Alex Ferguson My Autobiography (19 page)

In the 2009–10 season he did come in for a glass at Anfield, but looked uncomfortable, and, after a short while, said he needed to go, and that was that. To Sammy Lee, his assistant, I said: ‘At least that’s a start.’

On the day Roberto Martínez, manager of Wigan Athletic, was quoted as saying I had ‘friends’ who did my bidding in relation to Benítez (big Sam Allardyce was one he was referring to), Roberto phoned me and put a call into the LMA to ask whether he should make a statement correcting the story. Roberto told me he had no connection with Benítez, who had not helped him in any way. I think Martínez had spoken to a Spanish paper about the way Benítez saw us, his rivals in England, but was not endorsing that view himself. He was merely the messenger. You would think Benítez and Martínez would have struck up an affinity, being the only Spanish managers in England.

Benítez would complain about having no money to spend, but from the day he landed, he doled out more than me. Far more. It amazed me that he used to walk into press conferences and say he had no money to spend. He was given plenty. It was the quality of his buys that let him down. If you set aside Torres and Reina, few of his acquisitions were of true Liverpool standard. There were serviceable players – Mascherano and Kuyt, hard-working players – but not real Liverpool quality. There was no Souness or Dalglish or Ronnie Whelan or Jimmy Case.

Benítez did score two great successes in the transfer market: Pepe Reina, the goalkeeper, and Fernando Torres, their striker. Torres was a very, very talented individual. We watched him many times and tried to sign him when he was 16. We expressed our interest two years before he joined Liverpool, but we always felt that our contact with him would end only in him receiving an improved contract at Atlético Madrid. We watched him in many youth tournaments and always fancied him. He was ingrained in the fabric at Atlético, so I was surprised Liverpool were able to prise him away. Benítez’s Spanish connections must have helped.

Torres was blessed with great cunning: a shrewdness that was borderline Machiavellian. He had a touch of evil, though not in a physical sense, and he had that total change of pace. In a 45-yard sprint he was no faster than several Liverpool players, but he had that change of pace, which can be lethal. His stride was deceptively long. Without warning he would accelerate and slice across you. Conversely, I’m not sure he was at his best when things were going against him because his reactions could become petty. Perhaps he was spoilt at Atlético Madrid, where he was the golden boy for so long. He was captain there at 21.

He had a fine physique: a striker’s height and frame. And he was Liverpool’s best centre-forward since Owen or Fowler. Another star, of course, was Steven Gerrard, who didn’t always play well against Man United, but was capable of winning matches by himself. We made a show for him in the transfer market, as did Chelsea, because the vibe was that he wanted to move from Anfield, but there seemed to be some restraining influence from people outside the club and it reached a dead end.

His move to Chelsea seemed all set up. A question kept nagging at me: why did Benítez not trust Gerrard as a central midfield player? The one thing we could be sure of in my later years against Liverpool was that if their two central midfielders won it off you they would not do much with it. If Gerrard was in there and he won it against you, you knew he had the legs and the ambition to go right forward and hurt you. I could never understand why Liverpool so often neglected to play him centre-mid. In 2008–09, when they finished second with 86 points, they had Alonso to make the passes and Gerrard further up the pitch behind Torres.

Another of our advantages was that they stopped producing homegrown talents. Michael Owen was probably the last. If Michael had joined us at 12 years old, he would have been one of the great strikers. In the year he played in the Malaysian youth finals we had Ronnie Wallwork and John Curtis there on England duty. When they returned I gave them a month off – sent them on holiday. Michael Owen was straight into the Liverpool first team, with no rest and no technical development. Michael improved as a footballer in the two years he had with us. He was terrific in the dressing room and was a nice boy.

I think that lack of rest and technical development in his early years counted against him. By the time Houllier inherited him, he was already formed and was the icon of the team. There was no opportunity by then to take him aside and work on him from a technical point of view. I made a mistake with Michael in the sense that I should have signed him earlier. There would have been no chance of him coming straight to Man United from Liverpool, but we should have stepped in when he left Real Madrid for Newcastle. He’s a fine young man.

Of the other Liverpool players who gave us trouble, Dirk Kuyt was as honest a player as you could meet. I’m sure he was 6 feet 2 inches when he arrived and ended up 5 feet 8 inches because he ran his legs into stumps. I’ve never known a forward player work so hard at defending. Benítez picked him every game. But then, if something happens in the opposition penalty box, will he be sharp enough or is he exhausted from all the scuffling?

