The whole of the Fergie article that stirred up the ancient history about Ericsson
maybe becoming our next manager.
Tanya
>From The Times
The Boss
by Robert Crampton
This charming man: Yes, we are talking about Sir Alex Ferguson. He may be the most
aggressive, volatile manager in the business,
with a reputation for putting the boot in, but Manchester United's boss is not all
tough guy. Robert Crampton met him at home - and
there wasn't a temper tantrum in sight
When Jason Ferguson was driving me to his parents' home in the Cheshire town of
Wilmslow, I kept expecting us to arrive at a Really
Big House, something at the end of a very long drive, perhaps, quite possibly with
iron gates. When we drove on to a newish private
estate - nice houses, for sure, but nothing out of the ordinary - I thought we'd go
through it. Then, when we turned into the drive
of one of these houses, a short drive, I thought maybe Jason was turning round for
some reason. But then I saw that the house
(mock-Tudor, leaded lights, lantern-style illumination by the door) had a name plate
up which read "Fairfields". Fairfields was the
name of the shipyard in the Glasgow district of Govan where Alex Ferguson Snr worked
when his first son was born in 1941. And at the
door, his head visible above a big black Mercedes, was that son, also called Alex, or
rather, since the summer of 1999, Sir Alex. He
looked to be in a good mood. But then this was a couple of weeks before his team's FA
Cup defeat by Arsenal last Saturday, when a
football boot kicked in anger by Ferguson across the dressing room reportedly struck
David Beckham in the face. As you would
imagine, Sir Alex's handshake was, on the spectrum, at the firmest end of firm.
In we all went, into a hall. Off the hall to the left was what I later discovered was
a snooker room, complete with a tartan carpet
and small busts of John Wayne, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. In another room Cathy
Ferguson, Lady Ferguson in fact, was watching
something involving Martin Kemp on UK Gold on a very big telly. She was feeding a
bottle of milk to Grace Ferguson, her
three-month-old granddaughter. To the right of the hall was a kitchen and behind that,
a formal sitting room, neat as a pin, the
stripes and swirls left by a recent vacuuming still visible on the thick carpet. Sir
Alex showed me in there and I stood looking at
the back garden for a while. Again, I was surprised that the garden didn't go on into
the far distance. It stopped, normal-sized,
and then the neighbours' gardens began. There were two footballs, a kids' swing and a
dusting of snow on the lawn.
Sir Alex joined me at the window. He said they'd lived here for 16 years, since
shortly after he took the job. Moving down from
Aberdeen, he and Cathy had been shocked at the prices in Cheshire. Eventually, the
club loaned them some money and they'd had this
house built on a new plot. They've never thought much about moving, nor do they own
any other property. Recently, however, the
husband, now 61, had tentatively suggested they might move to a flat in Alderley Edge…
but the wife wouldn't hear of it. Instead,
they'd lived in a hotel for three months while Fairfields was extensively refurbished.
Later, I asked him who was the boss of the house. "You're joking, aren't you?" he
said. "You want to try her out? I have to lose my
temper to get anywhere here." At the end of the afternoon, on my way back to the
station, the taxi driver, Stan, said that once, in
the bad days before Ferguson started winning everything (for three and a half years,
nothing, then, since 1990: seven Premierships;
four FA Cups; one European Cup Winners' Cup and, in 1999, most importantly, one
Champions' League), United had lost the local derby
5-1 to Manchester City. When the manager got home, furious, dispirited, there was his
wife at the door, chanting "Cit-y! Cit-y!"
"She keeps him down-to-earth," said Stan.
Ferguson and I moved away from the window and sat down. Jason Ferguson brought tea. I
saw that Jason's father was wearing slippers,
proper dad slippers in blue velour. Jason, who at 31, after a spell in television, now
acts as his father's agent, sat down too. I
realised he was going to stay. One or two people, and one or two books, Michael
Crick's biography in particular, had warned me about
Jason. But he was fine, no problem. More than fine, actually. I liked him. One or two
people had warned me about Jason's father too,
though the warnings weren't really necessary. I've seen Alex Ferguson on the
television often enough, we all have. He's usually
standing next to his dugout and often he seems to be very angry indeed. There he was
again last Saturday, fuming.
