‘If he takes our boy Torrance on again, I’m on.’ And, of course, he did. ‘That’s it,’ I said, ‘I’m on.’
Two minutes later I was back off again.
In the dressing room I said: ‘If. I. Ever. Hear. A. Word. Of this getting out, you’re all dead.’ I thought the referee’s back was turned when I whacked him. He was 6 feet 3 inches, an army player.
My first clash with an Arsenal manager was with George Graham. I watched the denouement to the 1989 title race upstairs in my bedroom and told Cathy, ‘No calls, don’t put anyone through.’ When Michael Thomas scored the goal against Liverpool that won Arsenal the title, I went berserk. Two years later, Arsenal won it again, beating us 3–1 in the year we won the European Cup Winners’ Cup. I stayed with George after our Highbury game one year. He has this fantastic collection of malt whiskies. ‘Do you want one? he asked. ‘I don’t drink whisky,’ I said. So George opened a bottle of wine.
‘Which of those malts do you open for guests?’ I wondered.
‘None of them. Nobody gets a malt,’ he said. ‘I’ve got blended Bell’s here.’
‘Typical Scot,’ I said.
George laughed. ‘This is my pension.’
Our first meeting at Old Trafford was a war. Afterwards, George was persuaded by a mutual friend to come up to my office. My word, it was hard playing against his Arsenal teams at that time. When Arsène took over after Bruce Rioch’s brief spell, I didn’t know much about him.
One day I asked Eric Cantona: ‘What is Wenger like?’ Eric said: ‘I think he’s overdefensive.’ ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ I thought. And the way he started at Arsenal was with five at the back. But when you see his teams now, you can’t argue for a second that his teams are defensive. Eric’s critique still makes me smile.
At the end of the 1990s, and for the first part of the new millennium, Arsenal were our challengers. There was no one else on the horizon. Liverpool and Newcastle had brief spells of prominence. Blackburn had their title-winning year. But if you look at our history prior to José Mourinho’s arrival at Chelsea, there was no consistent threat to our dominance outside of Arsenal. Chelsea were a good Cup team, but they could never quite scale the peak of the Premier League.
When Blackburn came with an assault we knew it was unlikely to last because there was no history to sustain an achievement of that magnitude. Their League title win was great for football and for Jack Walker, the benefactor who brought such fine players to the club, Alan Shearer especially. That was a tremendous time for Blackburn. Experience tells you, though, only to worry about the challengers who have a tradition of bidding for the big prizes. When Arsenal and United were locked together for so long, you knew the Gunners were sustained by history and a strong identity.
At their ground, in my penultimate year as United manager, I had lunch in the boardroom and said to myself: ‘This is class. Real class.’ At Highbury I would study the bust of Herbert Chapman and feel that any suspicion of nostalgia was outweighed by the sense of solidity and purpose those marble halls conveyed. Achievement was always there, from Herbert Chapman and the 1930s, all the way through.
Their dressing rooms are marvellous. The advantages of building a new stadium from scratch are enormous. You have a blank sheet. Every detail you see in the Arsenal home dressing room reflects Arsène’s specifications. He has covered every requirement for a football team. In the centre of the room is a marble-topped table where they put all the food. After a game, everyone tucks in. Another expression of class. The staff have their own quarters.
So I never ceased to be concerned at the high quality Arsenal could bring to our tussles. History helped us, but it helped them too, and they had the right manager. Arsène was the right one because you always felt that, having been given the chance to manage in England, he put his tent down and was never going to move it. All the while, there was speculation that he might leave one day to join Real Madrid. I never thought Arsène would leave Arsenal. Ever. I’d say to myself: ‘We’re going to have to put up with it. He’s going to be here forever. I’d better get used to it.’
At times it was very edgy. Although Arsène would never come in for a drink after games, Pat Rice, his assistant, would always cross the threshold for a glass, until the pizza fight at Old Trafford.
