With most players I did not have to urge them to increase their work rate or expend more energy, but there were a few, like Gary Pallister, who played 437 games for United between 1989 and 1998 who needed the extra poke. The irony of this is that Pallister was probably the best defender I ever managed, but he had a laidback attitude towards life. He did not like training, and in games it always seemed to take him 15 minutes to coax his engine into life. There was a first half in a game against Liverpool in 1990 when he just tortured me. At half-time I said to him, ‘You are coming off.’ Then I thought better of myself, changed my mind and told him, ‘No, I’m not taking you off. You can suffer along with me.’
Paul Ince was another. He was a good player but he had a tendency to run with the ball rather than pass it. Every now and again I’d have to upbraid him and I did so after a game against Norwich in 1992, which we had to win in order to have a shot at the League title, and he went berserk. He started yelling that I always blamed him, and the other players had to hold him back. I told him, ‘I’m not blaming you. You made mistakes. You ran with the ball when you should have passed it.’
When I was younger I was more inclined to be severe. I cringe when I think back to a live TV interview moments after Aberdeen had won the 1983 Scottish Cup final against Rangers–three days after winning the European Cup Winners’ Cup final against Real Madrid–when I blasted the team for a ‘disgrace of a performance’. Later, after I had tucked more experience under my belt, I took a different approach. There is no benefit in engaging in public hangings. It just doesn’t buy you anything. It humiliates the victim and does not do much to encourage those around him. So I tried to stick to a few rules. While not always succeeding in the heat of the moment, I would try to reserve my severest comments for a private session with a player. I would always try to meld criticism with support by saying, ‘You know you are capable of better. What were you thinking?’ It was also important to make everyone understand that any disciplinary action was not arbitrary: it applied to everyone and it was unchangeable. When Ryan Giggs started arguing with me at half-time during a game against Juventus in the 1996–97 season, I stapled him to the bench for the second half. When Paul Scholes, one of the best players ever to wear United red, committed a few daft tackles that resulted in needless red cards, I would always discipline him. His actions had let the side down; however valuable a player he was, he wasn’t above the law.
One other aspect of managing high-achievers that is worth emphasising is the need to restrain them from trying to do the impossible. Every now and again someone would pull off an acrobatic goal or some other exquisite form of mastery, but you can never count on these. There is always a temptation when the chips are down to try and resort to stunts that might have worked in the pages of the old comic magazine Boy’s Own Paper, but were almost always guaranteed to fail in front of 75,000 desperate fans. Whenever we were in a tight game and trailing by a goal, I would always emphasise to the team that we should not panic, and I would implore them not to try and shoot from outside the box. Instead I would want them to keep their heads, retain possession and get crosses into the penalty box. Gary Neville, who was our indomitable right-back for so many years, had this habit of trying to shoot from 35 yards. It drove me bananas. After the game I would always be asking him, ‘How many times have I told you it doesn’t work?’ Disciplined perseverance pays far more dividends than impetuous attempts at individual heroism.
Part of the way to extract the most out of people is to show genuine loyalty when the rest of the world is baying for blood. Football provides plenty of opportunities to do this. After Eric Cantona’s famous kung-fu attack on what appeared to me to be–when I reviewed tapes of the incident after the match–an aggressive, foul-mouthed fan at Crystal Palace in 1995, the club, which gave him a four-month suspension (which was doubled, in a punitive manner, by the FA), did everything we could to support him. Eric had been sent into exile and forbidden from training or travelling on our pre-season tour, so it was natural for him to feel isolated and forgotten. I worked very hard to make sure he understood that we cared about him, and eventually, when he was teetering on the edge of departing to play in Italy, our loyalty towards him caused him to stay in Manchester.
Some years later, in the 1998 World Cup in France, after David Beckham got sent off for lashing out at Argentina’s Diego Simeone, now the Atlético Madrid manager, we wanted to be sure we were by his side. The entire press corps was convinced that David’s dismissal from the game had cost England the fixture, and the headlines reflected this. They were merciless: ‘10 Heroic Lions, 1 Stupid Boy’ was the headline in the Daily Mirror, while the Daily Star blared: ‘Beck Off’. There were effigies of David hanging from lamp-posts, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if an immigration officer had refused him permission to re-enter Britain. After I saw what happened, I immediately phoned David, because I knew he would be devastated. He was. I learned afterwards that he had burst into tears when he saw his parents after the game and was almost inconsolable.
The last thing David needed was criticism from me, because he had already found himself guilty. So I phoned him, tried to bolster his confidence, told him that I understood what had occurred, that these things happen to us all, and that Manchester United, and everyone associated with the club, knew he was a wonderful player and were looking forward to his return, and that we would take care of him. United’s first away game of the following season was against West Ham, where an effigy of Beckham was displayed hanging from a noose en route to the stadium, and the United team bus was pelted with stones and pint glasses.