He can be rude too, I was told. Contemptuous. Withering. Aggressive, and not just in
the dressing room: he's had reporters up
against the wall before now, spitting venom, his face mottled with fury. Not so long
ago, a reporter questioned the worth of his
£28-million signing, Juan Sebastian Veron. Ferguson responded: "Youse are all f******
idiots." At a recent Manchester United plc
AGM, Ferguson, mindfully dropping the expletive, called one shareholder simply "an
idiot". Yet, I'd heard other stories, too:
Ferguson putting himself out for people he hardly knew; Ferguson taking time to help
loyal fans with tickets; Ferguson the charming
raconteur; Ferguson the student of human nature, possessed of a rare intelligence
about what makes other men tick. One football
writer summed up the Ferguson character thus: "He can be the best company there is, so
it winds me up all the more that he can also
be such a shitbag."
We started to talk. I asked him if he ever regretted losing his temper and he said
yes, that sometimes he "wished it had been with
somebody six foot ten. Sometimes it's a small guy, sometimes it's a medium-sized guy.
I've no discrimination that way. Sometimes
there's guilt. Sometimes you say to yourself, 'Why did I do that?'" He has mellowed
slightly, he says. Nowadays, with his players if
not the press, he admits to "premeditating my temper if I need to. I never shout at
anybody during training. The only thing I say is
'well done'. Saturday is different, because the preparation I give them that week is
good enough…" He thought for a moment…"Is
perfect, aye always perfect, I would think. So Saturday we look for a result." Last
Saturday, Manchester United didn't get that
result and there didn't seem to be anything premeditated about his loss of temper
then. At half-time, he says, "Sometimes I lose my
temper, sometimes I don't. If someone argues with me I have to win the argument. So I
start heading towards them, that's where the
hairdryer comes in. I can't lose an argument." For the most part that afternoon,
Ferguson was pure Dr Jekyll, all twinkly-blue-eyed
merriment. On occasions, however, during our three hours together, his face would
settle into a harder shape, his eyes locking on to
mine, and I would catch a glimpse of what Mr Hyde might be like. This change, I came
to realise, always preceded his saying
something he wanted me to remember, some part of his creed. "The manager," he said on
this occasion, slowly and deliberately, "can
nivvah lose an argument."
The "hairdryer", incidentally, was the name one former player gave to Ferguson's
verbal assaults, his face so close you could feel
his breath. Much exaggerated, says Ferguson, all smiles again. So too, he claimed, is
the extent of the mind games he employs to
psyche out opposing managers as the season moves to its finale. "People get carried
away," he chortled. "The press are waiting for
everything, 'Old Fergie's at it again.' Somebody close to Arsenal told me Arsène
Wenger reads everything I say!" Ferguson stretched
for his tea, cackling delightedly at the image of Arsenal's cerebral and reputedly
rather humourless manager poring over the sports
pages, analysing platitudes for hidden meaning.
We moved on to the retirement that never was. Several years ago, Ferguson announced he
would retire at the end of the 2001-02
season, the one that finished last summer. Then, about a year ago, he said he wasn't
quitting after all, that he still felt fit and
hungry for more success. He signed up for another three years. If he hadn't been ready
to go at 60, I asked, why would anything be
different at 63? "Exactly!" he said, "Exactly! I've never said I will retire then."
Oh, I said, but isn't everyone assuming that
that will be it? "Yeah, but it's not. If I'm fit and healthy at that time and the team
are successful, I could stay on. Quite
easily. I could stay on."
He told me the story of his change of heart. "The first six months of last season were
agony. Agony. I wasna enjoying it at all. I
knew I'd made a mistake having pre-announced it [his retirement]. I put pressure on my
players [the team made a poor start to last
season, losing several home games before Christmas]. Then," continued Ferguson, "New
Year, it was my sixtieth birthday. We'd been
out for dinner with the family, come back, few drinks, I'd gone for a sleep on the
couch through there. Cathy come through, she
says, 'I've had a chat with the boys. They don't think you should retire. Think you're
off your head. Even if United have got a new
manager you should go elsewhere.' I needed someone to kick me. I wouldn't have done it
myself." Because you didn't want to admit
you'd made a mistake? "That partly, yeah. And having to kow-tow and say, 'Oh, I'm
sorry, I said that and I shouldn't have said it.'"
