‘One thing is simple. I will never answer any more questions about this man. I am not going to answer any provocation from him any more. It is simple, I will not respond to anything.’
James Lawton, the Independent’s chief sports writer, had one final question.
‘Is that the end of diplomatic relations for good?’
Wenger looked down, blinking very quickly, and hissed: ‘I have no diplomatic relations with that man.’
He stayed true to his word for about three weeks before slipping back into the old routine. The London journalists are always amazed they can ask Wenger whatever they like about Ferguson, or Mourinho, and nine times out of ten he will have something to say. It would be easier sometimes for him to brush it off with something like: ‘I would rather you asked me about my own club.’ But it rarely happens.
As for Ferguson, his sights are firmly fixed on Mourinho these days and the feuding with Wenger has been downscaled to a part-time hobby. Nowadays, it is nothing more malicious than two old neighbours bickering over the garden fence about who has the better lawn. Yet it is Wenger, not Mourinho, whom Ferguson dislikes. He has criticised him over the years for lacking grace in defeat. He has argued with him on the touchline. Arsenal are renowned for playing beautifully elaborate football and Ferguson, like every lover of the game, admires the way they treasure the ball. But he has also suggested they like to kick their way to victory compared to his own halo-wearers at the top of the Fair Play League.
Wenger speaks five different languages and is one of the few football managers to have a master’s degree, earned from Strasbourg University in economics and sociology. Yet Ferguson has never seemed impressed. ‘Intelligence! They say he’s an intelligent man, right? Speaks five languages! I’ve got a fifteen-year-old boy from the Ivory Coast who speaks five languages …’
That is not to say there is not a mutual sense of respect. Both men appreciate what the other has brought to their sport, and there are sides to Wenger that, if pushed, Ferguson would admit he admires – but he would have to be pushed hard.
Ferguson has his love of films and music and horses and wine, whereas Wenger can come across as being as grey as John Major’s Spitting Image puppet. Wenger admits spending his free evenings watching tapes of old German football matches and he once confessed he had no knowledge of central London at all, despite living in the capital since 1996. He said his wife wanted to take him out for dinner to celebrate his birthday but that he had insisted on certain conditions: the restaurant had to be close to his north London home and it had to be an early booking so he could watch Match of the Day at 10.30 p.m.
Ferguson is wary about what goes on behind that inscrutable face. For years, he would invite Wenger into his office for a drink after Arsenal had played at Old Trafford and, every time, Wenger politely turned it down. Ferguson always took that as a snub. Then Arsenal won the league at Old Trafford in 2002 and suddenly Wenger decided that he would like a glass of Manchester United’s wine. Ferguson doesn’t forget things like that.
Nor has he forgotten that Wenger refused to shake his hand after United beat Arsenal in an epic FA Cup semi-final at Villa Park en route to the 1999 treble. Giggs won the match with a sixty-yard slalom through Arsenal’s defence but Wenger was still ruminating about Peter Schmeichel saving Dennis Bergkamp’s penalty in the final minute of normal time and marched briskly down the tunnel. When the two managers shake hands these days there is only the briefest contact of flesh.
BACK ON TRACK
31.1.07
Manchester United 4
Watford 0
A freewheeling win. Watford are certainties for relegation and they are obliging opponents for a club that is fully committed to swift, first-time passing and imaginative, penetrative running. Ferguson is wreathed in smiles and he seems to have got the Arsenal game out of his system. ‘People can curl up and die in the face of disappointment,’ he says, ‘but men of purpose and ambition do something about it.’
Arsenal, he says, should be regarded as nothing more than a blip. ‘It was gut wrenching. I certainly didn’t sleep a wink, repeatedly going over the match in my mind, doodling on bits of paper, watching the video, asking myself over and over again how we could let the points slip through our fingers. But as far as I’m concerned it’s the challenge presented by a big setback that drives me on and if I’ve got my players figured out correctly, and I know I have, they will be feeling the same way.’
