Alex Ferguson My Autobiography (30 page)

There were times in the first half of that season when we couldn’t have defended a sandcastle. We conceded way too many times for my liking before tightening up from January onwards. The goalkeeping position was complicated. De Gea developed a tooth infection and needed an operation to remove his two rear molars. He missed a couple of games on that account and Anders Lindegaard didn’t do anything wrong in the No. 1 spot. He had a good game at Galatasary and against West Ham. My message to De Gea was that I needed to be fair to Anders. But after our narrow 4–3 win at Reading on 1 December, De Gea came back in and did well throughout the second half of the season, especially in the 1–1 draw at Real Madrid in February, where he was brilliant.

I still had high hopes for Javier Hernández. The issue with Chicharito was freshness. For three seasons in a row he played all summer with his country. Despite that we cooperated well with Mexico. The presidents of their FA and Olympic association came over, with their coaches, for a meeting with me. I showed them the medical file. Under discussion was whether he could play in two World Cup qualifiers as well as the Olympics.

Chicharito said, ‘I’d rather miss the other two games and play in the Olympics because I think we’ll win it.’ I thought he was joking.

He went on, ‘If we don’t get Brazil in the quarter-finals, we’ll win it.’

Meanwhile we had invested heavily in a marvellous new medical centre for Carrington. We can now do everything on site, apart from operations. We had a chiropodist, dentist, scanners, everything. The benefit was that, apart from having it all on site, injuries would not become instant public knowledge. In the past we might send a player to hospital and rumours would flash round the city. This told you we weren’t standing still. It might have been one of our best buys.

A major incident from that season requires a mention: the allegation, later dismissed by the authorities, that referee Mark Clattenburg had used racist language against Chelsea players in our 3–2 victory at Stamford Bridge on 28 October. A word about the game, first: against Di Matteo’s Chelsea we needed to work out how we would operate against Juan Mata, Oscar and Eden Hazard. Those three were hammering teams and turning on the style. The two sitting midfielders, Ramires and Mikel, were bombing on. We elected to load the right side to attack the areas they had vacated by attacking us, and squeeze Mata’s space.

It was a thrilling game until the shenanigans at the end of the match. When Fernando Torres was sent off, Steve Holland, one of Di Matteo’s assistants, blamed me. I looked at him, bemused. Mike Dean, the fourth official, could make no sense of Holland’s accusation. Torres should already have been sent off in the first half for a tackle on Cleverley.

When Hernández scored the winning goal, half a seat came on and hit Carrick on the foot, along with lighters and coins.

I still wonder whether the Clattenburg allegation was a smokescreen to obscure the crowd trouble.

Twenty minutes after the game, I went in with my staff for a drink, and in that wee room were Bruce Buck, the Chelsea chairman, Ron Gourlay, the chief executive, Di Matteo and his wife. You could sense an atmosphere. Something wasn’t right. We stood in the doorway and thought it wise to leave them to it.

The food was covered and the wine was uncorked. They said, ‘Help yourselves,’ and left the room.

My own staff had seen Mikel fly into the referee’s room with John Terry and Di Matteo. Whoever told Mikel that Clattenburg had said something inflammatory was making a big call. It was also a big move by Chelsea to inform the press pretty much straight away that an alleged incident had been reported. A lawyer might have sat back and said, ‘Let’s wait until tomorrow.’

The Branislav Ivanovi
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sending-off in that game was perfectly straightforward. Torres went down easily but Evans did catch him. When you see where Clattenburg was, you can why he sent him off for simulation. He took one step, then went down. A toe is enough to fell a player moving at speed, but Torres did go over softly. I’ve no idea why Holland thought I had forced Clattenburg to send him off. A few days later, Di Matteo announced that I had too much power with referees.

I had run-ins with match officials all my life. I was sent off eight times as a player. I was sent to the stands three or four times as a manager in Scotland. I was fined so many times in England. I always had disputes of one sort or another. But I called it as I saw it. I never went out of my way to drop a referee in the soup.

There is no way, in my mind, that a top referee would be racist to a player. I called Mark Clattenburg and said, ‘I’m just sorry we are the other team involved in this.’ I was poised for someone in authority to bring us into the inquiry, which fortunately never happened. I had no knowledge of it until we boarded the plane back to Manchester. The FA took a hell of a long time to reach the decision that Mark was innocent. It could have been concluded in two days.

From January 2013 we really motored on in the League, piling pressure on Man City all the way. For me, knowing I was standing down, the sense of release and relief was delayed until the night we beat Aston Villa to win the title. We were going to win it anyway, but to finish the job in April, on our own ground, was immensely comforting. I would go out with a bang. I continued to make my team talks and prepare for games properly. The professionalism of Manchester United remained intact.

