Along with Tévez and Larsson, other global talents joined us. Carlos, through his Portuguese connections, told us there was a young boy at Porto from Brazil called Anderson. He was 16 or 17. We kept an eye on him. He was in and out of the team. A game here, an appearance from the bench there. Then he played against us in the Amsterdam tournament and I resolved to act, but the following week he broke his leg.
When his recovery was complete, I sent Martin over to watch him in every game for four or five weeks. Martin said: ‘Alex, he’s better than Rooney.’
‘For Christ’s sake, don’t say that,’ I told him. ‘He’ll need to be good to be better than Rooney.’ Martin was adamant. At that stage, Anderson was playing off the striker. At the end of the tournament we moved to buy both him and Nani, who I went to see for myself. What attracted me to Nani was his pace, strength and aerial ability. He had two fine feet. All the individual attributes were there, which brought us round to the old question: what type of boy was he? Answer: a good one, quiet, could speak English reasonably well, never caused any problems at Sporting Lisbon, and was an excellent trainer. My word he’s a fit boy. Gymnastic, too. His athletic read-outs were always first-class. So the foundations were there. Carlos went over with David Gill: called into Sporting Lisbon to sign Nani and then drove up to Porto to capture Anderson. All in one day.
Two years on, we were able to say that the reasons for signing them were correct. There were complications with Anderson in the winter of 2009–10. He wasn’t playing as much as he would have liked to and wanted to return home. He was Brazilian, and the complication, as ever, was the World Cup, which he was desperate to play in. His scheme was to go to Vasco Da Gama for the rest of the season so he could play in the South Africa World Cup of 2010. ‘You’re not leaving here. We’re not investing millions of pounds in a player so he can shoot off to Brazil,’ I told him. Lovely personality, Anderson.
I have always respected Brazilian footballers. Name a Brazilian player who doesn’t excel in big games? They were born for the big occasion. They have a special quality: deep pride in themselves. Great belief. There is a myth that Brazilians regard training as an onerous interruption to a life of pleasure. Not true. They train conscientiously. The notion that they hate the cold is another fallacy. The two Da Silva brothers for example: no tracksuit bottoms, no gloves – out they go. No country can apply the rich mix of ingredients you gain from a top Brazilian player. Argentines are deeply patriotic but I found they lack the expressive personalities of Brazilians.
With Nani we were buying pure raw material. He was immature, inconsistent, but with a wonderful instinct for football. He could control the ball with either foot, head the ball and he bristled with physical strength. He could cross, shoot. When you buy a player with all those talents, the trick is to put them in order. He was a bit disorganised and needed to be more consistent. It was inevitable that he would work in Ronaldo’s shadow because he was a winger from Portugal with some of the same attributes. Had he been from Serbia, no one would have made the comparison. But both Ronaldo and Nani had come through Sporting Lisbon, so they were always being studied side by side.
Ronaldo was blessed with outrageous talent, and was brave, with two great feet and a wonderful leap. It was perhaps daunting for Nani to assert himself as a Man United starter against that backdrop. To be up against Ronaldo in team selection was a problem in itself. In his first year he was on the bench a lot. Nani picked up the language quickly but Anderson took longer. Because he’s Brazilian, though, he brought incredible self-belief to the job. Brazilians think they can play against anybody.
I would say to Anderson: ‘Have you seen this Neymar in Brazil?’
‘Oh, great player. Fantastic.’
‘Have you seen Robinho?’
‘Wonderful. Incredible player.’
Every Brazilian name I mentioned would elicit this response. He thought everyone back home was world class. When Brazil battered Portugal in a friendly, Anderson told Ronaldo: ‘Next time we’ll play our fifth team to give you a chance.’ Ronaldo was not amused. That’s the kind of country Brazil is. I love that story about the competition in Rio to unearth new No. 10s and thousands turning up. One boy travelled for 22 hours on a bus. It’s a massive country, with talent everywhere.
I look back less fondly on our move for Owen Hargreaves, who was phenomenal in the summer of 2006 and was just the type of player we needed to fill the gap left by Keane. We started to put together a bid for him. But I studied his playing record and felt a tinge of doubt. I didn’t feel a strong vibe about him. David Gill worked hard on the deal with Bayern. I met Owen’s agent at the World Cup final in Berlin. Nice man, a lawyer. I told him we could develop Hargreaves at United. It turned out to be a disaster.
Owen had no confidence in himself whatsoever. He didn’t show nearly enough determination to overcome his physical difficulties, for my liking. I saw him opt for the easy choice too often in terms of training. He was one of the most disappointing signings of my career.
He went everywhere in search of cures for his various injuries: Germany, America, Canada. I felt he lacked the confidence to overcome his injuries. It went from bad to worse. He was away in America for the best part of a year. He saw Hans Müller-Wohlfahrt, the club doctor at Bayern Munich, for his calf. In the games he did actually play, I had no qualms about his contribution. He was lightning quick and a great set-piece deliverer. He could play right-back, wide right or central midfield. I played him wide right in the 2008 final against Chelsea, and when we started to struggle against their midfield three, I put him in the middle of the park with Rooney wide right and it worked. He had definite value. But it was all lost in the fog of his lack of games. Yet Hargreaves was fantastic for England at the 2006 World Cup, plugging gaps, racing to the ball.