My recollection of that fabled incident is that when Ruud van Nistelrooy came into the dressing room, he complained that Wenger had been giving him stick as he left the pitch. Right away I rushed out to say to Arsène: ‘You leave my players alone.’ He was incensed at losing the game. That was the reason for his combative behaviour.
‘You should attend to your own players,’ I told him. He was livid. His fists were clenched. I was in control, I knew it. Arsène had a thing about Van Nistelrooy. I remember him saying he’d had a chance to sign Ruud but had decided he was not good enough to play for Arsenal. I agreed with him in the sense that Van Nistelrooy may not have been a great footballer. But he was a great goal-scorer.
Anyway, the next thing I knew I had pizza all over me.
We put food into the away dressing room after every game. Pizza, chicken. Most clubs do it. Arsenal’s food was the best.
They say it was Cesc Fàbregas who threw the pizza at me but, to this day, I have no idea who the culprit was.
The corridor outside the dressing room turned into a rabble. Arsenal had been defending a 49-game unbeaten record and had been hoping to make it 50 on our turf. It seemed to me that losing the game scrambled Arsène’s brain.
That day created a division between us, without doubt, and that rift extended to Pat Rice, who stopped coming in for a drink after games. The wound was not fully healed until the Champions League semi-final in 2009, when Arsène invited us into his room after the game and congratulated us. When we played them at Old Trafford a few weeks later, Arsène came in with Pat, just for a few minutes.
In football you do see incidents that reflect normal conflicts in life. In our home lives, sometimes. You know when your wife turns that machine off and won’t talk to you. ‘Christ, what have I done?’ you think.
‘Have you had a good day?’ you ask. ‘Yeah,’ she mumbles. Then the anger passes and normality returns. Football is like that. I would have hated the silence between Arsène and me to go on so long that it became poisonous.
At my end of it, I had a formula for defeat. After saying my bit in the dressing room, always, before going through that door to face the press, to face the television, to speak to the other manager, I said to myself, ‘Forget it. The game’s gone.’ I always did that.
Whenever people came to my room at the ground after a game, I always made sure there was a good atmosphere. There was no gloom, no frostiness. No blaming the referee.
When Aston Villa beat us at Old Trafford in the 2009–10 season, it was the first time they had beaten us on our turf in decades. Martin O’Neill, whose conversation I always enjoy, practically moved into my office with his wife and daughter. It felt like an hour and a half. It was a really good night. John Robertson, Martin’s assistant, and a few of my friends joined us and it turned into a real get-together. I ended up needing a driver to take me home.
When we lost in the FA Cup third round to Leeds United, the Leeds physio, Alan Sutton, couldn’t stop laughing and smiling in my office. As he left I said, ‘You’re still bloody laughing!’
‘I can’t help it,’ he said. It was the first time in my Old Trafford career that Leeds had beaten us on our soil and he was just incapable of not grinning. His pleasure was infectious. You have to say to yourself, I’m a human being, I must keep my dignity.
I was hospitable in that way to all the managers who joined me after the game.
I saw a change in Arsène in the last few years. When the Invincibles were forming, we were in transition. Around 2002, we were rebuilding the side. The Arsenal side of 2001–02 won the title at our ground, of course, and were accorded a standing ovation by our supporters. An attribute of Manchester United fans is that they
will always acknowledge class. There were times when I would think, bitterly, ‘Go on, go and applaud them, why don’t you? Meanwhile, I’ll go into the dressing room and pick our players up.’ But that is how they are. I remember their standing ovation for the Brazilian Ronaldo after his Champions League hat-trick against us. As he left the pitch, Ronaldo seemed bemused, like his manager. ‘Strange club, this,’ they must have thought. Gary Lineker’s last game in England for Spurs was also warmly received. But there is a lot to be said for it. It brings football to its zenith. If you see class, excitement, entertainment, there is an obligation to acknowledge it.
