Football – Bloody Hell! (26 page)

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Authors: Patrick Barclay

BOOK: Football – Bloody Hell!
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With ten minutes left, a thirty-five-yard free-kick from Ronald Koeman went through the United wall and was touched by the diving Les Sealey against a post, from which it cannoned off the unlucky goalkeeper into the net. United held out – and partied for forty-eight hours, with Ferguson a keen participant. He had even been emboldened to cavort on the pitch, conducting the fans as they belted out a new anthem, Monty Python’s
‘
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
’
.
As Robson swigged champagne, Koeman swallowed disappointment. The Dutchman had only a year to await consolation, for at Wembley another of his renowned free-kicks beat Sampdoria’s Gianluca Pagliuca to make Barcelona champions of Europe for the first time and earn Cruyff’s players (including Pep Guardiola, who was to manage Barcelona against Ferguson’s United in the 2009 final) membership of a celebrated ‘dream team’.
Dreaming On
F
or Ferguson and United, the dream was about England and the title that had last been claimed in 1967. In the summer, Ferguson was dismayed to lose Archie Knox, who went to Rangers, but promoted Brian Kidd to assistant manager and received some benefit in the sense that his behaviour towards referees improved.
This, at least, was the recollection of David Elleray, a leading whistler who later served as chairman of the FA referees’ committee. ‘Brian did a lot to keep Alex out of trouble,’ said Elleray. ‘Once I saw him take Alex and drag him down the tunnel away from my dressing room. He knew Alex well enough to arrive just as Alex was waiting for you in the tunnel, ready to give you a volley of abuse, and get him out of the way.
‘I remember once chatting to Brian and asking him where he liked to spend his summer holidays. “The other end of the world from Alex Ferguson,” he replied. But he was good with Alex and I think Alex respected him. I think Alex is always better when he has a strong assistant.’ Clearly Knox was strong. ‘Yes,’ said Elleray. So had Knox been able to moderate Ferguson’s behaviour? ‘No,’ said Elleray. ‘He was as bad. In fact he was worse.’
With Kidd at Ferguson’s side, the wait for the title seemed certain to end after a neat quarter-century, for the 1991/2 season saw United top for long periods. They collected another trophy, the League Cup, and yet it may have been their success in making themselves the hurdle over which Leeds fell in both that and the FA Cup that enabled the Yorkshire club to pip them at the post in the big race.
Again Ferguson had strengthened his team. Sealey had left the club (he was to die of a heart attack at forty-three) and the likes of Phelan and Blackmore become squad players, as specialists of true quality were brought in.
A right-winger of electric pace, only twenty-one years old, had been brought from the Ukrainian club Shakhtar Donetsk towards the end of the previous season and Andrei Kanchelskis was to prove a significant buy at £1.2 million rising to £3 million if he were sold at a profit (he went to Everton for £5 million eventually, being replaced by David Beckham).
Paul Parker, another quick player, an England defender who cost £2 million from Queens Park Rangers, would have been more significant but for injury problems that surfaced soon after his arrival.
But the biggest buy, in every sense but one (he cost just over £500,000), was the cheapest: Peter Schmeichel became a giant, a hero of the Ferguson revolution as well as his native Denmark and a worthy United captain on the night in 1999 when the club regained the European title.
Foreign players still verged on the exotic when Ferguson engaged Kanchelskis and Schmeichel; at the Premier League’s inception (as the FA Premier League) a year later, there were only about a dozen in it. Leeds had Cantona. Arsenal had the Swedish winger Anders Limpar and Sheffield Wednesday his compatriot the full-back Roland Nilsson. Schmeichel apart, Denmark was represented by another hero of the European Championship campaign, John Jensen, who joined George Graham’s Arsenal. The Oldham right-back, Gunnar Halle, was Norwegian.
Quite a Scandinavian presence, you will notice – and it was the agent responsible for most of those moves, and more, who had helped Ferguson into the forefront of the English game’s new internationalism. His name, Rune Hauge, was to become almost synonymous with the backhander or ‘bung’ habit which had been perennially discussed in the game but seldom proved.
