Football – Bloody Hell! (22 page)
Read Football – Bloody Hell! Online
Authors: Patrick Barclay
Gazing through the window at his latest platoons – young recruits and multi-million mercenaries, all filing cheerfully to the training fields – he reflected on his inheritance from Ron Atkinson. ‘There was a void,’ he said, ‘between the youths and the older players at the club.’ Atkinson had not been the first manager to have allowed that to happen, nor would he be the last; the demand for instant success caused many to despair of ever having the time to build a youth policy as Ferguson had done, or Arsène Wenger at Arsenal.
‘So don’t get me wrong about Ron,’ said Ferguson. ‘He was a terrific manager. He was the kind of manager I’d have liked to play for. He relaxed players. But he believed in experience and you can understand that with managers in danger of losing their jobs all the time. They prefer to play safe. I’m a bit more reckless. But I am what I am. I could do it the other way – if I had enough money – but I wouldn’t enjoy it. There’s nothing to beat the satisfaction of bringing through your own players and seeing them succeed. I think that’s probably why I took my coaching badges at Largs all those years ago. I wanted to educate players, not just train them.’
Edwards backed him all the way. Not just philosophically but with hard cash. ‘Everything I asked for to do with the youth team,’ Ferguson recalled, ‘I got. The system was changed and we took on eighteen extra scouts and that cost a lot of money, even though at first they were given expenses only. Later we took on the best and gave them salaries. For Martin it was never a problem. He was brilliant that way.’
Their relationship was not so smooth on other financial aspects, notably Ferguson’s own salary, which he felt was on the mean side. He had been in the job little more than six months when he alluded to it. He and Edwards had gone to Glasgow to clinch one of his first signings. Needing an adequate replacement at centre-forward for Hughes, he had identified Brian McClair of Celtic. Before the trip, Edwards had mentioned having met almost all of United’s 1948 FA Cup-winning team, with the notable exception of the centre-forward, Jimmy Delaney. Ferguson said he would put that right. ‘So I phone the wee Jolly [Jim Rodger, his journalist fixer friend] and he phones Mrs Delaney and she says it’s all right.
‘After the signing we go to the Delaneys’ house and you wouldn’t believe it. The neighbours had all been baking and there was a long table with a nice cloth and on it, apple tarts, cream cakes, sandwiches, scones – fantastic. And afterwards Martin asked why Scottish people would put on such a spread just for afternoon tea.’ Ferguson, his Scottishness rearing like a lion rampant, grinned and replied: ‘Because they’re no’ bloody miserable like you, Martin – at your house there’s never even a biscuit!’
Knowing of Ferguson’s taste for football trivia, I reminded him that Jimmy Delaney had been unique in winning Cup medals in England, Scotland (with Celtic) and Northern Ireland (Derry City). ‘Aye,’ he said, and, in an almost absent-minded piece of one-upmanship, added: ‘He got to the final of another cup, too, but his team lost.’ It did indeed: Cork Athletic, of the Republic of Ireland. After leading 2-0 only thirteen minutes from the end of normal time. But I had to look that up. Ferguson had the answer on the tip of his tongue. The wrong answer, admittedly; he asserted that Delaney’s near-miss had been during a spell with Bangor City in Wales which research showed to be non-existent. But he did like his facts and figures. So did Edwards. And Edwards’s memory almost rivalled Ferguson’s. So, except when discussing money, they got on just fine.
An element of the Dick Donald role in Ferguson’s life was taken by Sir Matt Busby. ‘I was very lucky,’ he recalled, ‘that Matt was still at the club.’ Busby had ceased to be manager in 1969, a year after the European triumph that brought him a knighthood (he shouldered the burden again, briefly, after his protégé Wilf McGuinness had buckled under it), but remained as a director until 1982, when he became president. He retained a small office at Old Trafford.
Ferguson, though he mainly worked at The Cliff, also had a base at the stadium. ‘I used to love going into Old Trafford,’ he recalled, ‘and, as soon as I walked through the door, I’d know if Matt was around because I could smell the pipe smoke. It was amazing – the smell got all over the building. And I’d go in and see him for half an hour, sometimes more. He was wonderful with me. As was Bobby [Charlton]. They were a great support system – there’s no doubt about that.’