Those people have seen all the best United teams, so they know what a good side is. They have the necessary reference points. They know what a top player is as well. On top of that, you have to acknowledge when you are beaten. There is nothing to be done. Sulking is futile. The Old Trafford game in 2002 was a non-event for me, in one sense, even if we were chasing second place. It was already obvious that Arsène’s team were going to win the League. There was a sense of destiny.
In those moments of defeat and acceptance, there would be a dawning, for me, of where we needed to go. My feeling was always: ‘I don’t like this, but we’ll have to meet the challenge. We’ll have to step up a mark.’ It wouldn’t have been me, or the club, to submit to apocalyptic thoughts about that being the end, the finish of all our work. We could never allow that.
Every time those moments poked us in the eye, we accepted the invitation to regroup and advance again. Those were motivating passages. They forced me on. I’ll go further: I can’t be sure that without those provocations I would have enjoyed the job so much.
In later years we learned more about Arsenal’s thinking. Arsène had a template of how he sees his players and the way they play. We didn’t need to win the ball against Arsenal, we needed to intercept it. You need good players who can intercept. We worked out that when the ball was played into Fàbregas with his back to goal, he would turn it round the corner and meet the return pass. He would twist the pass round the corner then run to get it back on the other side of the defender. So we would say to our players: ‘Stay with the runner, then intercept the pass.’ Then we counter-attacked quickly.
They were more dangerous at Old Trafford than their own ground. Away from home, they didn’t feel obliged to throw everything at us. They were more conservative.
Barcelona were far more organised than Arsenal. When they lost the ball they would hound it. Every one of their players would be after it to win it back. Arsenal didn’t have quite that dedication to the task of regaining possession. Then again, sometimes Barcelona would imitate Arsenal in over-elaborating, because they enjoyed it so much. Against Real Madrid at the Bernabéu in 2009, Messi was playing one-twos in the Real Madrid penalty box: not just one but two or three, while the Madrid defenders were all over the place. They won 6–2, but for a time I thought they would throw the game away.
We all have to put our hands up to having players who were over-physical at times, but Arsène could never do that, which was a weakness. It’s not a crime to admit guilt when a player is sent off. You should feel bad, because he’s let his team down. I had some issues with Paul Scholes. I even fined him for the silly things. I don’t get upset when a player is booked when he was on for the tackle, but if he is sent off for a stupid challenge – and Scholesy was guilty of that – he would be fined. But if you expect a player to go through a season without infringing the laws of the game, you’re asking for miracles.
Arsène’s softer centre in my later years reflected the players he brought to the club. Samir Nasri becomes available, so Arsène takes him. Rosický becomes available, so he takes him, because he’s his type of player. Arshavin becomes available, so in he comes. When you acquire a lot of those players, they are almost clones. The team Arsène inherited gave him a start in English football.
We stayed on these parallel tracks right to the end. And of course we were united by a desire to find and develop young players in our own image.
Then again, Aaron Ramsey said before we played Arsenal one time that he had chosen Arsène’s team over mine because Arsenal produce more players than Man Utd.
I thought: ‘What world is he in?’ I think a young boy can get manipulated into saying things. It was his own decision to reject United, and I have no problem with that. I thought he made the wrong choice, I must say, though he would have faced more competition at our place to make the first team. Arsenal had not produced many of their own players. They had developed players, which is not the same thing. They bought them from clubs in France and all over the place. The only truly homegrown player I could think of was Jack Wilshere.
Giggs, Neville, Scholes, Fletcher, O’Shea, Brown, Welbeck: all produced at Man Utd.
There I go again. I could never be anything other than competitive with Arsène, my rival for 17 years.
fourteen
EACH time a member of our great homegrown generation left the club, I would count those left. Two managed to stay to the end of my time: Paul Scholes and Ryan Giggs. Gary Neville almost made it through with me. Even now I can visualise the six of them taking the mickey out of each other as boys after training. Scholesy would try to hit the back of Nicky Butt’s head with the ball – or Gary’s head more often. He was a devil for that. Those half-dozen young men were inseparable.
