Football – Bloody Hell! (32 page)
Read Football – Bloody Hell! Online
Authors: Patrick Barclay
The ship had steadied when Ferguson accepted his third challenge: that of helping New Labour to win the right to form the next Government.
On 30 January, Alastair Campbell’s diaries of
The Blair Years
tell us, he had a chat with his chum Ferguson, whose team had just taken the League leadership for the first time that season. It was about the election campaign. Ferguson recommended attention to fitness, with a masseur on the battle bus (it was done) and the building of rest periods into the schedule. ‘If you have physical fitness,’ Ferguson told Campbell, ‘you get mental fitness.’
The Blair Years
tell us, he had a chat with his chum Ferguson, whose team had just taken the League leadership for the first time that season. It was about the election campaign. Ferguson recommended attention to fitness, with a masseur on the battle bus (it was done) and the building of rest periods into the schedule. ‘If you have physical fitness,’ Ferguson told Campbell, ‘you get mental fitness.’
On 25 February, three days after a whipped drive from Beckham had earned United a draw at Chelsea, Campbell again met Ferguson, whose view was that Labour looked like a team 2-0 up who just had to sit back and let their opponents make mistakes.
When Blair briefly joined the company of the two men, he, too, was given the benefit of Ferguson’s advice. ‘Alex felt tax was still a problem,’ recalled Campbell.
Ferguson also said that Blair should be ready for ‘stress levels’ rising and should clear his mind by admitting only the most important matters. ‘In positions of leadership, the appearance of calm was important and you had to work at it by cutting out everything that didn’t matter.’ And by delegating.
On 17 March, as Ferguson prepared to fly with United to Portugal for the second leg of the Champions League quarter-final, Campbell and Blair had time for reflection in which the party leader said he agreed with Ferguson that Labour could wait for John Major’s Tories to slip up.
On 11 April, the night before United won 3-2 at Blackburn, Ferguson rang Campbell and said that ‘we [Labour] were going okay, avoiding big mistakes’. He added that Blair looked ‘strong and confident’ and the Tories ‘desperate’. Another tip Ferguson gave Campbell was to step ‘outside the bubble and see the big picture from outside’.
On 20 April, the night after United had won 3-1 at Liverpool, Campbell and Blair were in Manchester and Ferguson came to their hotel for a drink. He asked how Blair felt; ‘tired’ was the answer. Ferguson told him to relax, believe in himself – ‘you’re here because you deserve to be’ – and not be too aggressive towards Major, who, he felt, performed better under attack. Ferguson forecast a Labour majority of a hundred seats or more.
Anyone stepping outside the United bubble at that time would have seen that, while they looked a decent bet for the domestic title, Borussia had their measure in the Champions League. The second leg bore this out and the next day Cantona gave Ferguson another worry by telling him he intended to retire from football. A week later, on the election night of 1 May, Ferguson switched away from this and the strains of the title race by watching his political favourites romp home.
At one stage he picked up the phone and rang Campbell to say that the television cameras were filming him and Blair live through the curtains of the Labour leader’s constituency home: ‘I looked over,’ wrote Campbell, ‘and he said “yes, that one” and I went and closed the curtain.’
Ferguson had underestimated Labour’s ascendancy. Their majority was 179, a party record.
The forecasting skills of David Pleat were to prove bolder and better. He had said an exceptional generation of kids would help United to dominate English football for a decade. Ferguson began to feed them into the team in 1994 and it was about ten years later, following the departure of Beckham to Real Madrid, that they were knocked off their perch, Wenger’s Arsenal occupying it for one season and José Mourinho’s Chelsea for two.
As for the forecast I gave Ted Beckham, at The Cliff, it was proved less than half right, errant on the side of pessimism: he hit the half-century of caps in England’s opening match of the 2002 World Cup, against Sweden, and the century when Fabio Capello brought him back for a friendly against France in Paris in March 2008, and kept going, past Billy Wright’s 105 and Bobby Charlton’s 106 and Bobby Moore’s 108 (albeit often with substitute appearances of short duration), until he became England’s most capped outfield player of all time.
