It is sad that it has gone this way. In the old days he would accept we had a legitimate role to play and hold separate post-match briefings for the Sunday and daily newspaper reporters. He respected the fact we were the medium between the club and the supporters and that, in our number, there were journalists who understood the game, who could be trusted and could be useful allies.
Everything has changed now. ‘There are some excellent journalists, honest journalists, and respected journalists,’ he says. ‘But the media has become a monster. They know all the answers, right and wrong. They want exclusive stories and confidential background. They want their cards marked. They want gossip. And believe me, if they don’t get it, you’re in trouble.’
What we are left with is a process in which MUTV, the club’s subscription channel, is the only media organisation he indulges. He stops for them for five minutes after every match, answers a dozen questions and then he is gone. Occasionally, a press officer at an away ground will innocently offer to show him to the pressroom, but he will quickly make it clear it is not necessary.
We improvise. At away games we give a tape to his press officer Karen Shotbolt (or in the context of this book her predecessor, Diana Law). She records his MUTV interview in the tunnel and brings the tape to the pressroom so we can recycle the best bits. For home games we gather round the pressroom television until MUTV announce he is about to come on air. Then we jostle for position and hold our tape players to the television to record whatever he says. It is an undignified process: taping another man’s interview to reprocess the more usable quotes.
There are old-timers in the pressbox who can remember the days when journalists were encouraged to travel and socialise with the team and Sir Matt Busby told his players to ‘treat the press the same way you would treat a policeman’. You could argue that any objectivity was compromised by such close association but at least it gave the readers (i.e. the supporters) detailed knowledge about what made the club tick. No journalist has such insight now and, for us, that’s a source of permanent disappointment. Not unhappiness, exactly, but a kind of deep regret because we are deeply conscious we must be missing out. We try to get into Ferguson’s mind, to second-guess him and work out his body language, but sometimes we might as well be writing about what is at the bottom of the ocean. We don’t really know what he thinks about the crucial goal, the opposition’s tactics, whether such and such a player ought to have been marked closer, and so on.
At most clubs, reporters will be allowed into the tunnel, or a special interview area, at the end of every match to speak to the players. At United, it is considered trespassing. The last person to make that mistake was Arsenal’s press officer Amanda Docherty, who had offered to escort Matt Dickinson, of The Times, to the changing rooms so he could speak to Arsène Wenger’s players. They were waiting in the corridor when Fergie emerged and allegedly shouted: ‘Get that cunt out of my tunnel!’
In recent times, the club have started to allow one newspaper reporter into the tunnel after league matches to speak to the opposition players. Otherwise, the only media personnel allowed tunnel passes are from television (usually MUTV, BBC’s Match of the Day and Sky Sports) and a local radio reporter who records an interview on a disc that is shared between all the different radio stations. The BBC were a sworn enemy for seven years until Ferguson relented in 2011 and agreed to speak to them again. The radio reporters call it the ‘Disc of Doom’.
As for the rest of us, there is nothing we can do. Ferguson is hard and in control. ‘Your days are numbered,’ he told us once. ‘Television gets everything now. All you lot can hope for are the crumbs that remain when television has had its fill.’
There are rules in place. Rules about where we can go and what we can ask, and if anyone rocks the boat Ferguson hoards grudges like other people collect stamps. The Press Association were excluded from his conferences for three years after he told their correspondent Dave Anderson (now of the Daily Mirror) he asked ‘too many questions’. The Times and the Guardian have been frozen out at various intervals. The same goes for the Daily Star and the Daily Express. The Sun and the Daily Mirror are banished, on average, two or three times a season. The BBC is regarded as a sworn enemy sine die, and the Daily Mail was denied access for several years until a change of sports editor and a major peace-making exercise in 2002. Ferguson had been convinced the Mail was ‘running a campaign against myself and the club’ and that it was a ‘disgrace’ and a ‘vendetta’. He then got it in his head that Peter Keeling, a freelance reporter who has covered United for forty years, was sneakily tipping off the newspaper.
As Keeling took his seat at Carrington one day, Ferguson ordered him into the reception area, frog-marched him out of the pressroom and pointed towards the toilet.
‘In there!’
‘He’d been misinformed,’ Keeling recalls, ‘but I was too astonished to be coherent and I apologised for whatever it was I hadn’t done.’
The truth is that ninety to ninety-five per cent of the stories that are written about Ferguson and Manchester United are hugely complimentary, and rightly so. On other occasions, though, he is entitled to feel like the newspapers are ganging up on him. He lives his life in a blaze of headlines and it has become fashionable in some parts of the media to knock him. This book is not an attempt to portray our profession as perfect (it’s not). Reporters are under pressure every day to come up with big stories and there is so much competition, particularly between the tabloids, that there will always be some who cut corners and take chances. Trivial incidents will be blown up and exaggerated. Transfer gossip will be written as fact. Quotes will be subtly spun to take on new meaning. The culprits even have their own name for it – ‘twirling’.
