

  14. Teddy Sheringham celebrates scoring in the Champions League final (PA Photos); Ole Gunnar Solskjær scores against Bayern Munich (Colorsport)

  15. Teddy Sheringham and David Beckham with the Champions League trophy (Getty Images); Ferguson with the Champions League trophy (PA Photos)

  16. David Beckham (PA Photos); David Beckham and Juan Sebastián Verón; David and Victoria Beckham (both Getty Images)

  17. Ferguson and Alastair Campbell (Getty Images); Jason Ferguson; John Magnier; Rock of Gibraltar (all PA Photos)

  18. Kenny Dalglish (PA Photos); George Graham (Getty Images); Ferguson and Kevin Keegan (PA Photos)

  19. Jose Mourinho (PA Photos); Arsene Wenger and Carlos Quieroz (Getty Images); Rafael Benítez (PA Photos)

  20. Roy Keane (PA Photos); Jaap Stam (Getty Images); Ruud van Nistel-rooy (PA Photos)

  21. Cristiano Ronaldo takes on Porto; Wayne Rooney celebrates scoring against Dynamo Kiev (both Getty Images)

  22. Ronaldo scores in the 2008 Champions League final (Getty Images); John Terry misses penalty; John Terry is inconsolable (both PA Photos)

  23. Ronaldo celebrates with Champions League trophy (Colorsport); Alex Ferguson with the Champions League trophy (Getty Images)

  24. Malcolm Glazer; Vendor selling scarves (both PA Photos); Manchester United team to face Bayern Munich in the 2010 Champions League quarter-final

  NO DOUBT ABOUT IT

  Among the Idiots

  The winds from the North Sea still howled at the back wall of the Beach End, which didn’t even blink. The Beach End had seen all this before, night after black night. The Beach End: although the most exposed part of Aberdeen Football Club’s Pittodrie Stadium is accurately named, it is fair to add that neither Malibu nor Manly need fear for its place in the hierarchy of balmy suburban strands.

  The winds still howled, but the noise of the crowd had long since ceased. All 24,000 paying spectators had drifted back up Merkland Road towards the city centre, the autograph hunters and their parents being the last as usual, and it was left to the journalists, the game’s diligent janitors, to sweep up what was left of an Under-21 international match between Scotland and England, a quarter-final of the European Under-21 Championship which had ended goalless, eliminating the Scots because they had lost the first leg at Coventry.

  The earnest Alex McLeish on his home ground, the mournful Steve Archibald, a fresh-faced Alan Brazil – all had had their expressions of regret dutifully sought. The triumphant English, whose ranks featured such giants in the making as Terry Butcher and Glenn Hoddle, had tried not to look too superior as they assessed their chances of going all the way and taking the European title that spring. But naturally they exuded optimism (it proved excessive, because they were beaten home and away by East Germany in the next round). For football journalists it is a familiar routine – our rite of passage to bed or bar – and on this March night in 1980 the little group of travellers from England, having assessed the so-called ‘quotes’, adapted them for publication and telephoned the consensus of import to their offices in London (transmission by laptop computer had yet to be introduced), duly spilled out on to the dark thoroughfare in search of comfort.

  At that moment the headlights of a sleek saloon, easing itself out of Pittodrie’s official car park, obligingly swivelled to point them up Merkland Road. The driver-side window rolled down, revealing the face of Alex Ferguson.

  Although he had yet to work in English football, Ferguson was recognisable to some of us as the potent young manager of Aberdeen, who were about to claim the first of three Scottish championships under his leadership. ‘Where are you heading for, lads?’ he asked. The nearest taxi that could sweep us to our hotel, he was told. If Ferguson experienced a temptation to grin at Sassenachs appearing to mistake Merkland Road for Park Lane in the West End of London, he resisted it. ‘You’ll never get a taxi here this time of night,’ he said. ‘Jump in.’

  Due to this and other encounters, Ferguson became known on the fringes of English football as a good bloke. It was a reputation that survived his arrival at Manchester United, whose manager he became in 1986 when Ron Atkinson was dismissed with the team placed nineteenth in England’s old twenty-two-club First Division. Results improved, but not steadily. By the end of the 1986/7 season, though safe from relegation, United had lost to Wimbledon (twice), Oxford United, Norwich City and Luton Town, among others, and a luminary of a former Old Trafford era mentioned that fans, including his grown-up sons, were unconvinced about Ferguson. My friend said he kept telling his sons to be patient and bear in mind that everyone at the club thought the Scot a ‘good lad’. This never mollified them. ‘Good lad!’ they would splutter. ‘We don’t want a good lad. What we want is a bastard who’ll win us the League.’

