Ferguson, Alex - Alex Ferguson My Autobiography

Of all the centre-forwards we employed, when you talk about their talents (two-footed, good in the air, spring, speed, power), Saha would be one of the best. He posed a perpetual threat. But then came the injuries. Louis, who lived about 50 yards from me, and was a lovely lad, had to be 150 per cent to play. It was agony for us. And it wasn’t a case of him being out for weeks; it tended to be months. The reason for selling him was that no matter how talented he was, I could never plan around him, could never say, ‘This is my team for the next two or three years.’ Saha was young enough to be viewed in that way, as a cornerstone player, but the uncertainty caused by his constant non-availability rendered it impossible to look far down the line.

It became so vexing to him that he considered retiring. ‘You’re a young man, you don’t give in because of an injury, you’ve just got to work to get back. This can’t last forever,’ I told him.

He was assailed by guilt. He thought he was letting us down. He would send me apologetic texts to that effect. I tried to impress on him that he had been unlucky, and that unlucky players could be found throughout footballing history. Viv Anderson was one. When we were assessing Viv’s playing record at Arsenal, we noticed that in four years he missed four games. Suspension, every time. Viv came to us and was never fit. We gave him a free transfer to Sheffield Wednesday and he played there for three years and hardly missed a game. I used to give him stick about that. I’d say, ‘I don’t think you wanted to play for me.’ He’s a big United fan and was desperate to shine for us, but was halted by persistent knee trouble.

Louis knew his injuries were hampering his form, and that’s where the guilt complex began biting away at him. Carlos devised a two-week programme for him to enable him to be fully ready in a fortnight. This was tailored work, which he did on his own. We explained that to him, and he embraced it – shooting, turning, and generally throwing himself into these preparatory exercises. He was flying. Friday, the day before the game, and Saha walks off, saying he had felt something in his hamstring. We were never going to conquer that physical sensitivity, so we reached a deal with Everton in 2008.

Everton copied our approach and tried to raise Louis to a level where he would be confident of playing. It might have helped him to be away from the pressure of Manchester United. He was a fantastic centre-forward, though. In the 2009–10 season, I thought France would be mad not to take him to the World Cup.

A constant in our discussions about young players – in terms of whether they could handle the demands of the Old Trafford crowd and the short patience span of the media – was temperament. Would they grow or shrink in a United shirt? We knew the make-up of every young homegrown player who came into the United starting XI, from the training ground, from reserve team football.

You can’t leave your character in the dressing room. It has to come out of that room, down the tunnel and onto that pitch.

In the 2003–04 season we finished third in the League behind the Invincibles of Arsenal, but finished off with a 3–0 win over Millwall in the FA Cup final in Cardiff. Ronaldo was majestic in that match, scoring our first goal with a header before Van Nistelrooy added two more, one from the penalty spot.

The year had been overshadowed by the death of Jimmy Davis in a road accident. Jimmy, 21, was one of those bright, breezy individuals. He had a chance too. He would have had a career in the game. We had loaned him to Watford. On the way to an academy game at our place that Saturday morning, I heard that Watford’s game that afternoon had been postponed. There were no details given. Then I was told, at the academy game, of Jimmy’s death in a road accident.

He was a tenacious wee lad, very popular. A large number from the club attended his funeral. Two years later, at a wedding, I felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. As the photographs were being taken outside, the minister came over to me and said, ‘Would you like to come round and see Jimmy’s grave?’ I hadn’t made the connection, and it chilled me to the core. It was so sad. He would not be forgotten by Manchester United.

eight

CRISTIANO Ronaldo was the most gifted player I managed. He surpassed all the other great ones I coached at United. And I had many. The only ones who could be placed near him would be a couple of the home-produced players, Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs, because they contributed so prodigiously to Manchester United for two decades. That longevity, consistency and those behaviour patterns were quite exceptional.

We lost our wizard, Cristiano, to Real Madrid, in the end, but we looked back at his time with us with pride and gratitude. In six seasons with us, from 2003 to 2009, he scored 118 times in 292 games and won the Champions League, three Premier League titles, one FA Cup and two League Cups. He scored in the 2008 Champions League final, against Chelsea in Moscow, and kicked a ball for us for the final time 12 months later, in the final against Barcelona in Rome.

In between we watched a special talent bloom on our training pitches at Carrington and in our first XI, which passed through a lean spell in the middle years of the decade. We helped Ronaldo to be the player he was and he helped us recapture the excitement and self-expression of Manchester United teams.

Madrid paid £80 million in cash for him, and do you know why? It was a way for Florentino Pérez, their president, to say to the world, ‘We are Real Madrid, we are the biggest of the lot.’ It was a clever move by them and a declaration of their intent to chase the game’s most famous players.

Ramón Calderón, Pérez’s predecessor, had claimed the previous year that Cristiano would one day be a Real Madrid player. I knew full well that if they produced the £80 million, he would have to go. We could not block his fervent wish to return to Iberia and wear the famous white shirt of Di Stefano or Zidane. The reality of managing Ronaldo, as of other talents who came to Manchester United as teenagers, was that you could oversee the early years fairly comfortably, because they were not yet global idols, they were on the way up. At the point they became mega-stars, as Ronaldo did, you asked yourself a question that Carlos Queiroz and I discussed all the time: ‘How long are we going to be able to keep Cristiano Ronaldo?’

Carlos was as accurate as it was possible to be. He said: ‘Alex, if you get five years out of him, you’ve struck gold. There’s no precedent for a Portuguese player going to another country at seventeen years old and staying five years.’ The fact that we had him for six was a bonus. In that period we won a European Cup and three League titles with him. I consider that a pretty good return.

When the possibility of him leaving edged towards being a probability, I reached a gentleman’s agreement with him. I went to Carlos’s house in Portugal to find the boy expressing an urge to go to Real Madrid, and told him: ‘You can’t go this year, not after the way Calderón has approached this issue.’ I said, ‘I know you want to go to Real Madrid. But I’d rather shoot you than sell you to that guy now. If you perform, don’t mess us about, and someone comes and offers us a world record fee, then we will let you go.’ I had already conveyed that message to his agent Jorge Mendes.

I did well to calm him down. I told him that the reason I was refusing to sell him that year was because of Calderón. I said, ‘If I do that, all my honour’s gone, everything’s gone for me, and I don’t care if you have to sit in the stands. I know it won’t come to that, but I just have to tell you I will not let you leave this year.’