The only disappointment, of course, was losing our Champions League round of 16 tie to Real Madrid, in a game that featured a ludicrous sending-off for Nani by Cüneyt Çakir, the Turkish referee, for an innocuous challenge. In Spain in the first leg we had been terrific, weathering a 20-minute storm at the start of the match. We could have won by six. I held no fear of facing José Mourinho’s team again at home. Our preparation was perfect. We devised a good plan for the game, our energy was terrific and we forced three or four great saves from their goalkeeper. David de Gea barely made a stop.

Nani was sent off in the 56th minute for leaping to meet the ball and making slight contact with Álvaro Arbeloa, and for ten minutes we were up against it. We were in shock. On came Modri
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for Real to equalise Sergio Ramos’s own goal and then Ronaldo finished us in the 69th minute. But we might have scored five in the last ten minutes. It was an absolute disaster.

I was particularly upset that night and gave the post-match press conference a miss. If we had beaten Real Madrid, there would have been every reason to imagine we could win the competition. I left Wayne out of that second leg because we needed someone to get on top of Alonso and play off him. The Ji-Sung Park of earlier years would have been perfect for that job. Andrea Pirlo’s passing rate for Milan had been 75 per cent. When we played them with Ji-Sung Park in the hounding role we reduced Pirlo’s strike rate to 25 per cent. There was no better player in our squad to keep on top of Alonso than Danny Welbeck. Yes, we sacrificed Wayne’s possible goal-scoring, but we knew we had to choke Alonso and exploit that gain.

Ronaldo was wonderful in those two games. In the Madrid leg he made his way into our dressing room to sit with our players. You could tell he missed them. After the Old Trafford game, as I was watching the video of the sending-off, he came in to sympathise. The Real players knew the sending-off had been absurd. Mesut Özil confessed to one of our players that José’s team felt they had got out of jail. Cristiano declined to celebrate his goal, which is just as well, because I would have strangled him. There were no issues with him at all. He’s a very nice boy.

My final thought on Man City losing the title to us was that they couldn’t call on enough players who understood the significance of what they had achieved by winning the League for the first time for 44 years. Evidently it was enough for some of them to have beaten Manchester United in a title race. They settled down into a sense of relief. Retaining a title is the next hard step and City were not in the right state of mind to defend what they had won on the most dramatic closing day in Premier League history.

When I won the League for the first time in 1993, I didn’t want my team to slacken off. The thought appalled me. I was determined to keep advancing, to strengthen our hold on power. I told that 1993 side: ‘Some people, when they have a holiday, just want to go to Saltcoats, twenty-five miles along the coast from Glasgow. Some people don’t even want to do that. They’re happy to stay at home or watch the birds and the ducks float by in the park. And some want to go to the moon.

‘It’s about people’s ambitions.’

Games 31

Goals: 15

Games: 47

Goals: 21

Games: 131

Goals: 88

Played for Scottish League (0) v. Football League (3) at Hampden Park, 15 March 1967.

Scottish FA XI summer tour 13 May–15 June 1967: scored 10 goals in seven appearances against Israel, Hong Kong Select, Australia (three matches), Auckland XI, Vancouver All Stars.

Games: 66

Goals: 35

Played for Scottish League (2) v. Irish League (0) in Belfast, 6 September 1967. Scored one goal.

Games: 122

Goals: 49

Games: 22

Goals: 10

Total

Games: 415

Goals: 218

(Scottish League, Scottish Cup, Scottish League Cup and European competitions only)

Finished fourth in Division One in 1975–76; Division One champions 1976–77; finished eighth in Premier Division 1977–78.

Final position: fourth

Scottish Cup: semi-final

Scottish League Cup: finalists

European Cup Winners’ Cup: second round

Final position: champions

Scottish Cup: semi-final

Scottish League Cup: finalists

UEFA Cup: first round

Final position: runners-up

Scottish Cup: fourth round

Scottish League Cup: fourth round

European Champion Clubs’ Cup: second round

Drybrough Cup: winners

Final position: runners-up

Scottish Cup: winners

Scottish League Cup: semi-final

UEFA Cup: quarter-final

Final position: third

Scottish Cup: winners

Scottish League Cup: quarter-final

European Cup Winners’ Cup: winners

Final position: champions

Scottish Cup: winners

Scottish League Cup: semi-final

European Cup Winners’ Cup: semi-final

European Super Cup: winners

Final position: champions

Scottish Cup: semi-final

Scottish League Cup: second round

European Champion Clubs’ Cup: first round

Final position: fourth

Scottish Cup: winners

Scottish League Cup: winners

European Champion Clubs’ Cup: quarter-final

Scottish League Cup: fourth round

European Cup Winners’ Cup: first round