Back in 1986, newspapers were thinner and had none of the glossy football supplements that weigh them down now. There was a London-based chief football correspondent, known as the Number One, and maybe half-a-dozen regional operators, including a United specialist. Two decades later and there are Number Ones, Number Twos, regional staff, feature writers, colour writers, website correspondents, stringers, bloggers, podcasters, diarists, agency staff, foreign reporters and wires correspondents, all ravenous for news. It is an era of 24/7 breaking news. Ferguson’s idea of hell.
‘The press conference of today is a total waste of time,’ he says. ‘There are young guys sitting there … I don’t know who they are, what they are or how they got there. They don’t want to know about the football side any more. They want the reasons why you didn’t pick such and such a player. Or they want to find disarray in the dressing room. I don’t think they are interested in football at all. There was a time when sports journalism was about what happened in the twentieth minute, how the goal was scored, how good was the final pass. We’ve nothing like that now.’
Ironically, we too would prefer to go back to the old days. Journalists can be world-class moaners and we have a few of our own gripes as well. But, essentially, we should never lose sight of the fact that this is a fascinating job and that Ferguson has enriched all our lives. Some reporters support United. Others don’t. We are all seduced by the club and that is Ferguson’s doing. He is a propagandist of genius, obsessed with excellence and, in many ways, truly unique. Working out his idiosyncrasies is just part of the journalistic adventure.
Daniel Taylor, November 2011
2005–06
Annus Horribilis
THE BEGINNING
8.8.05
Press conferences are usually held at Carrington every Friday at 12 noon sharp – Ferguson, you discover, is never late and regards it as extreme bad manners if we are – but he also sees us on the day before midweek matches. If it is a Champions League week his briefings are switched to the Europa Suite, in the South Stand at Old Trafford.
Today is the first time we have seen him this season. United play Debrecen of Hungary in a Champions League qualifier tomorrow and, traditionally, this will be one of the more enjoyable sessions. Everyone i
s happy to be back. Ferguson will be light-hearted, his batteries recharged, raring to go. He will tell us we get uglier every season, asking in an incredulous voice how we manage to make him look so young. The questions will start and, if he is feeling generous, he might have some information deliberately stored up. ‘Make something with that,’ he will say, as we gratefully scribble it down knowing that the next day’s back-page splash has just been organised. Then he will shoo us out with a wave of the hand and his favourite payoff line. ‘Now get out my sight. Go on. Away and write your shite…’
However, nothing can be taken for granted. Getting to grips with Ferguson is like riding a bucking bronco. One minute you feel you are in control, your senses tuned in to every bump and jerk, convinced that you can ride the beast on your terms and that you have it mastered. But you’re kidding yourself. Suddenly, one violent twist later, you are on your backside, dazed and confused and dusting yourself down, covered in bumps and bruises.
He loves to keep us on our toes. It is part of what makes him so fascinating in this conformist age when so many Premiership managers are as colourless as tap water. Yet it can be maddening too. Ferguson comes into the Europa Suite through a side door, and the speed at which he bustles in takes everyone by surprise. He looks tanned and healthy, damn good for a man of his age. But there isn’t a flicker of a smile. His face is hard and uncompromising. His eyes are scanning the room, burning holes in everyone, sending coded signals that he would rather be anywhere than in this room at this time. There are no pleasantries, no comparing suntans, none of the football banter that you normally get from him at this time of the year. When someone says hello, he barely responds and it signals, to anyone who has not guessed already, that it is going to be a difficult press conference.
We know what he is doing, and why. A few weeks ago, Ferguson took the squad on a trip to Vale Do Lobo, a five-star resort for sun-seekers and golfers-with-money in an exclusive part of the Algarve. It was a chance to get some sun, introduce the new signings and start plotting how to win the title back from Chelsea. The press were not invited. But, three days in, a story was leaked to the Sunday Times, a newspaper with a reputation for accuracy, about an argument between Ferguson and the team’s captain, Roy Keane. Keane was unhappy with the training arrangements and had complained to Carlos Queiroz, the assistant manager. Ferguson told him he was out of order and to snap out of it. Keane went berserk and suddenly they were yelling at each other in front of all the other players. Pointing fingers and shouting abuse. Two potentially lethal chemical agents, both capable of spontaneous combustion.
Manchester is the City of Gossip. There have been rumours ever since that the rift has become unbridgeable, that Ferguson and Keane, once as close a manager–player partnership as any in football, have come to resemble an old married couple, still sharing the same oxygen but none of the old joys. The fans have been getting jittery and Ferguson blames the press for stirring things up. ‘It was blown up out of all proportion,’ he says. ‘Roy and I had a few words but an argument is nothing. Did he walk out? Did we come to blows? Of course not. We are both combustible characters and we are always having arguments. I wish I had a pound, in fact, for every row I have ever had with Roy. He cares and I care, and every so often we clash. That doesn’t affect the respect I have for him and I don’t think it lessens my standing as manager in Roy’s eyes.’
He is angry because he thinks we have sensationalised what happened. Today, in this room, is the first opportunity he has had to exact his revenge. There is a bad vibe, from the moment he arrives, and our worst fears are confirmed when Diana Law, United’s press officer, gives a little welcome speech and invites the first questions. There are twenty or so journalists lined up in several rows of seats. A television reporter asks Ferguson what he makes of the coming season and, specifically, whether he thinks United are equipped to win the title back from Chelsea.