Arsenal on Top
T
he morning after the end of the 1996/7 season, Eric Cantona requested a meeting with Ferguson. He wasted no time in confirming his decision to leave football and Ferguson, though not wholly surprised – he had noticed both a dulling of the eye and a thickening of the waistline – asked the thirty-year-old to explain. He gave two reasons, both of which might have been puckishly designed to resonate with Ferguson.
he morning after the end of the 1996/7 season, Eric Cantona requested a meeting with Ferguson. He wasted no time in confirming his decision to leave football and Ferguson, though not wholly surprised – he had noticed both a dulling of the eye and a thickening of the waistline – asked the thirty-year-old to explain. He gave two reasons, both of which might have been puckishly designed to resonate with Ferguson.
One was that Cantona felt exploited by United’s merchandising department. The other was that the club, when they brought in new players, were not ambitious enough (naturally Ferguson could have done with the freedom to offer even higher wages, to exceptional players, than could be paid under United’s structure). Ferguson thought about all this and came up with the theory that plc status was partly responsible. He was nevertheless to break the British transfer record again (for Rio Ferdinand) before the Glazer family took United back into private hands in 2005.
Anyway, there was to be no change of mind. Football’s loss was to be the cinema’s gain. And Cantona was gone. It must have seemed an abrupt departure to the supporters who had idolised him – and yet it was marked by the style they had loved in him. There were no complaints. Old Trafford continued to echo to the ‘Marseillaise’. The music would never die. Cantona, like Busby, was immortal.
Ferguson tried to replace him with Teddy Sheringham, who, though thirty-one, looked good value at £3.5 million from Tottenham. Sheringham was slow but extremely crafty and dangerous in the air. Nor did he let a personal distaste for Cole get in the way of their partnership – Sheringham scored fourteen goals in all competitions that first season, and Cole twenty-six – but the team could not dominate at home, let alone abroad. Arsenal were the team of that season. It was Arsenal who won the Double, and Arsenal who had the manager everyone was talking about.
United had been handicapped by the loss in late September of Roy Keane, who, in trying to foul Alfie Haaland at Leeds, succeeded only in injuring one of his own knees so badly that he missed the rest of the season. As he writhed in agony on the Elland Road turf, Haaland, thinking he could detect a familiar ploy used to avoid a yellow card, accused the Irishman of feigning (Keane never forgot the Norwegian’s words and was to wreak a terrible vengeance years later, when Haaland was representing City in a Manchester derby).
Lacking Cantona, and now his successor as team leader, United were bound to feel the difference and it was testament to the structure Ferguson had built that they led the League until Easter. But after Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal, who had beaten them 3–2 at Highbury, came to Old Trafford and won again through a goal by the near-unplayable Marc Overmars, it was clear that power had shifted south again.
Arsenal won both the League and the FA Cup and reached the semi-finals of the League Cup, from which United had beaten a hasty retreat at Ipswich, Ferguson’s diluted side bearing evidence that the quality of the Beckham/Butt/Scholes/Neville generation was not to be repeated. Arsenal, moreover, had replaced Graham (not directly, for Bruce Rioch came in between) with a man who was changing the culture of the club, bringing it into direct competition with United in matters of both substance and style.
Nor was Europe of much encouragement to Ferguson. True, there had been a 3–2 victory over Juventus at the group stage; after Alessandro del Piero struck in the first minute, Sheringham, Scholes and Giggs retaliated and Zidane’s gesture came too late. But in the quarter-finals a scoreless draw at Monaco proved insufficient because of David Trezeguet’s early away goal, against which Solskjær’s notional equaliser did not count.
Wenger had been at Monaco before the short spell in Japan that preceded his arrival at Arsenal. One of his star pupils had been Thierry Henry, who remembered the Old Trafford experience with glee. He already knew of Ferguson because the Cantona signing had put United in the spotlight in France. ‘Their games were on TV,’ said Henry, ‘and there was lots of talk about Ferguson, what he had done at Aberdeen and now United, how he was a special character, very severe – in the right way – and very demanding of the players. Even though Cantona had gone, Ferguson was a big figure in the game.
‘As a young player [Henry was twenty] I found it amazing that a team like Manchester United had so many youngsters in their squad. It was very unusual in Europe at the time, certainly at such a big club. Okay, you could say that Ferguson was given a great generation to work with, but he had to trust them. Another manager might not have done that. It takes a lot of courage and, as a youngster myself, I was impressed by that.’
Yet the Monaco kids, Trezeguet and Henry, were too good for United’s on this occasion.
Juventus, meanwhile, marched on. They were to lose only to Real Madrid in what was their third Champions League final in a row. Guess who was to deny them a fourth. And guess who, at the same time, was to put Arsenal in their place. The most momentous of all Ferguson’s seasons with United was almost upon us.
