Ferguson, Alex - Alex Ferguson My Autobiography

‘That’s the problem,’ Gary said. ‘He doesn’t want to come to you.’ Phil lacked Gary’s directness, you see.

I invited Phil out to the house for a talk. He came with his wife Julie. At first I didn’t notice her in the car. ‘Cathy, go and bring Julie in,’ I said. But when Cathy got out there, Julie began crying. ‘We don’t want to leave Man United,’ she was saying. ‘We love being at the club.’ Cathy took her a cup of tea, but she wouldn’t come into the house. I think she was worried she might break down and embarrass her husband.

My point to Phil was that I was doing him more harm than good with the way I was using him. He agreed. He told me he needed to move on. I left him to work out how he would approach that with his wife.

When they had left, Cathy said: ‘You’re not going to let him go, are you? You can’t let people like that go.’

‘Cathy,’ I said, ‘it’s for his own good. Do you not understand? It’s killing me more than it’s killing him.’

I let him go cheaply, for £3.6 million. He was worth double that, because he could play five positions for you – in either of the full-back positions or all across the midfield. He even played centre-half for Everton, when Phil Jagielka and Joseph Yobo were injured.

Letting Nicky Butt go was similarly traumatic, although Nicky had no problem standing up for himself. Nicky was a cheeky sod. Gorton boy. Great lad. He would fight your shadow, would Nicky.

He would come in and say: ‘Why am I not playing?’

That was Nicky. I loved that. And I would say, ‘Nicky, you’re not playing because I think Scholes and Keane are better than you.’ Sometimes, away from home, I would put him in ahead of Scholesy. In the Champions League semi-final at Juventus, for example, I played Butt instead of Scholes. Scholes and Keane were on two bookings and I couldn’t afford to risk them both missing the final, though in the event both missed out through suspension. I brought Scholes on for Butt when Nicky picked up an injury – and Paul was booked. In the end I sold Nicky to Bobby Robson at Newcastle for £2 million. What a great buy that was.

The clouds began to clear in 2002 with the 5–3 win over Newcastle at the end of November. Diego Forlán, who had taken 27 games to score his first goal for us – a penalty against Maccabi Haifa – was a factor in our 2–1 win at Liverpool, after Jamie Carragher had headed the ball back to Jerzy Dudek and Forlán had nipped in to score. We then beat Arsenal 2–0 and Chelsea 2–1, with Forlán again scoring the decisive goal. On the training ground that winter, we worked intensively on our defensive shape.

In February 2003 we lost an FA Cup fifth-round tie 2–0 at home to Arsenal. It was the game in which Ryan Giggs missed an open goal, lifting the ball over the bar with his right foot, when the net was undefended. ‘Well, Giggsy,’ I told him, ‘you’ve scored the best-ever goal in the FA Cup, and now you’ve added the best-ever miss.’ He had all the time in the world. He could have walked the ball into the net.

That game, which sent me into a fury, was to have more serious implications for my relationship with another graduate of the 1992 FA Youth Cup winning side. A butterfly plaster was involved, but it couldn’t heal the wound. The boot I kicked in anger just happened to fly straight at David Beckham’s eyebrow.

After losing the Carling Cup final to Liverpool, we ran into another major rival from that period. By the end of my time as manager, Leeds United were nowhere to be seen on the list of threats, but in the spring of 2003 they were a menace, although we won that match 2–1. I should say a few words about our rivalry with Leeds, which was disturbingly intense.

When I first arrived in Manchester I knew about the derby games with City and the clashes with United’s Merseyside rivals, Everton and Liverpool. I knew nothing of the animosity between United and Leeds. In the old first division, Archie Knox and I went to see Crystal Palace beat Leeds.

It was 0–0 at half-time. The second half was all Leeds. With 20 minutes to go, Leeds had a penalty turned down and the crowd were going crackers. A Leeds fan began shouting at me: ‘You, you Manc bastard.’

‘What’s that all about, Archie?’ I said.

‘No idea,’ Archie replied.

So I looked for a steward. The directors’ box at Leeds is small and the fans are all around you. Palace went to the other end and scored. That’s when the crowd really lost it. Archie wanted us to leave but I insisted we stay. Palace scored again, and that’s when our new friend hit me in the back with a Bovril cup. The abuse was astonishing. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said to Archie.

The next day I was speaking to our kit man at the time, Norman Davies. He said: ‘I told you about Leeds. It’s pure hatred.’

‘Where does that come from?’

‘The sixties,’ Norman said.

Leeds used to have a commissionaire called Jack who would come on the bus as we arrived at Elland Road and announce, like the town crier, ‘On behalf of the directors, players and supporters of Leeds United, welcome to Elland Road,’ and I would mutter: ‘That’ll be right.’

Some of the fans would have their kids on their shoulders, radiating the most incredible hatred. In the semi-final of the League Cup at Leeds in 1991, they did give us a bit of a battering in the second half, but Lee Sharpe had broken away, at 0–0, with two minutes to go, to score. It looked 10 yards offside. I was on the pitch, Eric Harrison was in the dug-out. A lot of people think Eric looks like me. One Leeds supporter certainly did, because he whacked Eric. Absolutely panned him. The guy thought he was hitting me. On came the fans. Pandemonium. And yet there was something about the hostile atmosphere at Elland Road that I quite liked.

In the Peter Ridsdale years, when Leeds were ‘living the dream’, as the chairman later put it, I sensed the club was built on sand. When I heard what kind of wages they were paying, my alarm bells rang. When we sold them Lee Sharpe, I believe they doubled Lee’s wages, on a 35,000 crowd.

But they constructed a useful team. Alan Smith, Harry Kewell, David Batty. Back in 1992, they won the League with one of the most average teams ever to win the title, but they were as committed as it’s possible to be. And they were superbly managed by Howard Wilkinson. A decade later, we would hear about the boy from Derby joining them, Seth Johnson, and him discussing with his agent what they were going to ask for. The story goes that the sum they came up with was £25,000. Leeds’ offer was apparently £35,000 a week, climbing to £40–45,000.

Clubs don’t learn these lessons. The emotions of the game trap you.

I remember a local Manchester businessman coming to me and saying: ‘I’m thinking of buying Birmingham City, what do you think?’

I said, ‘If you’ve got a hundred million pounds to risk, go ahead.’

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘they’re only eleven million in debt.’

‘But have you seen the stadium?’ I replied. ‘You’ll need a new stadium, for maybe sixty million, and then forty million to get them into the Premier League.’

People try to apply to football the usual principles of business. But it’s not a lathe, it’s not a milling machine, it’s a collection of human beings. That’s the difference.

We faced some seismic fixtures before that season’s end. A 4–0 home win over Liverpool – Sami Hyypiä was sent off in the fifth minute for stopping Van Nistelrooy’s run on goal – led us into a Champions League tie against Real Madrid. In the first of our games against Madrid, Van Nistelrooy was our only scorer. Luis Figo and Raul, twice, left us facing a 3–1 deficit in the home leg, for which I left Beckham on the bench. This was an epic game, watched, the story goes, by Roman Abramovich, who was inspired by our 4–3 win, and the hat-trick by Brazilian striker Ronaldo, to seek his own involvement in the great global drama by buying Chelsea.