In 1991, Ferguson recalled, Hauge had visited Old Trafford notionally representing a perimeter advertising company but had asked if he needed any players and, upon being told that something right-sided would be handy, sent a video of Kanchelskis. Ferguson and Martin Edwards saw the fleet, powerful winger play for the Soviet Union against Germany in Frankfurt and soon concluded negotiations with Kanchelskis’s three agents.
One was German, another Swiss – ‘We were beginning to think we were in a John le Carré novel,’ said Ferguson – but the main one, Grigory Essaoulenko, was the most interesting, as Ferguson was to have confirmed in 1994 when, after Kanchelskis’s contract had been generously renewed, the United manager received an unsolicited gift of £40,000. And rejected it. Ferguson also pointed out that Hauge, who had been ‘peripheral’ to the Frankfurt negotiations, only ever mentioned money to him once, and ‘in a roundabout way’, and never brought up the subject again.
George Graham found Hauge’s generosity harder to resist and, also in 1994, was discovered to have received gifts of £425,000 in connection with Arsenal’s recruitment of Jensen and the Norwegian defender Pål Lydersen. After a Premier League inquiry, Graham was sacked by Arsenal and banned from football for a year. He later managed Leeds United and Tottenham Hotspur and was generally regarded as having been unlucky in that, due to the diligence of the tax authorities in Norway and journalists both there and in England, he was caught. Because Hauge worked with quite a few clubs. By Ferguson’s testimony, he was an excellent identifier and procurer of talent.
Nor was his gift lost to the game for long. An indefinite ban imposed by Fifa was reduced on appeal to two years and, short of putting up ‘business as usual’ signs, Hauge could hardly have appeared less devastated. It was less than two years, certainly, before another of his clients, a Norwegian forward, arrived at Old Trafford – and what a bargain Ole Gunnar Solskjær was to prove at £1.5 million.
Ferguson had been more hesitant in assessing Hauge’s client Schmeichel than some others. Goalkeepers do not always adapt easily to the aerial buffetings of the English game and so Ferguson had him watched often by Alan Hodgkinson, the former Sheffield United and England goalkeeper who was his specialist coach at the time. ‘We must have sent Alan over about ten times to watch him playing for Brøndby or Denmark,’ said Ferguson. ‘My fear was that he couldn’t play in England. Alan said there was no doubt about it. He was a winner. He shouted and bawled at everybody. He was a real hungry bastard.’ A glimmer of self-recognition always stimulated Ferguson’s interest in a player. ‘So I went over to his house in Denmark and I could feel it in his handshake. He thrust out this massive hand. “You’ll do me,” I thought. And, after a few early problems adjusting, he was fine.’
Ferguson was speaking at The Cliff towards the end of Schmeichel’s first season. United had just beaten Nottingham Forest 1–0 in a League Cup final whose quality, from both sides, had pleased him – whatever he thought of Clough as a person, he respected his footballing principles – and were firm favourites for the last League championship before the Premier League started. They led the table, as either they or Leeds had done since late August, with six matches to go and, at one stage in an interview I was conducting with Ferguson for the
Observer
, he actually talked about the title as if it were won.
Discussing squad rotation, an art of which he was about to become the arch-exponent, he looked at a chart on the wall of his office and started counting. He stopped at seventeen. ‘Yes,’ said Ferguson, ‘seventeen players are going to get a League medal because they’ve played in fourteen matches or more.’ There was a pause. ‘If we win it, of course.’ Not one of those players got a medal. Fourteen of Howard Wilkinson’s Leeds players did. One was Strachan. But he inhabited United’s past. Another was Eric Cantona and the enigmatic Frenchman, soon to transfer to Old Trafford, was to shape United’s future more than any other player.
Cantona had arrived at Elland Road at an opportune moment. Some said he had carried Leeds over the finishing line with his fifteen appearances, nine as what Ferguson’s old chum Craig Brown used to call a ‘cheer sub’ (a substitute who lifts the crowd, who in turn lift the players). But Ferguson’s chairman had a more convincing explanation, one which the manager shared. ‘Knocking Leeds out of both Cups lost us the League,’ Edwards declared.
A trio of matches took place between the clubs in late December and early January, all at Elland Road with the inevitable high intensity, and, although Leeds won none (the points were shared in the League encounter), the outcome conspired to make the League Cup final the start of a season-concluding sequence of seven matches in twenty one days for Ferguson’s men. Leeds, with a much less demanding programme, took the title with a match to spare.
