Ferguson, Alex - Alex Ferguson My Autobiography

Berbatov was surprisingly lacking in self-assurance. He never had the Cantona or Andy Cole peacock quality, or the confidence of Teddy Sheringham. Hernández also had high confidence: he was bright and breezy. Berbatov was not short of belief in his ability, but it was based on his way of playing. Because we functioned at a certain speed, he was not really tuned into it. He was not that type of quick-reflex player. He wants the game to go slow and to work his way into the box in his own time. Or he’ll do something outside the area and link the play. His assets were considerable. Although we had a few inquiries for him in the summer of 2011, I was not prepared to let him go at that stage. We had spent £30 million on him and I was not willing to write that off just because he had missed a few big games the previous season. We might as well keep him and use him.

In training he practised getting to the ball faster. But when the play broke down he was inclined to walk. You couldn’t do that at our place. We had to regroup quickly or we would be too open, with too many players up the pitch. We needed people to react to us losing the ball so the opposition would be under pressure quickly. But he was capable of great moments. He also had a huge appetite, of Nicky Butt proportions. Head down at meal-times, and sometimes with food to take home as well.

Berbatov wouldn’t have featured in the Wembley game, even if he had been on the bench. I had been forced to take off Fábio and send on Nani, which left me with only two options. I wanted to get Scholes on because I needed an experienced player to orchestrate our passing, so Paul came on for Carrick. We had talked about Scholesy’s retirement for many months and I had tried to talk him round, to entice him with one more season, but his view was that 25 games a season were not enough. He also admitted his legs tended to be empty in the last 25–30 minutes. He had survived two knee operations and an eye problem that had kept him out for months at a time, yet he was still playing at that high level. Phenomenal.

The goal he scored at his testimonial that summer was a beauty. He gave Brad Friedel in goal no hope. It was a rocket. Eric Cantona, the visiting manager, was applauding. On Talksport later I heard a presenter say Paul wasn’t in the top four of modern English players. His assertion was that Gascoigne, Lampard and Gerrard were all better players. Absolute nonsense.

After our second Champions League final defeat to Barcelona, I had to ask: what is the problem here? Fact No. 1is that some of our players fell below the level they were capable of. A contributing factor might have been that we were accustomed to having most of the possession in games. When that advantage transferred itself to the opposition it might have damaged our confidence and concentration. There was some credence in the theory that our players were unsettled by having to play a subservient role: even a player such as Giggs, or Ji-Sung Park, who, in the quarter-final against Chelsea, tackled everybody and was up and down the pitch all day. We never saw him, in that way, against Barcelona, whose starting XI was: Valdés; Alves, Piqué, Abidal, Mascherano; Busquets, Xavi, Iniesta; Messi, Villa and Pedro.

They took the lead through Pedro from one of Xavi’s countless clever passes but Rooney equalised for us after a quick exchange with Giggs. But then the Barcelona carousel really started spinning, with Messi at the controls. He and Villa scored the goals that finished us off in Van der Sar’s last game for the club.

I made an error at half-time. I was still focusing on winning the game and told Rooney he needed to keep running into those gaps behind the full-backs. ‘We’ll win the game if you keep doing that,’ I urged him. I forgot the big issue with playing Barcelona. So many of their games were effectively won in the first 15 minutes of the second half. I should have mentioned that to my players. I might have been better assigning Park to mark Messi for the first 15 minutes and pushing Rooney wide left. If we had employed those tactics, we might just have sneaked it. We would still have been able to counter-attack. Those changes would have left Busquets free, so maybe we would have been driven back towards our box, but we’d have posed more of a threat, with Rooney attacking from a wide left position.

I had intended to replace Valencia after 10 minutes of the second half, but then Fábio was attacked by cramps again and I was forced to re-jig around his injury. My luck in finals was generally good. Favour deserted me in this one. On the balance of all those big games and the success I had enjoyed, I could hardly start pitying myself at Wembley, the scene of United’s win over Benfica in 1968.

We thought we might have a chance at corner kicks but they never came our way. As our defeat was confirmed, there was no smugness about Barcelona. Not once did they flaunt their superiority. Xavi’s first move after the final whistle was to make a move for Scholes’ jersey. Footballers should have a role model. They should be saying to themselves: ‘He’s where I want to get to.’ I had it with Denis Law. Denis was a year and a half older than me and I looked at him and said, ‘That’s what I want to be.’

In the days after that loss I began taking a serious look at the coaching in our academy. Gary Neville, Paul Scholes and I exchanged a lot of opinions. I looked at appointing another technical coach to the academy. Our club was always capable of producing great players and Barcelona’s next wave were not better than ours. No way. Thiago was on a par with Welbeck and Cleverley but there was no fear about the rest of theirs coming through.

Looking ahead is vital. We were on to Phil Jones long before that Champions League final. I tried to buy him in 2010 but Blackburn would not sell. Ashley Young was bought to replace Giggs. The goalkeeping situation was all settled in December. Granted, David de Gea had a torrid start to his United career, but he would develop. Smalling and Evans were outstanding prospects. We had Fábio and Rafael, and Welbeck and Cleverley were coming through; Nani was 24, Rooney 25. We had a nucleus of young talent.

We shed five that summer because with Jones joining it wasn’t going to be easy for Wes Brown or John O’Shea to make the starting XI. They were good servants to me. The horrible part of management is telling people who have given their all for you that there is no longer a place for them in your plans. After the Premier League title parade, in the rain, we returned to the school from where we had started the procession. I spoke to Darron Gibson and asked him how he saw his future. Perhaps it wasn’t the perfect place to begin that discussion, but he got the gist of what I was thinking. He was off on holiday that night so we needed to start the conversation. Wes Brown, I struggled to reach by telephone. It was horrible to let players of that experience and loyalty to me go.

I lost five players aged 30 and above and let Owen Hargreaves go. We were bringing back Welbeck, Cleverley, Mame Diouf and Macheda from loan spells, and signing three new players. The average age of the squad was reduced to around 24.

With Scholes and Neville, my plan was to let them roam about the place, with the youth team, academy and reserves, then the three of us would sit down for an assessment of how strong we were. I was going to place a big burden on them to shape the future, because they knew better than anyone what it took to be one of our players. It’s something I’d wanted to do for years and years: feed my top players into the stream.

Scholes was a man of excellent opinions. His assessments were brilliant. Always in one line. There were no maybes. When we had a problem with Van Nistelrooy, Paul was instantly clear that Ruud could not be allowed to cause disruption. His language was blunt. Gary asked him, ‘Are you sure, Scholesy?’ – just winding him up.