He is very positive, very pumped-up, but he must be worried Chelsea have been let off the hook. The crowd seem to recognise it too. The atmosphere is good tonight, but there has been a palpable change at Old Trafford since those days, pre-Abramovich, when the fans were so spoilt with success they would frequently sing: ‘It’s all so fucking easy’. With Chelsea on the scene, nothing can be taken for granted any more. It is dangerous to assume anything.
Ferguson, however, is making all the right noises, convinced that his players can hang on. ‘We’re still in an excellent position,’ he says. ‘Winning the Premier League this season lies in our hands.’
And here’s the thing: Chelsea have become so hated, so terminally unpopular, he has noted a trend, for the first time in his twenty years at the club, of other clubs’ supporters taking United’s side. Strangers, non-United supporters, have been stopping him in the street to offer words of encouragement. Taxi drivers have been telling him how they cannot bear the thought of Chelsea making it a hat-trick of titles. Letters containing good-luck messages have arrived from all around the country. ‘Even Liverpool fans,’ Ferguson says.
This is a completely new phenomenon and he seems bemused by it, as if it might be some kind of elaborate prank. But it is very real. Even when Chelsea are at their best they do not, and cannot, tug at the heartstrings in the way United do. There is a lot to admire, and it is only envy that stops some people from recognising the quality of their football, but Mourinho is essentially a pragmatist, and his team, to the average punter, have become as romantic as a cold sore. They are not a spectators’ team, a side that grabs your imagination and makes you quicken your step on the way to see them, whereas there is something captivating about the way Ferguson has taken United to the top of the league and the way they are trying to take on Chelsea by playing football the way it is meant to be played. Adventurously and with flair.
The turnaround is nothing short of incredible because, once, it felt as if the whole country was desperate for United, and Ferguson, to fail – and, ideally, in the most excruciating way possible. No other club has inspired a book title such as Manchester United Ruined My Life. Or a television show such as The Greatest 100 Goals Scored Against Manchester United. Or had England fans singing derogatory songs about them at Wembley. Even when they won the European Cup in 1999, Ferguson was very conscious there were millions of Englishmen cheering on Bayern Munich in the final. Afterwards, he guessed there would be ‘more than one person throwing themselves off London Bridge’.
For that hostility to have transferred to Chelsea is one hell of an achievement, especially given that there was a time under Mourinho’s predecessor, the endearingly eccentric Claudio Ranieri, when they were many people’s ‘other’ team, and most neutral supporters were happy for them to bloody United’s nose.
Mourinho took over in 2004 and, at first, he bewitched everyone. He was the coming man, infuriatingly handsome with his well-cut dark suit and excitingly modern take on the role of football manager. There was a period indeed when he was the most admired personality in the game. He didn’t look, or sound, like the average football manager. He was too chiselled, too debonair. Chelsea won trophies and set records, and the critics, if not the purists, were won over. He was made for television, our first celebrity manager since Brian Clough, and he did something that nobody thought possible – transforming Abramovich’s Chelsea empire into something weirdly cool.
What he is discovering now is that it is no longer enough to win but to win with style and, most importantly, with
grace. The novelty factor has worn off, replaced by resentment and, in some cases, open hostility about Abramovich’s riches and Mourinho’s feistiness. Peter Kenyon, who brags Chelsea will be ‘the biggest club in the world by 2016’, does not help either. In football grounds across the country, every Saturday afternoon, there is a hush of expectation when the scores are read out and an anguished sigh when the news comes through of another Chelsea victory, or a loud cheer of undisguised joy on the rare occasions when they fail. Drinkers congregate around the television screens in pubs, watching the scores flash up on Sky Sports and willing Jeff Stelling to announce in giddy tones that Petr Cech has just picked the ball out of his net.