He was lucky. The Manchester United board had spent months scouring Europe for a
successor, seemingly without any joy. By January
last year, however, according to Ferguson, the board had their new man in place. "I
think they'd done the deal all right," he says.
"I don't know for certain but I'm sure it was Eriksson, y'know?" Done the deal in
terms of a signature? "No, no, no. I think they'd
shaken hands. They couldn't put anything on paper because he was still England
manager." Had he, Ferguson, known this at the time?
"No, I'd no idea at all."
He went on. "I think Sven Eriksson would have been a nice easy choice for them [the
United board] in terms of nothing really
happens, does it? He doesna change anything. He sails along, nobody falls out with
him." I said that because Sven was a Swede and
looks a bit intellectual, we all think he's really deep. "I know," laughed Ferguson.
"He comes out and he says [here, the Scot
essayed a Swedish accent]: 'The first half we were good, second half we were not so
good. I am very pleased with the result.'" We
had a good laugh at that. Ferguson said: "I think he'd have been all right for United,
you know what I mean? The acceptable face."
He hadn't finished with the England boss yet. "Carlos [Queiroz, Ferguson's assistant]
knows him because he [Eriksson] was with
Benfica and Carlos is from Lisbon. Carlos says what he did well was he never fell out
with anyone, best pal with the president [of
the club], the press liked him. I think he does this a bit: the press make a
suggestion about something, he seems to follow it a
bit." For example? "Making David Beckham captain for instance." Was the press
suggesting that? "Oh aye, they did aye. In fairness
there wasna many options."
We moved away from Sven-Göran Eriksson and on to the way the game has changed in the
years since the Fergusons made the move south.
Once again, Ferguson was in a candid mood. "The salaries players get, I don't think
can ever be a good thing for the game. You think
to yourself: 'How's it come to this?'" He went on: "The modern man has changed.
There's a need to be recognised, a need to be known.
You see that with earrings, tattoos, the way that dress sense and hairstyles change
every six months." (There is only one Manchester
United player I can think of who sports earrings and tattoos and frequent changes of
hairstyle. His name, however, remained unsaid.)
"A lot of people my age will say the same about the younger generation," continued
Ferguson. "Probably when I was in my teens I was
the same. I remember buying an LP, Dean Martin, Deano Latino. It was lying on the
kitchen table in Govan, my dad comes in and says,
'Jesus God! Who the hell is he?' They talk of the Sixties as the liberating years for
young people and they were!" Even so, I said,
you kept your self-discipline, didn't you? "Oh aye." I pointed out that in pictures of
him as a player in the late Sixties and early
Seventies it is noticeable that he never had long hair. (Following an apprenticeship
as a toolmaker during which he was also an
active shop steward, Ferguson pursued a solid but undistinguished career as a physical
- some say overly physical - striker with a
string of Scottish clubs.) "Aye, exactly, aye. You're basically what your parents have
instilled in you in terms of your discipline,
your manners." Your parents, and, he might have added, your community, the mid-century
Govan working class, of which he is fiercely
proud.
What his parents and community instilled in him were the classic respectable
working-class virtues of hard work, loyalty, straight
talking; in short, "character". His father was a Protestant, his mother Catholic (like
his dad, Ferguson married a Catholic, and
brought his sons up as Protestants) so, in a sectarian city, what was not instilled,
importantly, was bigotry. And the Fergusons
were modern people in being upwardly mobile too, Alex Snr ending his career as a
timekeeper in the yard. Fifty years after his
childhood, Ferguson says what he looks for in a young player, once he is satisfied of
his ability, is "character, attitude and the
desire to succeed". He wants his players to have what he has, or at least to know that
he can teach them what he has.
His biggest worry, he says, is not really earrings and tattoos, but how money can
erode character. "I worry about the ones who've
got a lot of money and are expected to stay at the top, how much you can keep the
hunger in them." All this talk of motivation, I
said, what I can never understand is how somebody would not be motivated to play their
heart out for 60 grand a week. "It's an
unconscious thing," said Ferguson. "I signed a [new] contract a few years ago and the
first thing I thought after I'd put my name on
that line was, 'I'm comfortable now', y'know? My players, suddenly their salaries have
escalated to wealth beyond what they could
have thought when they were young kids, and I think there's that relaxation, and I
think they're best when they're under pressure."