In September 2011, we took a blast from Hargreaves about how he had been supposedly let down by our medical staff in his time with us. He claimed we had used him like ‘a guinea pig’ for treatments for his tendonitis and various knee problems. We took legal advice and could have proceeded against him, but the doctor was not sufficiently offended to seek legal redress. We did the best for that lad. No matter what the staff did for him, he created his own agenda.
I would say to him, ‘How are you this morning?’
‘Great, boss,’ he would reply. ‘But I think I’ll do something on my own. I’m feeling it a bit.’
One of his allegations was that we picked him for the Wolves game in early November 2010 when he had asked not to be selected. Rubbish. Three weeks before that fixture, he had advised us that he would be ready for such and such a date, which happened to be a European tie. I was reluctant to bring him back in a European game after he had been out for so long. There was a reserve game that week, which he was meant to play in, but he withdrew.
In the week of the Wolves game, to my knowledge, he said nothing to our staff to indicate he had a problem. My concern, which I expressed to Mick Phelan, was that he would pick up an injury in the warm-up. My understanding was that he told one of the players he was feeling his hamstring a bit. When he came in from the warm-up, I specifically asked him: ‘Are you all right?’ I said it to reassure him. My message was: enjoy it. Well, he lasted five minutes. His hamstring went. But it was no surprise.
When I signed him, there was something about him I didn’t like. The thing every good leader should have is an instinct. Mine said to me: ‘I don’t fancy this.’ When he came over to Old Trafford for the medical, I still had some indefinable doubt. He was very hail-fellow-well-met. Almost too nice. Kléberson also left me with doubts, but only because he was so timid, and could barely look you in the eye. He had good ability, Kléberson, but he paid too much attention to what his father-in-law and wife wanted.
I read later that the FA were going to fast-track Hargreaves into coaching. That’s one of the things that’s wrong with our game. That wouldn’t happen in France or Germany or Holland, where you would spend three years earning your stri
pes.
Bébé is the only player I ever signed without first seeing him in action. We have a good scout in Portugal who had flagged him up. This boy had been playing homeless football and became a triallist for a second division team. He did really well. Our scout told us, ‘We need to watch him.’ Then Real Madrid were on his tail. I know that’s true because José Mourinho told me Real were ready to sign him and that United had jumped in front of them. We took a wee gamble on it, for about 7 million euros.
Bébé came with limitations but there was a talent there. He had fantastic feet. He struck the ball with venom, off either foot, with no drawback. He was not the complete player, but we were coaching him to be better. We farmed him out to Turkey and he injured his cruciate knee ligament after two weeks. We brought him home and put him on remedial work, then in the reserves. He did all right. He trained well in the short games, eight v. eight, goal to goal. On the big pitch his concept of team play needed work. With feet like his he was capable of scoring 20 goals a season. He was a quiet boy, spoke reasonable English, and had obviously had a hard upbringing wandering the streets of Lisbon.
With so many players coming in, I was proud of the work we did on those who were to end up with other clubs. In the spring of 2010, for instance, there were 72 players throughout Scotland, Europe and England who had been through an apprenticeship at Man Utd. Seventy-two.
Fabio Capello told a good friend of mine that if you put gowns and masks on Man Utd players, he could spot them a mile away, which was quite a compliment. Their behaviour and training stand out. We had three in Denmark, one in Germany, two in Belgium, and others all over the place in England. We had seven goalkeepers out there, none of whom had made the first team: Kevin Pilkington, Michael Pollitt, Ben Williams and Luke Steele among them.
We were adept at identifying the players who would become first-team regulars. There is something visible in a top-grade Manchester United player that forces you to promote him to the first team. Darron Gibson was an example of one who brings you to that crossroads where a decision needs to be made about whether he is going to be a first-team player.
In 2009–10 he was at the stage where we were in danger of not being fair to him. He had different qualities to most of my other midfielders. His main attribute was that he could score from outside the box. Scholes was the only other player who could do that, but he was coming to the end. So the judgment was a tough one, as it was with Tom Cleverley, who was at Watford, where he had scored 11 times from midfield. Cleverley had no physique, was wiry as hell, but he was as brave as a lion, had good feet and could score a goal. David Gill said one day, ‘What are you going to do with Cleverley next year? He’s scoring a lot of goals at Watford.’ My answer was, ‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m going to play him, to find out whether he can score goals for me as well as Watford.’
Could he score six for me? Nobody else was getting half a dozen from midfield. Michael Carrick had struck a high note of five. If Cleverley could score six goals in the Premier League from midfield, he would become a consideration. The demarcation line was always: what can they do and what can they not do? The can-do question was: can they win me the game? If they could score six goals, I could ignore some of the negatives.