Not all the antipathy is warranted. Yet Chelsea, in their current format, are not an enjoyable team to watch. The manager pouts and gesticulates and preens for the camera but the players, despite their cosmopolitan extraction, play remorseless old English football. The template is built on an immaculate defence and muscular, athletic midfielders rather than nimble ball-players such as Scholes and Giggs, and the common result is a 1-0 victory, often with a late goal as opponents tire. They grind out wins, playing an aggressive, pressing, zonal game, whereas the philosophy at Old Trafford is attack, attack, attack. ‘We have to put on a show,’ says Ferguson. For a short time – but only a very short time – this was not the case when he experimented with 4-5-1. United believe the best form of defence is to keep the ball at the other end of the pitch and the beauty of this is that every game is memorable for its ‘wow’ factor. The emphasis is to entertain – to win, but also to be the Harlem Globetrotters of the Premiership. Rarely do they attract the same newspaper critiques that attach themselves to Chelsea. For United, it is not enough to be ‘methodical’ and ‘efficient’ and ‘functional’. They want to be ‘dazzling’ and ‘bewitching’ and ‘exhilarating’. And that is Ferguson’s doing. It is not enough to win – he wants to win playing spellbinding football. Style matters.
Mourinho gives the impression he couldn’t care less if Chelsea have overtaken Don Revie’s Leeds on the hate scale. He is in the business of winning football matches, he says, rather than winning friends. And it is true, as he says, that there are no trophies handed out at the end of the season for being popular. Even so, it is amazing how a man once described as a ‘breath of fresh air’ for the English game has metamorphosed into a cartoon villain and how the initial fascination with Chelsea’s wealth has led to so many misgivings about the Russian oligarch sitting in the executive boxes. An ABC mentality – Anybody but Chelsea – has taken root and the more they bicker and brag and snipe the more they become a permanent reminder, to the man on the street, why the cricket commentator John Arlott once said of football that ‘the bad guys outnumber the good ones by about 200 to one’.
If that sounds terribly harsh, you can guarantee worse is being said in pubs, offices and factory floors the length and breadth of the country. To love Chelsea it is necessary to embrace Mourinho and, really, that should be a lot easier than it actually is. We should be able to forgive him his bad points because of his mix of talent, drive and showmanship. But the point is this: you can have all the money in the world but it cannot buy history and tradition. Nor can it buy class, and there are times when the modern Chelsea team have the soul of a pickpocket. Mourinho complains about referees. He belittles smaller clubs. He has put together arguably the most functional team ever witnessed in top-flight football and he is blessed with a fiendishly brilliant tactical brain. But he is dedicated to the idea of being permanently extraordinary. He has an abrasive, unforgiving edge and his policy is that you are either with him or against him. Mostly, he thinks people are against him.
He also has a brutal tongue. Towards the end of last season Ferguson said in one press conference that he would not give up on the league until it was mathematically impossible and that he was still living in hope that Chelsea might be susceptible to a ‘Devon Loch moment’. Mourinho’s response was cutting, to say the least. He said he wasn’t aware of the story of the 1956 Grand National loser but he knew of a Portuguese proverb that stood as a warning to Ferguson and it was known as morrernapraia – or, translated, dying on the beach.
He compared them to two swimmers at sea, himself being the ‘good swimmer’ and Ferguson ‘the fellow who wants to chase me’ and he demonstrated his full range of swimming strokes as he explained to the press what happened next. ‘He shouldn’t chase me,’ he said. ‘He should say to the boat: “Please take me a little bit closer.” He’s so enthusiastic chasing me – gasp, gasp, gasp – but he has a heart attack. When he reaches the beach, he dies. That, my friends, is our Devon Loch.’
Mourinho had already said he was more concerned about bird flu than the chances of United catching and overhauling his team. His one-liners can be cruel in their impact. Even when Chelsea won his first championship, eighteen points clear of United, his attention was diverted by Ferguson taking his team on a lap of honour at Old Trafford. It didn’t matter to Mourinho that it was just Ferguson’s way of thanking the crowd for their support. ‘If they had done that in Portugal,’ he remarked, ‘they would have had bottles thrown at them.’
Football would be a dull place, of course, if everyone behaved impeccably, and Chelsea’s fans are entitled to point out that, from time to time, Ferguson has been known to pick the occasional fight. Yet Mourinho wouldn’t walk if his wickets were scattered all over the square. He deserves better than to be labelled, in the words of one UEFA official, an ‘enemy of football’, and it is easy sometimes to find yourself warming to the man. But there are no guarantees that if United win the league he will be at all gracious. He might congratulate Ferguson and come out with some standard platitudes but, deep down, it will be that Chelsea lost the league, not that United won it.