Something similar happened when we went to sign Ruud van Nistelrooy from PSV Eindhoven in 2000. We had agreed on terms and I was stunned when Ruud failed his medical test. PSV claimed that Ruud was fit, and to demonstrate this arranged for a filmed training session. He broke down on camera and you can see the film of the session on YouTube, with Ruud howling in pain on the ground. It turned out that he had torn a cruciate ligament. So we suspended the deal but I immediately flew to the Netherlands to see Ruud, who was bed-ridden. I told him that it was not like the old days; that cruciate ligaments could be repaired; that he would regain his fitness and we would then sign him. I think that helped reassure Ruud, and it was also a way of ensuring that he did not go to another club. Just over a year later he was in United red, scoring on his debut.
Occasionally players can face much bigger challenges. Fortunately it is extremely rare for a top-notch player to come down with a life-threatening illness, but when Darren Fletcher fell sick with ulcerative colitis, it presented an opportunity for United to demonstrate unflinching support, because he was out of the side for a very long time. Darren had tried to muscle his way through this debilitating condition for a couple of years, but eventually it made him housebound and he underwent surgery. Coincidentally my sister-in-law had died of complications from the disease, so I was all too aware of the torture Darren had been silently enduring. It would have been easy for the club to consign him to the wilderness, but we made sure that he understood we wanted him to get well and return to the side and gave him a new contract. He had come to United as a teenager and never let us down, so while he was undergoing treatments we made him a reserve team coach so that he would not feel abandoned. I poked my head into one of his half-time team talks and he was spectacular. He was berating the players and I listened to him tell them, ‘If you think that performance is going to get you in the Manchester United first team, you have to be joking. You have no chance.’ In due course Darren recovered, felt great personal relief when he publicly revealed his private battle and is now the proud captain of West Bromwich Albion.
Though this sounds odd, I would sometimes protect players by leaving them out of the first team. It happened at both ends of the spectrum. For youngsters (as I have mentioned), I thought it best to gradually introduce them to the rigours of life in the first team. And for players in their thirties, I often rested them to make sure they did no
t overtax their bodies. When Eric Cantona and Gary Neville came to me to say they wanted to retire, I tried to talk both of them out of doing so. I urged Eric to talk to his father, but that didn’t work. Gary, being a proud professional, was also adamant. I had urged him to wait until the end of the 2010–11 season to make his decision but he just said, ‘No, Boss, I’m finished. I am just kidding myself on.’ On more than one occasion I left Wayne Rooney out of battles on Merseyside with Everton, not because of fitness concerns, but because the Everton fans could be merciless on him. Even though Wayne, particularly as he has got older, can shield himself from most abuse, it just did not seem sensible to expose him, or more particularly the entire team, to the abuse that would have been levelled at him. The abuse is so extreme that even Wayne’s father, a diehard Everton fan, skips United’s games at Goodison Park.
Football provides plenty of opportunities for a manager to show his support. There may be the times, like with Beckham or Van Nistelrooy, where the players were dealing with ugly situations. But, more often than not, it is the little things–helping youngsters improve their technique, making suggestions like one I made to Cristiano Ronaldo that he shorten his running stride when he was preparing to cross the ball, standing by players when they get injured, blooding a teenager when he makes his way into the first team–that instil a sense of loyalty. I was not doing these things because I was trying to emulate Mother Teresa, I was doing them because they would help United, but they had the side-effect of demonstrating to the player that we had confidence in him. This instils tremendous loyalty; it also helped them to lift their game. Their way of returning these favours was to give that extra 5 per cent during a match. And so, inadvertently, I gradually came to understand this back-door route to inspiring people.
The criticism of others also provides a way to rally the troops. It is one thing for an individual to be singled out for a press savaging, particularly when some of it may be deserved. It is quite another when a whole organisation is pilloried. I almost used to enjoy it when that happened, because it played right into our hands. It would get under the collective skin, it would bring people closer together, and it offered me a convenient rallying cry. In 1996, after we were clobbered in successive League games by Newcastle and Southampton, we lost our third League game in a row against Chelsea and BBC radio broadcast a programme about our supposed demise. It was a perfect tonic for us, and I am sure helped us go on to win the Premier League. In hindsight, I can see why it was such a big story as in my last 20 years at United it only happened on two other occasions.
Complacency
Complacency is a disease, especially for individuals and organisations that have enjoyed success. I like to think that United’s ability to avoid lapsing towards complacency was one of the characteristics that distinguished the club. We were not always successful at doing so, but I was always eager to stamp out the slightest trace of complacency. It’s like dry rot or woodworm because, once damp gets into the brickwork or insects into the wood, you don’t notice the damage until it is too late. Whenever we played a game I never thought victory was in the bag. People might think of me as a ‘winning manager’, but just look at the statistics. At United I managed a total of 1,500 games, of which we lost 267, drew 338 and won 895. So overall you could conclude that every time I walked out on to a pitch I only had just under a 60 per cent chance of winning. In the hotel in Moscow in 2008, after we had just won the Champions League and Premier League, I talked to the players about the 2008–09 season and emphasised the need to be prepared for a tough, fresh series of campaigns where nothing was guaranteed.