Le Déluge
I
n 2009, after France had qualified for the World Cup under the widely derided Raymond Domenech, Eric Cantona rather clumsily described him as ‘the worst French coach since Louis XVI’. Clumsy it may have been, but its point survived.
n 2009, after France had qualified for the World Cup under the widely derided Raymond Domenech, Eric Cantona rather clumsily described him as ‘the worst French coach since Louis XVI’. Clumsy it may have been, but its point survived.
Louis XVI was seen as a ditherer. He paid with his job come the Revolution in 1789 and was executed four years later. It may be that such terminally turbulent times for the French monarchy were what his late grandfather, Louis XV, had had in mind when he stated: ‘
Après moi, le déluge
.’ After Cantona at Old Trafford, there had been a short, dry spell. And then came the flood. A flood of trophies. Including the most important one of all, the one Ferguson had dreamed of showing to Busby, the one for which – Cantona had implied it and Ferguson had taken the point – United’s ambition had been insufficient.
Après moi, le déluge
.’ After Cantona at Old Trafford, there had been a short, dry spell. And then came the flood. A flood of trophies. Including the most important one of all, the one Ferguson had dreamed of showing to Busby, the one for which – Cantona had implied it and Ferguson had taken the point – United’s ambition had been insufficient.
There were changes on and off the field. The most significant was that Roy Keane returned from injury. But there were new faces, too. Ferguson had persuaded his supposedly skinflint board to hand £10.6 million to PSV Eindhoven for Jaap Stam, who thus became the most expensive defender ever (albeit pretty cheap in relation to Rio Ferdinand, who was to succeed the big and raw-boned but accomplished Dutchman). He had to pay Aston Villa £12.6 million for Dwight Yorke. But each was an immediate and spectacular success.
Another thing these purchases had in common was controversy. The Stam issue did not surface until, some years later, he wrote a book in which it was claimed that Ferguson had broken the transfer rules by approaching him – tapping him up, as the vernacular has it – before PSV. But the wrangling over Yorke was public. The Villa manager, John Gregory, refused all summer to let his star striker go unless United sent Andy Cole in the opposite direction. Ferguson clearly envisaged using them together. Impasse reigned until Yorke, selected for Villa’s opening League match at Everton, gave an eloquently limp display. A week later he was playing for United at West Ham.
Yorke and Cole had an almost instant chemistry. Yorke, fleet of foot, technically deft and all the more refreshing for the grin that was his default expression, had been spotted by Graham Taylor on a Villa trip to Trinidad and Tobago. Yorke liked Cole as person. It was an achievement that had seemed beyond both Cantona and Sheringham.
Cole could be difficult. His attitude as a youngster had apparently persuaded George Graham to ship him out of Arsenal. But Kevin Keegan had coaxed lots of goals out of him at Newcastle and now Ferguson had seven million reasons, each of them a £1 coin, for getting the best out of him. Yorke was the key to that and their almost telepathic understanding led Thierry Henry to tell me in 2010 that he had never seen such a partnership in the Premier League.
Over the course of their first season together, they scored a total of fifty-three goals in all competitions. Yorke led the way with twenty-nine, of which eight came in the swashbuckling Champions League campaign that culminated in the glorious triumph over Hitzfeld’s Bayern Munich in Barcelona. Though there could hardly have been a more extraordinary climax to any football match, it was somehow in keeping with the season that United’s late, late goals should have come from substitutes, Sheringham and Solskjær. For this was a season in which everybody chipped in, very much a squad effort and proof that Ferguson had developed a rare insight into the art of chopping and changing.
Among those who filled in was yet another Norwegian. Henning Berg had come, like Sheringham, the previous summer, a £5 million buy from Blackburn, where he had won the title. He was to feature in two title triumphs with United. Like David May, who had also made the short journey from Ewood Park, he could play at right-back or in central defence. Gary Neville had similar versatility, as did the latest big talent to emerge from the youth ranks, Wes Brown, whom Ferguson expected to settle down at centre-back with both United and England. Phil Neville was challenging Irwin at left-back. Jesper Blomqvist, a Swedish left-winger who had done well against United for IFK Gothenburg, had bolstered the Scandinavian contingent and provided an alternative to Giggs.
Among the constants, the pillars alongside Schmeichel, Keane and Beckham, were the new boys. Whoever Ferguson stationed alongside Stam, the defence had the assurance once exuded by Bruce and Pallister. And up front Yorke had a devilish twinkle.
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