Towards the end of his time at Old Trafford I found it increasingly difficult to pass comment on his situation. Whatever I said seemed to be magnified hugely, and there was maybe also the problem that I found it impossible to relate to the culture in which the player had grown so huge. ‘Well, of course,’ someone told me, ‘apart from being a great footballer, David is also a fashion icon.’ I just wished I knew what that was.
There was never much question that, apart from his wonderful ball skills, he also had another extremely well-developed talent: understanding the way publicity works, how it is that an image is made. This was a skill David Beckham had no doubt honed as he travelled through his wife’s celebrity world.
There were two occasions when this knack of his came to my attention. On the first it was pointed out to me; on the second I saw it for myself. Around the time it seemed to me that his lifestyle was beginning to take over from his football, someone leaned over during a game at Old Trafford and whispered in my ear, ‘Have you ever noticed what David Beckham does when he scores? He runs to the corner flag all on his own. If someone else scores, he’s usually the first one hanging on him. I suppose it means he is always in the picture.’
Maybe he was simply following one of the laws of celebrity, but certainly his awareness of the relationship between action and media response was underlined for me when we were in Singapore for the final campaigning in the London bid for the Olympics of 2012. We were sitting together when Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, came to the stage to announce the winning candidate. As Rogge was making his announcement, David turned to me and said, ‘Paris have got it, look how the press photographers are all going over to the French delegation.’ As I waited for the news, I thought, ‘I would never have noticed that.’ Of course, London won the vote, to general astonishment, not least mine after the emphatic statement of a companion who seemed to know so much about the world of communications.
The growth of the Beckham image meant that United came under immense pressure when he moved to Real Madrid. It is true that when it happened he wasn’t playing his best football, either for United or England, but his talent for public relations meant that there could be only one loser in the huge controversy which enveloped not just the club but all of English football when it was clear he was on his way to Spain.
Even at this late stage I do feel the need to make a basic point about David’s departure from Old Trafford. While, as I have said, it is true that the manager had serious problems with the Beckhams’ lifestyle, finding it unhelpful, to say the least, to his idea of the proper atmosphere for the smooth running of a football club, there was never any question of the player being driven out of United. This was the impression given by Beckham and his people – and it was quite wrong. Yes, maybe there were issues to be dealt with, but they had not reached the point where the hero of United and so many England fans had been shown the door.
I can say this with great conviction because I saw the contract he rejected when he decided to leave for Madrid. It would be an invasion of privacy if I gave the precise details of the deal, but I can say that it was an excellent, generous offer. Certainly it did not resemble in the slightest a goodbye note. In reporting this I hope there is no impression that I am discounting David Beckham’s great contribution to United, or his place in the history of the club. His was a spectacular talent and there was no question he enhanced hugely the confidence and the aura of a club Alex Ferguson brought back to huge prominence.
However, if am perfectly honest, I have to say we must look elsewhere for the hierarchy of players who did most to shape the years of revival and achievement in the course of Sir Alex Ferguson’s building of three quite separate teams. I have already given Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs their high places in the Ferguson regime. Now it is time for the men who, in their vastly different natures, shared between them all those qualities which make the difference between good, winning teams and great ones. They are the kind of players who have something inside them which announces, from the first moment you see them on the field, that they are subject to special forces.
In the case of Eric Cantona, his spirit and his instinct were rarely less than quirkish; his aura was peculiar to his own rather eccentric view of both himself and the game he played. In the case of Roy Keane and Peter Schmeichel there were no shadows, no mysteries. What you saw was what they were. They were as ferocious as Cantona, in his moods and his inspiration, was unchartable. But in one sense all three were inseparable: they had an extraordinary will to dominate every situation in which they found themselves. It meant that they were the players who underpinned everything Alex Ferguson achieved, as he made good his promise to build again on the foundations laid down by Sir Matt Busby.
I have to start with Keane because his influence was so immense it reached into every corner of the field. He was strong in a way I could not have been, not even with all the passionate urgings of Jimmy Murphy. Keane didn’t so much tackle opponents as demolish them; he read points of danger in the way of Nobby Stiles but, unlike Nobby, he was not content with breaking up an attack and giving a simple pass. In one aspect Keane was different too from Bryan Robson, who in terms of leadership and force and ambition was probably the player with whom he could most easily be compared. Robson was so often hit by injuries. Keane seemed capable of overcoming anything.
He played through injury and the controversy which so frequently surrounded his aggressive style on the field. Undoubtedly there were times when he went too far – no one could approve of his notoriously cynical tackle on Alf Inge Haaland, whatever the background, and nor was it uplifting to see him leading the hounding of a referee – but then always there was that commitment which made him such an extraordinary competitor, and arguably the most influential player in the history of the Premiership.
When Keane won a crucial tackle it lifted both his team and the crowd; it was a statement about the course of a game and it produced an authority which touched every aspect of his play. Among all his achievements, at one point there was an extraordinary statistic: his passing accuracy was at 97 per cent. Much of it was short stuff as he moved the ball downfield, but there were also biting passes, born of his deep understanding of how to play in midfield, and at such times the crowd and the opposition seemed to react as one: the crowd gasped and the men facing him fell back. This man was not just a strength in the team, he was the team, a force which so often was simply unstoppable.