These were solid human beings: the sort you hated losing. They understood the club and its purpose. They would march with you, defend the principles on which we operated. Any parent would recognise that moment when a 21-year-old walks in and says they are going to buy their own place, or move in with their girlfriend or take a job in some other town. They leave you. Football was the same for me. I became greatly attached to the men who were with me from their teenage years, the so-called Class of ’92. I saw them grow from 13 years of age.
Nicky Butt was a prime example. He always reminded us of the cartoon character with the freckles, big ears and buck teeth on the front page of the comic, Mad. That mischief, that devilment. They were so long under my care that they felt like family to me. I would chastise them more than other players because they felt like relatives more than employees. Nicky was always up to something, a jack the lad. He was also brave as a lion, incapable of shirking any challenge.
He was one of the most popular players to have played at our club. He was a real Manchester lad. Down to earth and mentally tough. Like Phil Neville, Nicky reached the point where he wasn’t playing often enough to satisfy his competitive urges. That prompted him to look elsewhere for openings. Once again we let him go very cheaply, for £2 million. Those men didn’t owe us a penny. We had acquired them for nothing through our academy. The money for Nicky was a token sum to ensure he left for the best deal. Right to the end of his playing days, he would refer to us as his club.
Behind my back, I’m sure those lads resented bearing the brunt of my annoyance. ‘Oh, me again,’ they probably thought. ‘Why don’t you give him over there some?’
The first person I would give stick to was Giggsy, bless him. As youngsters they would never answer back. With time, Ryan learned to defend himself. Nicky might also retaliate now and then. Gary would have a go. But then Gary would answer his shadow back. He has to have an argument every day. He would be up at six o’clock with the papers, texting Di Law or later Karen Shotbolt, our press officers: ‘Have you read this in the Telegraph or The Times?’
We always said of Gary that he woke up angry. His was an argumentative nature. He is a forthright guy. Where he sees error, sees flaws, he attacks them. His instinct was not to negotiate his way through an impasse, but strike hard with his opinions. There was no consensus with Gary. He was explosive. I would see a small issue escalate in his mind. But with me he knew where the limits of my patience were. I would say: ‘Gary, go and annoy someone else.’ Then he would laugh and the drama would be defused.
If I try to imagine those 20 years without the homegrown lads, I find it hard to visu
alise the base of the team. They provided our stability. Manchester United are recognised for the great players we found in the 26 years I was there, from Bryan Robson and Norman Whiteside and Paul McGrath onwards, through to Cantona and Ronaldo. But those homegrown boys carried the spirit of Manchester United inside them. That’s what they gave the club: spirit. They were a great example to our coaching staff of what could be achieved through youth development, and a beacon to the young players coming through. Their presence told the next 19-year-old coming up the line: ‘This can be done. The next Cantona can be created here at our academy, on our training ground.’
I will always remember Paul Scholes’ first day at our club. He came in with a little guy called Paul O’Keefe. His father, Eamonn, had played at Everton. They were standing behind Brian Kidd, who had told me he was bringing in two lads he liked the look of. They were 13. ‘Where are these two young kids?’ I asked Brian. They were so small they were invisible behind Brian’s frame.
They were about 4 feet 8 inches tall. I looked at this tiny pair and thought: ‘How are these two going to become footballers?’ It became a standing joke at the club. When Scholesy came into the youth team, I said, in the coaches’ room: ‘That Scholes has got no chance. Too small.’ When he joined us properly at 16 he was still minuscule. But he really did shoot up. By 18, he had risen three or four inches.
Paul never said a word. He was exceptionally shy. His father had been a good player and they had shared a nickname, Archie. When I harboured those initial doubts about his size, I had never seen him play in a game, though I had looked at him in training at the school of excellence. At the indoor centre we mainly taught technical skills. When he progressed to play for the A youth team, he was a centre-forward. ‘He’s not got the pace to play centre-forward,’ I said. They played him just behind a striker. In one of the early games at The Cliff, he hit one on the drop just outside the box and it stopped my breath with its power.
Alex Ferguson My Autobiography Page 16