Despite my reservations about him as a person and a manager, Benítez persuaded his players to work their socks off for him, so there must be some inspirational quality there: fear, or respect, or skill on his part. You never saw his teams throw in the towel, and he deserves credit for that.

Why did he not do as well as he might have at Anfield, from my perspective? Benítez had more regard for defending and destroying a game than winning it. You can’t be totally successful these days with that approach.

José Mourinho was far more astute in his handling of players. And he has personality. If you saw José and Rafa standing together on the touchline, you knew you could pick the winner. You always had to respect a Liverpool side. The same goes for some of the work Benítez put in, because they were a very hard side to beat, and because he won a European Cup there. There were plus points. He got lucky, but so did I, sometimes.

His mode on the touchline was to constantly move his players around the pitch, but I doubt whether they were always watching him or acting on those instructions. No one could have understood all those gesticulations. On the other hand, with Mourinho, in a Chelsea–Inter match, I noticed the players sprinted over to him, as if to say, ‘What, boss?’ They were attentive to his wishes.

You need a strong manager. That’s vital. And Benítez is strong. He has great faith in himself and he’s sufficiently stubborn to ignore his critics. He does that time and again. But he did win a European Cup, against AC Milan in Istanbul in 2005, which offered him some protection against those who dismissed his methods.

When Milan led 3–0 at half-time in that game, so the story goes, some of the Milan players were already celebrating, pulling on commemorative T-shirts and jigging about. I was told Paolo Maldini and Gennaro ‘Rino’ Gattuso were going crackers, urging their team-mates not to presume the game was over.

Liverpool won the Cup that night with a marvellous show of defiance.

After a brief spell in charge at Anfield, Roy Hodgson gave way to Kenny again and Liverpool embarked on another phase of major rebuilding. Yet few of the signings made in Kenny’s time haunted me at night. We looked at Jordan Henderson a lot and Steve Bruce was unfailingly enthusiastic about him. Against that we noticed that Henderson runs from his knees, with a straight back, while the modern footballer runs from his hips. We thought his gait might cause him problems later in his career.

Stewart Downing cost Liverpool £20 million. He had a talent but he was not the bravest or the quickest. He was a good crosser and striker of the ball. But £20 million? Andy Carroll, who also joined for £35 million, was in our northeast school of excellence, along with Downing and James Morrison, who went on to play for Middlesbrough, West Brom and Scotland. The FA closed it down after complaints from Sunderland and Newcastle. This was at the time academies started. The Carroll signing was a reaction to the Torres windfall of £50 million. Andy’s problem was his mobility, his speed across the ground. Unless the ball is going to be in the box the whole time, it’s very difficult to play the way Andy Carroll does because defenders push out so well these days. You look for movement in the modern striker. Suárez was not quick on his feet but has a fast brain.

The boys Kenny brought in from the youth set-up did well. Jay Spearing, especially, was terrific. As a boy Spearing was a centre-back, with John Flanagan at full-back, and Spearing was easily the best of them: feisty, quick, a leader. You could see he had something. He was all right in the centre of midfield, but it was hard to visualise his long-term future. His physique perhaps counted against him.

Kenny won the League Cup, of course, and reached the final of the FA Cup, but when I heard that he and his assistant Steve Clarke had been summoned to Boston to meet the club’s owners, I feared the worst for them. I don’t think the protest T-shirts and defending Suárez in the Patrice Evra saga helped Kenny. As a manager your head can go in the sand a bit, especially with a great player. If it had been a reserve player rather than Suárez, would Kenny have gone to such lengths to defend him?

The
New York Times
and
Boston Globe
editorials about the subsequent Evra–Suárez non-handshake showed the way the debate was going. Kenny’s problem, I feel, was that too many young people in the club idolised him. Peter Robinson, the club’s chief executive in the glory years, would have stopped the situation escalating to the degree it did. The club has to take precedence over any individual.

The next man in, Brendan Rodgers, was only 39. I was
surprised they gave it to such a young coach. A mistake I felt
John Henry made in Brendan’s first weeks in charge in June 2012 was to sanction a fly-on-the wall documentary designed to reveal the intimacies of life at Liverpool. To put that spotlight on such a young guy was hard and it came across badly. It made no great impact in America, so I could not work out what the point of it was. My understanding is that the players were told they were obliged to give the interviews we saw on our screens.