The essence of Roy Keane was never more visible, never more inspiring, than when he carried United into the 1999 Champions League final after they had conceded two early goals in Turin against Juventus. This, unquestionably, was the ultimate, defining performance of a great player and a great warrior. Unashamedly, but perhaps not in line with the most correct behaviour of the directors’ box, I spent much of the match on my feet, deeply moved by the strength of Keane’s performance. When he scored the header which put us back in the game, it was as though he was saying, ‘Now, let’s get back to work – let’s get this thing won.’ I was standing up and saying to anyone who cared to listen, ‘We can win this now – it’s our game.’ It was a bold statement, even by someone who has always erred on the side of optimism, but my confidence flowed from the sense that Keane had not only lifted us but flattened Juventus.
In my experience, British-based players are better equipped to battle through an unpromising situation than their Continental rivals. It is as though a lot of the Latin teams expect things to go their way all the time, and then when something goes wrong they have problems in putting it right. For me, Steven Gerrard underpinned this theory in 2005, when he led the successful charge against a Milan leading 3–0 in the Champions League final. If it is a basic strength of the English game, no one expressed it more consistently, more significantly, than Roy Keane. He had a single, unswerving obsession: always to win.
It is the tackles that I will always remember most vividly. I used to dream of making tackles like the
ones Keane performed so routinely – and I never made one. Sometimes watching him play I would think to myself, ‘Oh, to go in to win like that, to make the challenges that change a game.’
When Keane could no longer quite do what he once did on the field, and when his anger and frustration at the lack of success of the team spilled into heavy public criticism of his team-mates, Alex Ferguson didn’t need telling it was time to make a break. He knew there would be protests, a sense that part of the soul of the club had been exiled, but there could only be one manager and it was not Roy Keane. So Ferguson had to do the hard thing – something, given all that his captain had contributed, that I know he found one of the toughest decisions of his career.
Eric Cantona was a mystery, an enigma and, perhaps most surprising to anyone measuring his impact at Old Trafford, initially an aside in a conversation between Alex Ferguson and the manager of Leeds United, Howard Wilkinson, as Ferguson asked casually about the possibility of signing a player who, despite obvious talent, had spent a career drifting from one club to another in France and then England. When Cantona crossed the Pennines he brought more than talent. It was an hauteur which lads like Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and the Neville boys might have spent a whole career attempting to acquire, if it had not been laid before them by a man who gave the impression that he had finally found a place where he could play to the limits of his ability. Ferguson had stumbled upon gold.
Soon after Cantona arrived he talked about being in tune ‘with the spirit’ of Old Trafford. He said that he felt the presence of old players around him whenever he went on the field. Of course the fans responded as warmly as the young players who so quickly looked up to this wanderer who came among them with so much swagger, almost a strutting belief that he had arrived at his point of destiny.
Amid all the theatre, I analysed Cantona’s talent and found it quite exceptional in certain areas. He will always be remembered for the flourish and panache of his goals, so many of them the result of an amazing delicacy in such a big man, but I think his greatest single asset was his ability to run with the ball at speed. In this, I believe he had few rivals, one of them being Diego Maradona. Cantona brought to life brilliantly the old maxim of Jimmy Murphy which I have mentioned often in these pages, and which still holds true: when you have control of the ball and a little space, run directly at the defence, force them into decisions, get them on to the back foot. Then you create so many possibilities for yourself and your team-mates.
Why did his talent work so well at Old Trafford after the nomad years in France and at Sheffield Wednesday and Leeds? I saw it as another triumph for the judgement of the manager. In my opinion he read the player’s nature perfectly. Cantona was a natural born rebel, resentful of authority and uniforms, eager to assert his independence and his free will. In the past, I suspected, too many managers had tried to impose themselves on this free spirit, pushed him into corners where he became sullen and resentful. Ferguson’s approach was quite different. If Cantona wanted to fly off to Paris for a few days, he was usually granted his wish. ‘Be back on Tuesday,’ the manager said, ‘and be ready to train and to play.’ You could see Cantona grow almost day by day in his new environment.
Of course there was a fine line between the good and the bad of Cantona, always the fear that he might blow like a volcano. He did this while I was on a tour of Africa. An enterprising Daily Mirror reporter tracked me down on the phone and told me about Cantona’s ‘amazing eruption’ at Selhurst Park, how he had turned into the crowd and attacked a Palace supporter after being sent off. I told the reporter that I could only imagine there must have been a high degree of provocation; but a professional player couldn’t do that and not expect the severe punishment – at least a six-month ban – that would quickly come his way.
There was one other shadow over Eric Cantona. He never produced the best of himself in European or international football for France. In England, however, it was as though he was a great dramatic actor operating on a stage that he found so much to his liking. Alex Ferguson’s role in this turbulent life was that of a knowing theatre director. He knew what he could get out of his star performer – and what he couldn’t. He said he would take the best of the Frenchman, not the worst; he would only confront and chivvy him whenever it was absolutely essential. He would not be a figure of authority, but a friend and an admirer always ready to celebrate a special, though at times difficult, talent. It was the inspired – and practical – decision that did so much to shape an era.