I received my first high-profile lesson in the curse of complacency in 1968 during my first season as a player for Rangers. We had not lost a game up until the very last match against Aberdeen. We went down 3–2 and lost the League. After the game, thousands of supporters went berserk and were breaking windows and stampeding. It was mayhem. We required a police escort to leave the stadium unscathed. It would not have taken us much to win the League. It was our job to do our job–and we didn’t.
Another example of complacency, or over-confidence, sticks in my mind. It comes from tennis. I attended the final of the US Women’s Open Championship in 2012, when Victoria Azarenka almost beat Serena Williams. Azarenka was up 5–3 in the final set and gave a little fist-pump to her family and friends in the box. From that point on it was all downhill. She lost the game she was serving to win the championship, and Williams went on to take the trophy. I saw Azarenka’s face after she lost. She was devastated. It just shows you should never touch a cup until you have won it.
The same thing happened to the US team in the Ryder Cup tournament at Medinah in 2012, when they were leading the Europeans by 10 points to 6 and only had to win 4½ points from the remaining 12 in order to win the trophy. I’m sure a degree of complacency had set in–it is just human nature. The moment that happens, things start to go wrong, and it almost always leads down the road to perdition. At Medinah you could see uncertainty start to creep into Team USA after they gave up one point. Then, after the next one went out of the window, confusion started to set in. It wasn’t long before they were panicking, and by then the jig was up. Players forget what they are supposed to do, are incapable of calming themselves down and commit mistakes they don’t usually make. Eventually they capitulate.
I’ve seen this happen a million times. It begins with uncertainty which leads to confusion. Then panic starts to set in and, before you know it, the team has capitulated and defeat becomes inevitable. Meantime, the behaviour of their opponents starts to change: their confidence begins to build, their concentration sharpens and they block out all distractions. They can smell the scent of blood and, before you know it, complacency has scored another ugly victory.
We weren’t immune to it ourselves at United, and there are a few specific games that I am embarrassed to recall. In November 1998 we played Blackburn Rovers and were coasting towards what looked like a straightforward 3–0 win, made easier by the fact that they were only playing with ten men. Then Blackburn scored two goals in the last 25 minutes and we disintegrated. It was absolute mayhem. We were clearing balls off the line and booting them into the stand and I was saying to myself, ‘If we lose, I’m going to kill every single one of them.’ We scratched out a narrow victory on that occasion, but it was complacency, perhaps compounded by some substitutions I made, that nearly caused us profound embarrassment.
Without doubt our worst dose of complacency occurred in 2012 when we played Everton at Old Trafford. It was April, we had played 34 games in the Premier League season and were first in the table, five points in front of Manchester City. Goodness knows what happened in that game. Maybe everybody thought it would be a humdrum affair and a routine win. Maybe we all thought we were about to add yet another trophy to our collection, particularly since it had been the best performance of the season. We were 4–2 up with seven minutes to play; one or two of the players got a little lazy running back to their defensive positions and stopped doing their jobs.
I think about that game a lot, and even now I cannot account for what happened. We were 1–0 down after 33 minutes. We got the equaliser just before half-time and the next three goals were unbelievable. We sliced Everton to bits and were leading 4–2. The irony was that we were haunted by Darron Gibson, a strong midfielder we had only just sold to Everton. I kept telling the team to not let Gibson get in a position with the ball in the middle of the pitch. But, for some reason, we didn’t, and wound up with Darron Gibson actually running the show. And in the 85th minute Everton dragged the score back to 4–4. One week later we played Manchester City at the Etihad Stadium and lost 1–0–a result that was partly caused by a couple of mistakes I made with team selection, and by Roberto Mancini’s emphasis on defence. Manchester City wound up winning the League.
In my last season as a manager, in March 2013, we were 2–0 up against Chelsea in the FA Cup at Old Trafford and it looked as if we were coasting to victory.
That was the trouble–we were coasting. Chelsea made a couple of substitutions that changed the momentum and got a goal back before equalising soon after. By the end of the game we were under extreme pressure and just managed to hang on for a draw. The match went to a replay at Stamford Bridge which we lost; our complacency had turned a comfortable victory into defeat.
I was always careful not to exude any sign of over-confidence. That was not a pantomime show or a false front, it is how I feel about pursuing anything that others also want. You just cannot take anything for granted. If United happened to be at the top of the table and there were five games left to play, I would never say, ‘If we get three points here nobody stands a chance of catching up.’ Instead I would say, ‘Let’s get this game out of the way. Just get the job done.’ You win by taking one step at a time.
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