When these young men sign new contracts, do you think, 'Jesus, that's so much money'?
"Yeah," he said. "[But] with the good players,
the really good players, I don't think there's anything wrong with it." I asked: do
you still call yourself a socialist? "Yeah, I
do, aye." So you must think being paid £80,000 a week to play football, however good
you are, when a nurse earns…? He interrupted:
"Aye, I couldn't agree more. It is part of life that is totally unfair." And that
would be true of your own salary? "Yeah,
absolutely."
That said, Ferguson has often fallen out with his employers over money. "I've been a
manager 28 years and it hasn't been really
until the last eight years that I've earned what I should have earned. I was never
paid that well at Aberdeen. I know it was 20-odd
year ago but my starting wage was only £12,000." Is he bitter? "Nah, it was mah own
fault, I signed the contract. And anyway, your
riches are not always in money. And," he continued, "when you start as a manager, what
are you thinking about? You're thinking about
surviving. You don't want to be a casualty. There's that fear factor right through my
life. The fear of failure. It's there, it's
always there." Still? "Never leaves me." What counts as failure now? "Not winning a
trophy." So last season was a failure?
"Absolutely. Oh, I felt it, horrible, a numbness." He stared ahead of him, remembering
the day at Old Trafford last May when Arsenal
won the championship that had been his for the previous three years in a row. "That
final minute when you lose, the anger, the
frustration…"
As he does with all visiting managers, he had invited Arsène Wenger for a post-match
drink. Against habit, Wenger had accepted. I
asked Ferguson what he made of the distinction often made between the Frenchman Wenger
(along with Gérard Houllier at Liverpool) on
the one hand, and him, last of a dying breed, on the other. French guile and science
versus Scottish rule by fear. He said the two
Frenchmen had been great for the game. But, clearly, the distinction rankled a bit
(and it would, because Ferguson, with his wine
cellar, and his all-conquering racehorse Rock of Gibraltar, and his politics, and his
love of film, has a rich life beyond football,
whereas Wenger famously spends his spare time watching the German second division on
satellite). Ferguson said: "Intelligence! They
say he's an intelligent man, right? Speaks five languages! I've got a 15-year-old boy
from the Ivory Coast speaks five languages."
The conversation drifted on to the previous evening's game at Anfield, where Liverpool
had done their fiercest rivals a favour by
drawing with Arsenal. "You Manc bastard, come to see the champions?" was the greeting
as Ferguson had parked his car. "Good-natured
stuff, never any problem at Anfield." Not like Leeds, which he never relishes. "I went
there once and got caught at some traffic
lights near Elland Road. This bunch of supporters, skinheads, 20 or 30 of them, they
see me and go 'Ferguson!' and start running
across the road. The lights are still red. I'm almost shitting maself, they're getting
nearer, then the light goes to amber and
[impersonation of a tyre-squeal] I'm away."
He was still chuckling at that when Cathy Ferguson came in carrying little Grace.
Alex: "Cathy, you got a biscuit or something?
Christ!" Cathy: "I'm holding the bairn! You hold the bairn and I'll bring some
biscuits. What would you have done if I hadna come
in, eh Alec? You know the road to the cupboard." Ferguson took the baby. I asked how
many grandchildren he had. He looked at Jason.
"Eight, I think it is. Seven or eight, is it?" "Six," said Jason.
"And another on the way," added the grandfather, all pride. "This is Darren's, she's a
darling. My eldest boy, Mark, his wife's
expecting another one. Jason's got four. I've told him that's the end." Jason: "I'm
not sure what you've got to do with it." Alex:
"His twins, the girls, bloody belters! I tease 'em to death, tease 'em to death." For
the next few minutes, the nation's most
flint-faced authority figure, feared and revered in equal measure, bounced his newest
grandchild on his knee. He said: "Diddly
diddly dee-de-dee, diddly dum de dee."