Busby lived to see the reincarnation of his United. When he succumbed to cancer at the age of eighty four in January 1994, Ferguson’s team were on top of the Premier League, marching towards a second successive championship. They had also won the FA Cup and the European Cup-Winners’ Cup. And, as if in additional deference to the Busby tradition, the youngsters were coming through, not only in numbers but of a standard that was to serve England as well as the club.
Who knows what Busby’s Babes, above all Duncan Edwards, would have achieved had they survived Munich? But David Beckham, Paul Scholes, Gary and Phil Neville and Nicky Butt fared pretty well. As did Ryan Giggs, the first star to dazzle Ferguson’s Old Trafford. Two days after Busby died, Everton came to Old Trafford for a match played in an atmosphere of reverence that encompassed the supporters of both sides. The only goal came from Giggs, who was just twenty. Beckham and company were not long out of the youth team, gracing the reserves, being prepared by Ferguson’s coaches for careers that would bring them the club game’s biggest prizes.
Ferguson had been at United for only a few months when he heard about Giggs. It was a steward at The Cliff, one Harold Wood, a jobsworth familiar to the journalists waiting outside the gates in the hope of a meaningless word with a departing player, who gave him the tip-off about a schoolboy training with Manchester City. The boy was thirteen, said Wood, and a United fan. His name was Ryan Wilson. He was a son of Danny Wilson, the Welsh stand-off half of Swinton rugby league club. On the break-up of Wilson’s marriage to Lynne Giggs, Ryan was to take his mother’s side, and her surname.
The scout Joe Brown, a former Burnley manager, was sent to watch Wilson and a trial hastily arranged at The Cliff. Ferguson remembered the sinewy kid scampering across the pitch like a puppy chasing paper in the wind. It was a nice simile, but short of footballing relevance. Then he added that young Wilson held his head high – a mark of quality – and looked relaxed and natural on the pitch.
Ferguson, Brown and Archie Knox became regular visitors at the Giggs home. Ryan started to train with United instead of City and from that moment, said the late Chris Muir, the City director with responsibility for an acclaimed youth development system, ‘we knew we had a serious fight on our hands’.
Night after night Ferguson, with Knox and Brian Kidd and the astute scout Les Kershaw, would hold trials under the floodlights at Albert Park in Salford. No wonder that henceforth Muir referred to Ferguson as ‘that bugger’. But as the years went by and it became apparent that cancer would claim another victim and Muir, a splendidly convivial Scot whom even the certainty of death seemed not to daunt, held a farewell party for his friends, Ferguson was prominent among them, his presence enhancing an unforgettable occasion.
United’s efforts to identify and secure talent intensified in 1988 with the appointment as youth development officer of Brian Kidd, who had been a teenage goalscorer in the European Cup triumph over Benfica at Wembley twenty years earlier and gone on to play for City too; his brief was to concentrate on local kids, using scouts who supported United, and so successful was the policy that the Nevilles, Scholes and Butt, all of whom hailed, like Giggs, from Greater Manchester, became garlanded internationals, alongside Beckham, who had been enticed from London without too much difficulty because his father, Ted, was a United supporter to whom Bobby Charlton was such a hero that he had given David the middle name ‘Robert’.
These represented the second wave of youth created by Ferguson. The first were a group of players already attached to the club when he arrived, proving that United had not been wholly inactive on the youth front; twice in Ron Atkinson’s time, United had reached the final of the FA Youth Cup, while Mark Hughes had come through the ranks and David Platt been allowed to move to Crewe Alexandra before hitting the big time under Graham Taylor at Aston Villa.
Among those whom the press dubbed ‘Fergie’s Fledglings’, after the Busby Babes, were Russell Beardsmore, David Wilson, Deiniol Graham and Tony Gill. Overall they were not in the same class as the generation that delivered Beckham and Scholes and, in some cases, they were unlucky with injuries: the defender Gill, for instance, had his career finished by a horrific leg break in a match against Nottingham Forest in the spring of 1989.
Lee Martin scored the goal that won United their first trophy under Ferguson, the FA Cup in 1990, before he, too, succumbed to fitness problems. ‘But for injuries,’ said Ferguson, ‘Lee would have had a good career at left-back. Tony Gill would have made a decent player. And there was Mark Robins – a terrific finisher, maybe a wee bit short of some things that could have made him a better player, but a fantastic finisher who scored important goals for us.’ Including the one supposed to have saved Ferguson’s job; it gave United victory in the famous third-round FA Cup tie at Nottingham Forest. Robins also came on as a substitute in the semi-final replay against Oldham Athletic at Maine Road, Manchester City’s old stadium, and got the winner. But he was never again more than a squad player and eventually left for Norwich City.