In the course of these next few pages I intend to do something that is often asked of me privately, and is always a source of some agonised decision-making, partly because of the choices required, partly because in measuring the talent of footballers there are so many different factors to weigh, so many fears that in honouring one player you are doing less than justice to another. I am going to pick the best Manchester United team from all my years as a player and a director (excluding the great players of the 1948 team because although I did play with some of them towards the end of their careers, when their brilliance was shining most brightly on the pitch they were never more than fabled names on our radio back in Ashington).
There is one place that is automatic. It is the one that belongs to Schmeichel.
Schmeichel gave Manchester United the greatest gift at any goalkeeper’s disposal. He sent waves of confidence through the team. He even became an arm of the attack, moving the ball to Ryan Giggs or Andrei Kanchelskis in one easy, powerful motion that turned defence into assault so quickly. Twice, against Queens Park Rangers, goals flowed directly from the work of the goalkeeper. In the Champions League final in Barcelona, he unsettled Bayern’s defence with a charge down the field before David Beckham sent in the corner that led to Teddy Sheringham’s equaliser. No one suggested Schmeichel should do that. It sprang from his refusal to countenance the idea of defeat.
He also, as Cantona did in his prime, embraced the meaning of the club and is still frequently to be seen around Old Trafford, revelling in the aura of the place. He gave an early indication of his commitment while helping Denmark to the European Championship title in Sweden in 1992. Before the game against England, he was asked if he was aware Gary Lineker was close to scoring a record number of goals for his country. ‘Yes, I am,’ he said, ‘but it’s not going to happen against me. That record belongs to Bobby Charlton and my club.’
I hadn’t seen him before he arrived at United, but the first time I watched him I realised immediately that he was a sensational goalkeeper. He had everything: command, reflexes, judgement, nerve and powerful accurate kicking. And then there was that final classic quality of a great keeper: if he ever made a mistake, he simply didn’t recognise it – someone else got the bollocking. He could not accept the concept of being flawed in the slightest way. None of his team-mates complained. They knew the supreme value of a goalkeeper everyone can trust.
All this means that Peter Schmeichel has no rival as the foundation of my best Manchester United team chosen from the mid-fifties until today. The rest of it, playing 4–4–2, is: Gary Neville, Pallister, Stiles, Irwin; Cantona, Robson, Keane, Edwards; Law, Best.
I never saw the great Johnny Carey play for the ’48 team, and Bill Foulkes’s greatest strength was as a central defender, so the right back has to be Gary Neville. He has been a marvellously consistent and highly competitive player, confident and tough – the strongest of the pack led by Scholes and Beckham. He’s quick and he wins his tackles, and when there is a need you can trust him in one of the central defensive positions. My friend Shay Brennan, a European Cup winner, is one rival, but he didn’t have Neville’s versatility.
Choosing a left back is one of the toughest assignments. How do you pick one from Roger Byrne, Tony Dunne and Denis Irwin? Byrne was a born leader, an unorthodox defender but one equipped with a personalised radar system. Apart from his talent, he had an aura all of his own. Tony Dunne was possibly the quickest defender I ever saw. His marking abil
ity was quite brilliant, and I recall telling a journalist who had commented on Tony’s great form around the time we won the European Cup, ‘Well, you know, he’s been the best left back in Europe for years. He goes like lightning.’ In 539 appearances for United Dunne scored just two goals – he wasn’t a particularly good kicker of the ball – but he did have a kind of genius. He read an opponent so well that, with his speed, he could go out against any winger on earth confident of putting him in his pocket. However, Irwin has to get the vote because, on top of his other qualities of pace and judgement, he scored a lot of goals for a defender. You never worried about Denis Irwin; I remember him once making a mistake, an occasion so rare I found myself thinking, ‘Really, I never thought I would see that.’
In the middle of defence I am torn between the twin pillars of Alex Ferguson’s first title-winning team, Gary Pallister and Steve Bruce, and the man who brought a wave of reassurance whenever he walked into a dressing room, Nobby Stiles. Between Pallister and Bruce, I have to give the edge to Pallister. They were both defenders of the highest quality, they read attacks with great insight, and they weren’t afraid to put their heads in the dangerous places, but Pallister was a little more composed on the ball. Nobby is my friend, one of the great joys of my life, but my affection for him does not influence his selection one iota. Nobby is in because no teams were ever more reassured, or so driven, than those of United and England before such great matches as the semi-finals and final of the European Cup in 1968 and the same stages of the World Cup two years earlier. I know because I was there; I felt the force and strength of Nobby as though he was a band of steel running through everything we did. People used to look at him and say, ‘Well, you know he is not the most graceful player,’ and they were right – but they missed the point. The higher the pressure, the better Nobby was. If I ever picked a team without Nobby I would expect to be charged with negligence, at the very least.
My Manchester United Years: The Autobiography Page 32