Alex Ferguson sleeps five hours a night. (like Thatcher, I said. He ignored me.) He is
usually at the training ground not long after
seven. From his office "it's a one-minute walk to the gymnasium", but to his own
disgust, "I've not found the bloody gumption to get
down there for a month." He has put on half a stone and doesn't like it. When he does
go, he walks on the treadmill and does
weights. "I've got a bit of a hip problem," he said reluctantly, "so I don't run." He
is a friend of Alastair Campbell's ("I've told
him I'm against this war, absolutely. He told me to calm down") and he laughs about
the photos of Campbell training for the London
Marathon. "Bloody strapping on everywhere! His knees are going to be in a million bits
by the time he gets to 60!"
He does his paperwork and meetings early, then, while his assistants take training, he
watches. He used to do everything, he says,
then he learnt about "supervision through observation. I watch them all the time. Best
thing I ever did." Around this point, God
knows why, I asked Sir Alex Ferguson if he was in touch with his feminine side. For
the only time that day, he looked confused. "In
touch with what?" Er, I stammered, your feminine side, er, in the jargon? Now, he
looked utterly bewildered. I had to think rapidly:
are you a good listener? "Oh aye," he agreed, his face clearing. "Good listener, aye."
He gets home around 4pm. "Usually just watch the telly." (But not, he insisted,
Footballers' Wives. "Never seen it. Not my scene.
>From what people say, it's not got even a remote likeness to football.") That night,
>the day I was there, he and Cathy were going to
a Burns supper at a local hotel. He reads a lot, though never fiction. "Come on," he
said, "I'll show you my library."
He led the way to the snooker room. "I'm unbeatable on this table," he said.
"Unbeatable." There were books along one wall. Tony
Benn. That two-volume biography of Elvis. Hauser's book on Ali. Mandela. Terry Waite.
Bob Monkhouse. Sinatra. Books about the Alamo
and Rorke's Drift. A biography of de Valera. A biography of Michael Collins. "He's
very good, Tim Pat Coogan." I thought about
disagreeing but didn't. A huge tome called Parker's Wine Buyers' Guide. Thatcher's
memoirs. "Never read it. It was a present." He
picked up When Pride Still Mattered: the Life of Vincent Lombardy. "He was the great
coach of the Green Bay Packers. An obsessed,
committed guy, bit like myself." Did he regret his lack of education? "No, it didn't
inspire me, education. I wanted to go on in
life, wanted some excitement." He sent his sons to state schools.
We came to the next shelf. Truman's memoirs. Norman Mailer's book on Oswald. "Boring.
Nothing book, that." I noticed many other
books on the Kennedy assassination. "I've got the autopsy report," Ferguson said. He
told me about meeting a man - at a charity
dinner at Stoke City, of all places - who had been there in Dallas in '63. "He said
Jacqueline Kennedy knew who did it but she would
never say." Ferguson recommended a book called Seabiscuit, about a champion horse in
Thirties America. "It's a fantastic read, you
must read it," he said. "In fact, I'll give you it." Which he did.
Jason told his dad to change his shirt for the photographs. He argued, then complied.
I surveyed the rest of the room. In the formal
room, there had been several originals by Harold Riley, L.S. Lowry's pupil. In the TV
room, one wall was given over to old black and
whites of family members. In here, in colour, it was mostly Ferguson's other family:
Man United squad pictures, lots of them. There
were also framed newspaper pages about Jason's twin, Darren, who, having started his
career at Manchester United, now plays for
Wrexham in the Third Division. (The Fergusons' eldest son, Mark, 34, works for Goldman
Sachs in London.) I risked a cigarette out in
the drive, glad that Ferguson was busy elsewhere.
He had disappeared to find a coat prior to more photographs outside. I went through to
see Cathy. Her husband returned, wearing a
rather overlong Crombie. "What you doing with that coat on, Alec?" (Close family still
call him Alec to distinguish him from his
father, although his father has been dead many years.) "Do you not like it, mum?"
asked Jason. "Makes him look like something out of
Goodfellas," she said. Ferguson pointed at a photograph of four girls on the wall.
"Would you look at that! Jesus Christ there's
four of them!" "Don't be so cheeky," said Cathy, "that's me and my sisters." "There
they are again, that's worse!" said Ferguson
gleefully.