So, while Fergie’s Fledglings refreshed the club, they could not lift it beyond the level achieved by Atkinson, under whom the FA Cup had been won twice. The task of making them contenders for a domestic championship last won in 1967 – or, as Ferguson more graphically put it, ‘knocking Liverpool off their fucking perch’ – called upon Ferguson to show his skill in the transfer market while building the long-term aspects of the club and, for all his complaints about Edwards’s attention to the purse strings, money was spent.
Time, too, was allotted to Ferguson. He needed it.
Jousting with Graham
A
t the beginning of his first Mancunian summer, Ferguson told Edwards he required at least eight new players and Edwards quailed. He had, after all, warned Ferguson that funds were very limited. This was despite the sale of Mark Hughes to Barcelona a few months earlier for £2.3 million, the biggest fee United had ever received. Edwards, to his credit, often mentioned the desirability of keeping ticket prices as low as possible, while balancing the books.
t the beginning of his first Mancunian summer, Ferguson told Edwards he required at least eight new players and Edwards quailed. He had, after all, warned Ferguson that funds were very limited. This was despite the sale of Mark Hughes to Barcelona a few months earlier for £2.3 million, the biggest fee United had ever received. Edwards, to his credit, often mentioned the desirability of keeping ticket prices as low as possible, while balancing the books.
Hence Ferguson lacked clout in attempting to secure Peter Beardsley, who joined Liverpool instead. But he had been covertly active in the transfer market long before Viv Anderson and Brian McClair joined the pre-season parade. According to George Graham, who chuckled at the recollection, Anderson had been approached months before the end of the season.
‘We’d won the League Cup in our first season at Arsenal,’ he said, ‘and Viv was our right-back, but his contract was up in the summer and so I said I imagined he’d be signing a new one because it looked as if good times might be on the way. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’ We tried everything we could to make him stay, but he went to United. A couple of years later, one of our old players told me Viv had been leaving all along, even before we won the League Cup [that was in early April]. Alex had got someone in the England squad to sort it out. It goes on all the time, of course. You can laugh about it. Not at the time, though!’
Graham had long harboured a curiosity about Ferguson – and heard the rumours, which were accurate, that he had been sounded out about his own job. ‘I’d never met him at that stage,’ said Graham, ‘but I was interested in successful people and what Alex had done to the Glasgow giants, and in Europe, with Aberdeen put him in that category. I wanted to know his philosophy, to pick his brains.’ Yet their first meeting turned into an angry confrontation: the first tunnel row of several involving Arsenal and United in the Ferguson era.
Arsenal had come to Old Trafford as League leaders; the Graham effect on them had certainly been more dramatic than Ferguson’s on United. But United won through goals from Strachan and Terry Gibson. It was a stormy match and, as the teams left the field, the managers clashed. ‘I can’t remember what the argument was about,’ said Graham (it may have owed something to David Rocastle’s dismissal for a retaliatory foul on Norman Whiteside), ‘but there we were in the tunnel, typical Scots, at each other’s throats – and we hadn’t even had a drink!’
They soon became friends. So much so that once, when Ferguson was demanding a pay rise from Edwards, he suddenly brandished a copy of Graham’s Arsenal wage slip.
‘We were friendly,’ said Graham. ‘Except when our teams met.’ And even then the final whistle was final. Perhaps the most notorious meeting of the clubs in Graham’s time came in 1990, when a twenty-one-man brawl took place. An hour after the match, as the Old Trafford corridors crawled with journalists seeking reaction, recrimination and views on the likely punishment – I came across Ferguson and Graham chatting amiably in a quiet corner, as if at a cocktail party.
For Graham, who had been a member of Arsenal’s Double-winning team in 1971, the wait to bring the club his first championship as manager was relatively short; he won it in his third season, 1988/9. Liverpool had been champions when Ferguson came south. Everton were next, in 1987. Liverpool took the title in 1988 and 1990, Arsenal in 1989 and 1991. Leeds United were to frustrate Ferguson in 1992 before he finally came out on top in 1993. Graham, asked if he had been conscious of the threat from his compatriot, said: ‘Yes. From the moment I met him. It took longer than I expected – or he did, probably – but I knew he’d be successful.
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