  They got both in the sense that Ferguson, in guiding United to eleven League titles, became recognised as one of the hardest men in football, significantly less popular with some former players than their public pronouncements might suggest. And certainly less anxious to throw open his car door to an English journalist. Some twenty-two years after his generosity in Aberdeen – in May 2002, the day before Arsenal came to Old Trafford to confirm that they would be borrowing the title for a year – he sat down with the daily-paper representatives and was immediately asked by the man from the Sun to assess the first season at United of Juan Sebastián Verón. He threw the question back at the reporter, who replied that he did not think Verón had been worth the fee paid. Ferguson erupted and ended the briefing almost before it had started.

  ‘Out of my sight,’ he yelled. ‘I’m not fucking talking to you any more. Verón’s a great fucking player. You’re all fucking idiots.’

  It was true to the extent that Verón had inhabited the verge of greatness. I had first seen him playing for Argentina in a friendly match against Brazil at the Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro in 1997. He was not quite twenty-two and already with Sampdoria in Italy, and such was his indefatigable midfield craft that Argentina’s 1-0 win flattered their hosts. He looked a potential star of the forthcoming World Cup in France but, despite a gently impressive performance against England in the match in which David Beckham was sent off, did not quite stamp the expected authority. Afterwards he moved to Parma and then Lazio, whom Ferguson had paid more than £28 million for him.

  After the outburst, Ferguson kept Verón for one more season and then sold him for £15 million to Chelsea, where he did not last long either. He had a spell with Internazionale back in Italy before returning to Argentina to join Estudiantes de La Plata, with such success that Diego Maradona restored him to the national team and took him to the 2010 World Cup.

  Why had Verón flopped in England? The best guess would be that the physical determination required for a player to flourish in England was incompatible with his mid-career comfort zone. It was, however, beyond conjecture that the idiots had got this one right – and Ferguson cannot have enjoyed being exposed by a breed he appeared to regard as inferior.

  It was not always so. He had grown up as a footballer in Scotland in an age when it was possible to engage with the common man, who often turned out to be a journalist. Once, Ferguson claimed, when suspended for a Rangers match abroad, he and a clubmate, Sandy Jardine, had sat in the press seats and penned the report that appeared under the name of the man from the Scottish Daily Express. But over the years, while retaining friendships with old-timers, above all the great Hugh McIlvanney of the Observer and later the Sunday Times, he seemed to develop a contempt for what the press had become.

  It was not unreasonable, given the tendency to speculation and point-stretching that contaminated even some of the formerly broadsheet sections of the industry, not
to mention such perceived coups as the bugging of conversations involving, among others, Sven-Göran Eriksson and the ill-fated FA chairman Lord Triesman (who stood down in May 2010 after he had been caught making ill-advised comments concerning the 2018 World Cup bid). ‘It’s not so much the reporters,’ Ferguson once told me, ‘as what their newspapers make them do now.’ And it was easy to agree.

  He was less persuasive in disparaging some of the younger reporters for wearing ‘torn jeans’ at his briefings, as if he himself did not often turn up in a tracksuit or even shorts. Self-awareness seldom appeared to be a strong suit of Ferguson’s and mounting success made it less and less evident. He might bemoan injustice at large while being unfair to, say, referees. He demanded respect while, increasingly, lapsing into rudeness. Asked a fair question by the television reporter Rebecca Lowe at Birmingham, he brusquely replied: ‘Were you watching the match?’

  This was early in the 2009/10 season, when he was sixty-seven. Sir Bobby Robson, whom Ferguson admired, was around the same age when I interviewed him in connection with a biography of José Mourinho. ‘Let me tell you what happens to successful managers,’ said Robson. ‘It’s happened to me. It happens to all of us. We acquire a bit of power, don’t we? That success . . . you know what you stand for . . . you know what people think of you. And this power, this control you have over people, becomes ingrained into you. You use your position to be more powerful. More powerful than you basically are.’

  Late in the summer of 2009 a memorial service was held for Sir Bobby in Durham Cathedral and Ferguson gave a wonderfully sensitive address, as he invariably does when called upon to pay tribute (it is said that no one has attended more funerals, in itself a remarkable reflection on a man with so much else to do). On the train back to London, I sat with McIlvanney and took the opportunity to ask how he would describe his friend. ‘Alec,’ he said (Ferguson’s shortened name began to be pronounced ‘Alex’ only after he left Scotland), ‘is a good man.’ Quite deliberately McIlvanney left it there, knowing that I wanted a distillation. But no one, of course, is that simple.