An old picture of Florence Street in the Gorbals, Cathy's birthplace, then somehow
triggered a minor argument about how old Lulu is.
Through the french windows we could see the photographer was ready in the garden. The
Fergusons had a lively exchange of views as to
where the key for the french windows might be. (Without wishing to stereotype a whole
city, the Fergusons' interactions certainly
support the image of Glasgow as a disputatious place. It took me a while to realise
their routine wasn't serious.) Why don't we just
walk round, I suggested. Ferguson wrestled with a key a moment longer. "I think we'll
just walk round," he announced, as if I hadn't
spoken. The temperature outside prompted a memory of his Aberdeen days. "Minus 18, on
that beach, wind's hitting your face, freezing
your knackers off. You never get used to the cold."
Back in the warm, Jason having departed, we chatted in a general way about players. I
asked if any had ever been to this house.
"Only two or three for personal problems. That's the way it is." If he had a party,
would he invite them? "Oh, no. Never, never.
It's not my way. Not to say I wouldn't feel comfortable in their company, I've known
Ryan, for instance, since he was 13. But it's
just not the done thing." Has he ever been in their houses? "Been to Roy Keane's
house." Socially? "Nah, just business." I wanted to
know about his father-figure role, mentioning that Ted Beckham had often said he would
walk through a wall for Fergie, the way he'd
looked after his lad so well. "Aye, well, I tell all the parents I'll look after them.
I don't say it lightly. In the case of Becks
and all these lads from time to time they've all got problems and they know they can
trust me, confide in me." How Ferguson will
handle Beckham's most recent "problem" caused - albeit accidentally - by Ferguson's
own loss of temper remains to be seen.
Ferguson looked straight at me once again, another creed moment. "People think there
are degrees of loyalty. There's no degrees of
loyalty. If someone lets me down once there's no way back." His application of that
belief, to himself as much as others, is, I
think, the secret of his success. He follows it through to a fault. When Roy Keane got
sent off for a horror tackle that he later
admitted was a premeditated act of revenge, Ferguson refused to criticise his captain.
"When you go into print and criticise a
player you're also risking the relationship with their family. If I criticise my
players, 'That bloody Beckham, that Keane, he's a
bloody idiot, been sent off, I'm fed up with his behaviour, I'll sort him out,' that
type of thing, the mother's not happy with
that. The father, his brothers, his pals, you make enemies of people."
In the modern game, in which footballers' agents have a vested interest in
pressurising their clients to move clubs, keeping the
young multimillionaires onside is as crucial a part of management as keeping them
hungry. As much as anything, Ferguson's success
over the past 12 years has been down to his ability to keep the players he wants at
the club. It is hard to think of more than one
or two players who have left Manchester United whom Ferguson did not want to leave. He
leaned forward. "The most protected species
in the world is a son. The most protected. The mother and father don't see anything
wrong. They might tell 'em in private, but they
no tell the neighbours, noowa'ahmin?" He paused. "They're my best chance of success!
Why should I criticise them publicly? Doesn't
mean to say I let 'em off with anything."
When Eric Cantona, having been sent off at Crystal Palace, delivered his infamous kung
fu kick at a Palace fan who was racially
abusing him, Ferguson was annoyed the Frenchman had got himself sent off, not about
the kick. Eight years later, Cantona
long-retired, Ferguson was able to say what he felt about the kick at the time. "I
said to the directors, 'If that had been me, I'd
have probably done exactly the same.' They said, 'Don't dare say that, don't ever say
that. Christ, the press will slaughter you.'"
We were almost done by then. Cathy was buzzing about, thinking about getting ready for
Burns Night. My cab on the way, I asked if
he'd felt unfulfilled as a footballer himself. "Oh I did, aye. I wanted to win
everything but I never did. I never won a thing."
That simple fact alone must form a big part of his managerial determination. He's a
driven man, all right, a hard man, and hardest
on himself. A bright man, too. And he believes in the old-fashioned virtues of
diligence and discipline, he really does. And
loyalty, that's the big one. Loyalty such as a family owes to its own members. He
believes in that so strongly he has managed to
turn a multimillion-pound football club employing hundreds of people, some of them the
wealthiest and most famous young men in the
country, into a family, a family with Alex Ferguson in charge.
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