‘That’s some question, that is,’ Ferguson shoots back. ‘Do you seriously think I’m going to answer that?’
A Daily Mirror reporter, doing his best to pretend that everything is all right, holds up his hand to ask about possible transfer business, particularly speculation that United want to sign Michael Owen from Real Madrid. That hits a nerve too and Ferguson says he is not going to answer. ‘I’ve seen what you’ve been writing over the summer,’ he says. ‘I’m not helping you one bit.’
It carries on for a few more minutes but it is fizzling out already. Ferguson is sour and impenetrable and the barriers are not going to be broken down. Not today. At the first appropriate pause he says ‘Right’ and he is off his chair and out the door and the one Hungarian journalist in the room is looking bewildered. She asks us if he is always like this and, oddly, we find ourselves apologising on his behalf, telling her there is stuff going on behind the scenes and, please, don’t be too put off. For some reason, we don’t want to shatter her illusions.
The truth is that it is a lousy way to start a new season, with grim portents for the next nine months. Ferguson is under extreme pressure going into this season, United’s first under Malcolm Glazer’s ownership, and history tells us that when he comes under a lot of strain the leg-pulling and mickey-taking stop and he starts to think of the press with something approaching revulsion.
Glazer is seventy-six – too old, he says, to visit Old Trafford in person – and completed his £570 million takeover of the club in the summer. He lives in Florida, where he built his empire buying and selling trailer parks. A quick internet search shows that when he bought the NFL side Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in 1995, he fired the popular, long-serving manager. There has been no suggestion that he has contemplated doing the same at Old Trafford but, even so, his reputation makes it a potentially treacherous season for Ferguson. Glazer is no Jack Walker at Blackburn Rovers, Jack Hayward at Wolverhampton Wanderers or Steve Gibson at Middlesbrough, proud football men who poured tens of millions of pounds into their clubs out of sheer love. Neither is he another Roman Abramovich. He is an opportunist, a profit-seeker, and it is Ferguson’s job to provide him with some till-ringing trophies – and fast.
The fans have waged a hate campaign against Glazer, convinced that this strange, whiskery American will take the club into financial ruin. There are protests planned before tomorrow’s game. But he’s here to stay, and that must be unnerving for Ferguson at a time when Abramovich has a third of the Russian oil industry to spend at Chelsea and a manager, Jose Mourinho, who is intelligent enough to make sure it is spent well. Stamford Bridge has become a giant fruit machine, a club for the haves and the have-yachts, and these are worrying times for Ferguson. Pre-Abramovich, his achievements were as solid as the Old Trafford stadium and it seemed as though nothing could end United’s hegemony. He won the league eight times, the FA Cup five times, the League Cup, the European Cup Winners’ Cup and, in 1999, the most dramatic European Cup in history, a 2–1 defeat of Bayern Munich sealed by a pair of goals from Teddy Sheringham and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in stoppage time. At his peak, the Premiership trophy found its way to Manchester like a homing pigeon. United inspired envy and admiration. They were brilliant and successful and there was no club in the country that could live with them.
You think some things will remain for ever. But last season Arsenal beat them in the FA Cup final, Liverpool won the European Cup and, in the league, Chelsea cruised to their first championship for fifty years. In the previous decade, the title was a straight battle between United and Arsenal but the duopoly has been well and truly smashed now. Chelsea finished eighteen points clear of United with a record number of points (ninety-five), wins (twenty-nine) and clean sheets (twenty-five). Mourinho was named as Manager of the Year and when he accepted the award he described himself as the ‘Special One’. Modesty is not one of the qualities at Stamford Bridge and Mourinho has predicted Chelsea will finish as champions again, possibly by an even greater margin.
Ferguson still has reasons to be optimistic when he looks round the Old Trafford dressing roo
m. He has an inspirational captain in Keane, plus new signings such as Edwin van der Sar and Park Ji-Sung and seasoned campaigners such as Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville. He has two of the world’s most exciting young stars in Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo as well as a goalscorer, Ruud van Nistelrooy, who is the kind of striker every fan dreams about having in their team. And yet it is difficult not to be swept away by Mourinho’s self-aggrandisement. Mourinho was recruited from Porto, where he won the European Cup in his final match, having knocked out United in the last sixteen. His overcoat is long and very, very expensive. His shirts are cut in Savile Row. His cufflinks are solid silver and he holds your attention like Michael Corleone in the Godfather movies. He talks about Chelsea dominating English football as if nothing could be more natural. Between him, Abramovich and Glazer, it is a season fraught with danger for Alexander Chapman Ferguson.
PEACE, OF SORTS
9.8.05
Manchester United 3
Debrecen 0
Champions League qualifier, first leg
We aren’t sure what to expect tonight. But it is an important victory and an audience with Ferguson is a far more cordial experience. No drama, no fuss. The team all but book their place in the Champions League with goals from Ronaldo, Rooney and Van Nistelrooy, and Ferguson lifts that hard mask, Darth Vader-style, when he comes into his press conference.
This is the One: Sir Alex Ferguson: The Uncut Story of a Football Genius Page 2