Brendan certainly gave youth a chance, which was admirable. And he achieved a reasonable response from his squad. I think he knew there had been some sub-standard buys. Henderson and Downing were among those who would need to prove their credentials. In general you have to give players you might not rate a chance.

Our rivalry with Liverpool was so intense. Always. Underpinning the animosity, though, was mutual respect. I was proud of my club the day we marked the publication of the Hillsborough report in 2012: a momentous week for Liverpool and those who had fought for justice. Whatever Liverpool asked for in terms of commemoration, we agreed to, and our hosts made plain their appreciation for our efforts.

I told my players that day – no provocative goal celebrations, and if you foul a Liverpool player, pick him up. Mark Halsey, the referee, struck the right note with his marshalling of the game. Before the kick-off, Bobby Charlton emerged with a wreath which he presented to Ian Rush, who laid it at the Hillsborough Memorial by the Shankly Gates. The wreath was composed of 96 roses, one for each Liverpool supporter who died at Hillsborough. Originally, Liverpool wanted me and Ian Rush to perform that ceremony, but I thought Bobby was a more appropriate choice. The day went well, despite some minor slanging at the end by a tiny minority.

For Liverpool to return to the level of us and Manchester City was clearly going to require huge investment. The stadium was another inhibiting factor. The club’s American owners elected to refurbish Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, rather than build a new arena. To construct a major stadium these days is perhaps a £700 million enterprise. Anfield has not moved on. Even the dressing rooms are the same as 20 years ago. At the same time, my reading of their squad was that they needed eight players to come up to title-winning standard. And if you have made mistakes in the transfer market, you often end up giving those players away for very little.

While Brendan Rodgers went about his work, Rafa Benítez and I had not seen the last of one another. He returned to English football as Chelsea’s interim manager when Roberto Di Matteo, who had won the Champions League in May, was sacked in the autumn of 2012. In a United press conference soon after Benítez’s unveiling, I made the point that he was fortunate to inherit ready-made sides.

I felt his record needed placing in context. He won the Spanish League with 51 goals, in 2001–02, which suggested he was a skilled pragmatist. But I found Liverpool hard to watch when he was manager there. I found them dull. It was a surprise to me that Chelsea called him. When Benítez placed his record alongside Di Matteo’s, it would have been two League titles with Valencia, a European Cup and an FA Cup with Liverpool. In six months, Di Matteo had won the FA Cup and the European Cup.

They were comparable records. Yet Rafa had landed on his feet again.

F
ROM
the moment Manchester United became a Plc in 1990, I was certain the club would be bought and taken into private ownership. Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB were the largest of the private bidders before Malcolm Glazer first took a stake in 2003. With our history and our aura, we were too big a prize to be ignored by individual investors. The only surprise to me, when the Glazer family moved in to take control, was that there had not been a host of wealthy suitors.

Once the Glazers had seized their opportunity, Andy Walsh of the United supporters’ group called me to say: ‘You have to resign.’ Andy’s a nice lad but there was no temptation for me to agree to that request. I was the manager, not a director. Nor was I one of the shareholders who had sold the club. The takeover was not down to me in any way.

‘We’ll all be behind you,’ Andy said. My reply was: ‘But what do you think would happen to all my staff?’ The moment I left, most of my assistants would have been out as well. Some had been with me for 20 years. The impact made on others when a manager changes his position is sometimes lost on those outside the circle.

It was a worrying time, I admit. One of my concerns was how much money we might have to invest in the team. But I had to be confident both in my own ability to spot good players and the structure of the organisation. The Glazers were buying a good solid club and they understood that from the start.

My first contact was a phone call from the father, Malcolm. Two weeks later his sons Joel and Avi came over to set out their position. They told me there would be no changes to the way the football side was run. In their view, the club was in good hands. I was a successful manager. They had no concerns. They were totally behind me. All the things I wanted to hear from them, I heard that day. I know there is always an element of window dressing. People tell you everything is fine, then make a million alterations. People lose their jobs; there are cutbacks because debts need to be repaid. But United stayed solid under the new ownership, irrespective of the borrowings people talked about and the interest payments incurred.