BIGGLES
2.2.07
Ferguson is over his spat with Wenger and his press conference today is a friendly little session. He is in his tracksuit top when he comes up the stairs, whistling a happy tune, and his eyes light up when he sees that James Mossop, an old friend from the Sunday Telegraph, has put in a rare appearance. ‘James, how nice to see you,’ he cries out. ‘What are you doing slumming it in these parts?’
He is in sparkling form, astonishingly relaxed considering the pressure he must be under. He talks about how much he is enjoying watching his team play. He feels in great shape, the players are in great shape. Everything, in fact, is in great shape. He talks in a you-guys-aren’t-so-bad kind of way and when he realises he is actually enjoying himself he doesn’t stop. Even when he takes issue with one reporter for allegedly misquoting him it is done light-heartedly, with him declaring in a loud voice that ‘people have been hanged for these kind of things, you know’.
A soft-focus Ferguson has come into view, his observations marinated in humour. There are still moments of seriousness. He is very aware Mourinho may be watching on television and his strategy is clever: to look and sound as assured as he can.
The only thing that has been rankling with him recently is the incessant reports in the Spanish newspapers that Real Madrid plan to sign Ronaldo. This has been going on for several weeks and Ferguson’s message is clear. ‘We only sell players that we want to sell,’ he says. ‘There is no way that Ronaldo is leaving this club.’
The word from Old Trafford is that Ronaldo has been offered a new contract but Ferguson denies it. ‘His current deal runs to 2010,’ he says, and then he is laughing again. ‘I’ll be in my wheelchair by then. You’ll be pushing me up the hill so I can have a game of darts at the British Legion.’
‘We know that, Alex,’ says Stuart Mathieson of the Evening News. ‘But you’ll still be the manager here …’
Ferguson is still laughing when we ask him about the silliest story of the season so far. At the start of the week, person or persons unknown made four ‘spy flights’ in a Cessna over Carrington, with someone on board apparently filming the training sessions. The Mirror ran the story over three pages, claiming that an
other Premiership club was behind it – but Ferguson isn’t so sure.
United suspect the Mirror is trying to pull a fast one and Ferguson is beside himself with joy when David McDonnell brings it up.
‘Amazing!’ he exclaims. ‘It’s amazing that the Daily Mirror correspondent asks about this one, isn’t it?’
‘Just doing my job, Alex,’ McDonnell smiles.
Ferguson loves that. ‘Just doing your job … but I saw you flying the plane (impersonating looking through binoculars). I could see you up there in your Biggles hat and your Biggles goggles …’
He is roaring with laughter now. ‘Biggles McDonnell! Biggles of the Mirror!’
ENGLAND DUTY
6.2.07
International week: a chance for Ferguson to catch up on some paperwork. He still doesn’t allow himself any time off but most of his players are away and it gives him an opportunity to go through the mountain of letters on his desk. Or run the kind of errands that he never gets the chance to do in a normal week. Ferguson’s job is so time-consuming he once confessed to David Meek that he had forgotten to get Cathy a Christmas present. He remembered on Christmas Eve but the shops were shut. So he slipped a cheque into her Christmas card. ‘A bummer idea,’ he recalled, ‘she tore it in two and dropped it in the bin.’
England have a friendly against Spain at Old Trafford and the FA is using Carrington as its training base. Which gives us, the media, a rare opportunity to see a little more of the practice ground than just the pressroom. The FA does not operate by United’s restrictions and there is a training session every morning of which we are allowed to watch the opening fifteen minutes. The FA has a small army of press officers and after these sessions there can be as many as a dozen players put up for interview. The players have it drummed into them that it is part of their duties to speak to the newspapers, and everything is divided between the different broadcast and written journalists to suit everyone’s requirements. There are no set-in-stone time constraints and when it comes to Steve McClaren’s briefings there is nothing like the intensity of when Ferguson is in the seat.
This is the One: Sir Alex Ferguson: The Uncut Story of a Football Genius Page 22