Even Ferguson’s rotational skills had not been enough to keep his men as fresh as Wilkinson’s. But Ferguson had run by far his best campaign to date, the defence notably tightening as Pallister matured alongside Bruce and in front of the giant Schmeichel, and there was something approaching (but not, of course, reaching) satisfaction as he outlined his approach to squad management in the aftermath of the League Cup triumph.
‘You use your experience,’ he said, ‘to decide who to rest and when.’ For the September confrontation with Wimbledon, for instance, he had left out the young wingers Kanchelskis and Giggs and used Irwin only as a substitute. That had let in the dependable and combative veteran Mal Donaghy. ‘You pick the ones who can handle it physically. So by doing something tactical like that you can rest people. You can combine the two.
‘Sometimes you just pick the same team all the time. We had a spell like that in November and December [United were unbeaten in those months] when the players were at their peak, in full flow. Then you hit the Christmas and New Year period when the games come more frequently and the grounds change a little and you look to make changes. You check the younger players to see if there has been a draining effect on them.’
It all seemed to have worked. Since a 4-1 home defeat by Queens Park Rangers on New Year’s Day – ‘in among all those big matches against Leeds, it got lost, like an afterthought’ – they had suffered only one further loss in the League, at Nottingham, and the mood in the squad was upbeat. Everyone wanted to play. The next match was at home to Southampton and Ferguson semi-jocularly confided: ‘I’ve told eighteen players to report to Old Trafford – and I’m hoping at least one of them cries off.’ Like most managers, he found telling people they were left out the least palatable part of the job.
In particular he hated disappointing Donaghy. It was on Ferguson’s mind because Donaghy had just missed the League Cup final. ‘He tends to miss out on the big games,’ mused Ferguson. He had missed the FA Cup final in 1990 and, after taking part in every round up to the semi-finals, the Cup-Winners’ Cup final in 1991. ‘He’s the odd-job man,’ said Ferguson. ‘If you need somebody to sort out the plumbing, he’ll sort it. If you need somebody to fix the gas cooker, he’ll fix it. He’ll play anywhere you like and do a great job. But you can’t keep bringing him in and out. You can’t keep kicking him in the teeth.’
The trouble, Ferguson added, was the restorative property of the big match: ‘When it comes to a Cup final, every bugger is fit.’ It was the same now that United could almost reach out and touch the title. But he wasn’t really angry that they were adding to his selection problems. ‘It’s an important time for the club and the pressure’s on,’ he said, ‘and it’s good that nobody wants to duck it.’
Donaghy was absent as they beat Southampton through a lone goal from Kanchelskis. Nor did he play two days later at his old club, Luton, where United drew 1-1. He came on as a substitute two days after that, replacing Neil Webb during the 2-1 home defeat by Nottingham Forest that let Leeds resume the League leadership for the sixth and last time and, as the matches kept coming thick and fast and the squad showed the strain, started at West Ham, where United lost 1-0, and Liverpool, where they went down 2-0 to a club, now managed by Graeme Souness, whose decline was to be masked by success in the FA Cup final against Sunderland.
Donaghy made his final appearance for United in a 3-1 home win over Tottenham while, over the Pennines, Leeds celebrated. In twenty League contributions that season, four as substitute, the Northern Irishman had worn six shirt numbers. Ferguson let him go to Chelsea – their manager was Ian Porterfield, who had replaced Ferguson at Aberdeen – and there Donaghy had two more Premier League seasons. Under Glenn Hoddle, who replaced Porterfield, he became marginal and missed yet another Cup final. But this was a good one to miss. Chelsea lost 4-0 to United, for whom two Cantona goals completed the Double.
Shortly after that Donaghy travelled to Miami with Northern Ireland for a friendly against Mexico and, having made his ninety-first international appearance, retired. He was nearly thirty-seven and it had been quite a career, featuring everything from two World Cups to the frustration that comes with a manager’s need to make ruthless decisions. Donaghy went back across the Irish Sea and took charge of his country’s Under-19 team. He had plenty of experience to pass on.

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