Over the years, several supporter groups challenged me to define my stance in relation to the club’s debts and my answer was always: ‘I’m the manager. I’m working for a club owned by people in America.’ That was my standpoint. I never thought it sensible to upset the management side of the club by adding to the debate on models of ownership. If the Glazers had taken a more confrontational path, then it might have been different – if, for example, they had instructed me to get rid of one of my coaches. Any changes that might have undermined my ability to run the club would have altered the whole dynamic, but there was never that kind of pressure. So do you throw down your tools because some supporters want you to walk away from a lifetime’s work?

When I first joined United, there was a group of supporters known as the Second Board. They would meet in the Grill Room and decide what they thought was wrong with Manchester United. Back then, when my position was more fragile, I was more attuned to the damage that might be done to my position should they turn against me. Other United managers before me had felt the same way. In my playing days at Rangers, a group of powerful fans travelled with the first team and were influential lobbyists. At United there was a larger array of supporters’ voices. In disgust at the Glazer takeover, some handed in their season tickets and started FC United of Manchester.

There is a price to pay when you support a football club, and the price is that you can’t win every game. You are not going to be a manager for a lifetime. United are lucky to have had two for half a century. With losing and winning games, the emotions rise and fall. Football naturally generates dissent. I remember us losing a game at Rangers and the supporters throwing bricks through the windows.

There was no reason, beyond my age, for the Glazers to consider a change of manager in the summer of 2005. I never considered that possibility, never felt under threat.

The tens of millions of pounds paid out in interest to service the loans did arouse protective feelings towards the club. I understood that, but at no stage did it translate into pressure to sell a player or excessive caution on the purchasing front. One of their strengths was their commercial department in London, which brought in dozens of sponsorships globally. We had Turkish airlines, telephone companies in Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Thailand, beer companies in the Far East. That sucked in tens of millions and helped service the debt. On the football side we generated huge earnings. The 76,000 crowds helped a great deal.

So at no stage was I held back by the Glazer ownership. Often we would lose interest in a player because the transfer fee or wage demands had become silly. Those decisions were taken by me and David Gill. There was no edict from above to spend only in line with the club’s debts.

Instead our galaxy went on expanding. From 2007 more foreign talent poured into Carrington from South America, Portugal and Bulgaria. No imported player in those years attracted more attention than Carlos Tévez, who was at the heart of a major controversy over the relegation of Sheffield United from the Premier League and was to end up in opposition to us at Manchester City, staring down from that provocative billboard in his sky-blue shirt, underneath the message: ‘Welcome to Manchester.’

The tale begins when Tévez was at West Ham and David Gill was receiving calls from his agent, Kia Joorabchian, saying the boy would love to play for Man United. We had heard that kind of story many times. It was almost routine for agents to call saying their client had a special feeling for our crest. My advice was that we should not involve ourselves in any complicated dealings with the Tévez camp. David agreed. It was clear that a consortium of people owned the player. But, to David, I also remarked: ‘He does make an impact in games with his energy and he has a decent scoring record. It would depend what the deal was.’

David told me he could acquire Tévez on loan for two years, for a fee. That was the way it turned out and Carlos did well for us in his first season. He scored a lot of important goals, against Lyon, Blackburn, Tottenham and Chelsea. There was a real enthusiasm and energy about him. He wasn’t blessed with great pace and wasn’t a great trainer. He would always like a wee break, saying his calf was sore. In the context of the way we prepared, that sometimes annoyed us. We wanted to see a genuine desire to train all the time. Top players have that. But Tévez compensated quite well with his enthusiasm in games.

In the 2008 European Cup final in Moscow, he played and scored in the penalty shoot-out against Chelsea. He was our first taker. In the game itself, I took Rooney off and left Tévez on because he was playing better than Wayne. What planted a doubt in my mind was that in his second season I signed Dimitar Berbatov, and the emphasis was on Berbatov and Rooney as our forward partnership.

Watching Dimitar at Tottenham, I felt he would make a difference because he had a certain composure and awareness that we lacked among our group of strikers. He displayed the ability of Cantona or Teddy Sheringham: not lightning quick, but he could lift his head and make a creative pass. I thought he could bring us up a level and extend our range of talents.

So Berbatov’s arrival relegated Tévez to more of a backup role. And around December in his second season, we started to feel he wasn’t doing especially well. The reason, I think, was that he’s the type of animal that needs to play all the time. If you’re not training intensively, which he wasn’t, you need to play regularly. During that winter, David Gill asked, ‘What do you want to do?’ I felt we ought to wait until later in the season to make a decision. ‘They want one now,’ David said.

I replied, ‘Just tell them I’m trying to get him more games so we can assess it properly, because Berbatov is in the team a lot.’

Tévez did influence plenty of outcomes in the second half of the 2008–09 campaign, especially against Spurs at home, when we were 2–0 down, and I sent him on to shake things up. He chased absolutely everything. He brought huge enthusiasm to the cause and was the one responsible for us winning that match 5–2. His impact changed the course of events.

The 2009 Champions League semi-final pitted us against Arsenal and I was playing a three of Ronaldo, Rooney and Park. That was my chosen group for the final and apparently Tévez was not impressed. We made a mess of the final in Rome against Barcelona. We chose a bad hotel. It was a shambles. We have to hold our hands up about our poor planning.

Anyway, I brought Tévez on at half-time and just felt he was playing for himself a bit. From what I could gather, he had already made his mind up before joining City. After the game in Rome he said to me: ‘You never showed any great desire to sign me permanently.’ I explained that I had to see how the season played out and that he hadn’t played enough games for me to be sure. David offered the £25 million fee for him, but from what I can gather it was as if he were talking to the wall. That led us to think he had already elected to move across town.

The rumour, not confirmed, was that our Manchester rivals had paid £47 million. Tévez spoke to Chelsea at some point, too, and I think his advisers played one against the other. The word was that Chelsea offered £35 million but that City outbid them. To me these were incredible sums. I wouldn’t have paid that kind of money, fine player though he was. To me he was an impact maker. It was a mistake on my part, in the sense that Berbatov was a player I fancied strongly and I wanted to see him succeed. But he is also the sort who wants to be assured he is a great player. The conundrum with him and Tévez was always there.

There was no disciplinary problem with Tévez of the sort Roberto Mancini encountered when the boy declined to warm up for City, apparently, in a Champions League game in Germany, but there was a major hoo-ha over his supposed role in Sheffield United’s demotion to the Championship in 2007. Tévez’s goals had been saving West Ham from relegation when they came to our ground at the end of that season. They were fined for breaching third-party ownership rules with Tévez, but no points were deducted by the Premier League. Inevitably Tévez scored against us for West Ham, which helped send Sheffield United down, and Neil Warnock, their manager, tried to load the blame on us for playing a supposedly weakened team against the Hammers.

We had a Cup final the week after that West Ham game. Our squad was one of the strongest in the League and I had been changing the team all season according to circumstance. If you watch that match, we had two or three penalties turned down and their goalkeeper had a fantastic game. They broke away and Tévez scored. West Ham were never in the game. We battered them. I brought on Ronaldo, Rooney and Giggs in the second half but still we couldn’t knock them over.

Meanwhile Mr Warnock accuses us of throwing the game away. In their last game they faced Wigan at home and all they needed was a draw. In early January, Warnock had let David Unsworth go on a free transfer to Wigan, and Unsworth takes the penalty kick that knocks Sheffield United out of the Premier League. Could anyone with an open mind not say: I made a mess of that, there? Has he ever looked at himself in the mirror and said, ‘All we needed was a draw at home and we weren’t good enough to take a point off Wigan?’ The accusation was ridiculous.

In January 2007 we acquired a real aristocrat – for a two-month spell, at any rate. Louis Saha had returned at the start of the season full of promise but picked up another injury. In October Jim Lawlor, United’s chief scout, pointed out to us that it was a waste for Henrik Larsson to be playing in Sweden when he still had so much to offer on a bigger stage. Helsingborgs, where Henrik was playing, would not sell him, but I asked Jim to ask their chairman what they would think about him coming on loan in January. Henrik pushed the boat in that direction with his employers.

On arrival at United, he seemed a bit of a cult figure with our players. They would say his name in awed tones. For a man of 35 years of age, his receptiveness to information on the coaching side was amazing. At every session he was rapt. He wanted to listen to Carlos, the tactics lectures; he was into every nuance of what we did.

In training he was superb: his movement, his positional play. His three goals for us were no measure of his contribution. In his last game in our colours at Middlesbrough, we were winning 2–1 and Henrik went back to play in midfield and ran his balls off. On his return to the dressing room, all the players stood up and applauded him, and the staff joined in. It takes some player to make that kind of impact in two months. Cult status can vanish in two minutes if a player isn’t doing his job, yet Henrik retained that aura in his time with us. He looked a natural Man United player, with his movement and courage. He also had a great spring for a little lad.