At 20 or 21, players would sometimes stagnate. If they were not in the first team by then they could become disheartened. I reached that moment in my own playing career. At 21 I was fed up at St Johnstone and took papers out to emigrate to Canada. I was disillusioned. Football’s not for me, I was saying. I’m not getting anywhere. At the United reserve level, we encountered this dilemma all the time. We would send players out on loan in the hope they would come back better, but often sent them to a level that would suit them more in the long term anyway, so they could find careers. We were proud to have relocated the 72 players I talked about elsewhere in the game.
The ones who make it have a way of telling you they are certainties to reach the grade. Welbeck is an example. At one point I tipped him to make Fabio Capello’s 2010 World Cup squad, but he had issues to do with the pace he was growing at. At 19 he was still shooting up and encountering problems with his knees. I told him to go carefully in training sessions and save his best for matches. He was on course to end up 6 feet 2 inches or 6 feet 3 inches tall. But what a good player. Such a confident boy. I said to him: ‘One of these days I’m going to kill you,’ because he was such a cocky so-and-so, and he replied, ‘I’ll probably deserve it.’ Touché. He had an answer for everything.
A constant in our discussions about young players was whether they could handle the demands of the Old Trafford crowd and the short patience span of the media. Would they grow or shrink in a United shirt? We knew the make-up of every young homegrown player who came into the United starting XI, from the training ground, from reserve team football. By the time a player graduated from youth or reserve team football, we aimed to be sure about their temperaments, sure about their characters and sure of their abilities.
But plainly, when we bought players in from abroad, we knew less about them, however hard we investigated their backgrounds, and the peculiar swirl of playing for United could undo some of these imported names. In 2009–10, we were researching Javier Hernández – nicknamed Chicharito (it means ‘little pea’). He was 21 years of age. We sent a scout out to live in Mexico for a month. The information we received was that he was a family boy who was reluctant to leave Mexico. Our contact out there helped us research his background down to every detail.
United’s support is odd in some respects. We would sign a player for £2 million and some fans would consider it a sign of weakness and believe we had lowered our standards. Gabriel Obertan was in that price range. He was greased lightning. But in the final third of the field, his feet were sometimes all over the place. His task was to coordinate his speed with his brain and deliver the hurt in the final third of the pitch.
Mame Biram Diouf was recommended by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer through his contacts at Molde in Norway. Hannover 96 and Eintracht Frankfurt were starting to sniff around him when we stepped up our interest. So we sent Ole and a club official over and acquired him for 4 million euros. Again, the background was right, though he never established himself with us.
Chris Smalling was bought from Fulham in January 2010 with the idea that he would join us for the start of the 2010–11 campaign. He had been playing with non-league Maidstone until 2008, but Roy Hodgson developed a high regard for him at Fulham. He cost us around £10 million. We moved for him when Rio Ferdinand started having problems with his back and other parts. We were on to centre-backs everywhere, all over. We watched them all through 2009–10 and thought Smalling was a young guy who would mature into his frame. Long-term, I could imagine a central defence forming around Chris Smalling and Jonny Evans.
There was no resting on the status quo, even in the best times. The longer I stayed, the further I looked ahead. Regeneration was an everyday duty.
seventeen
BEFORE the Moscow Champions League final of 2008, I was the reluctant holder of possibly the worst record in penalty shoot-outs. I had lost two semi-finals at Aberdeen, a European tie at Aberdeen, an FA Cup tie at Old Trafford against Southampton, an FA Cup final against Arsenal and a European tie in Moscow through penalty shoot-outs. Six defeats and one victory was the inauspicious context to Carlos Tévez placing the ball on the spot at the start of our shoot-out with Chelsea in Roman Abramovich’s home town.
With those memories, you would hardly expect me to have been optimistic. All those earlier disappointments were in my head as the game stretched beyond extra time and the match crept into the early hours of the following day after a 10.45 p.m. kick-off. When Van der Sar saved from Nicolas Anelka to win the trophy for us, I hardly made it off my seat, because I could barely believe we had won. I stayed motionless for several moments. Ronaldo was still lying on the turf crying because he had missed his penalty kick.
Our goalkeeping coach had compiled all the video ana-l
ysis we could possibly need, and was able to pull the data up on a screen to show Van der Sar how each Chelsea player might take his spot kick. For several days we had discussed the order in which our players would step up. They were all good, apart from Ronaldo, who had been scoring them all season. Giggs’ execution was the best: hard and low, inside the post. Hargreaves battered his into the top corner. Nani was a touch lucky because the goalkeeper should have saved it and got a hand to it. Carrick’s was straightforward. Ronaldo hesitated and stopped.
John Terry had only to knock his in to win the game for Chelsea. At that point I was still and calm, thinking: ‘What am I going to say to the players?’ I knew I would have to be careful with my words in defeat. It would be unfair to slaughter them after a European final, I told myself, because they had worked so hard to get there, and these are deeply emotional moments for those in the thick of the action. When Terry missed the tenth penalty in the sequence and we headed into sudden death, my optimism returned. Anderson’s penalty, the first in the do-or-die stage, had lifted our supporters because he had run to them to celebrate, and they were then buoyant again. The kicks were taken into our end of the ground, which was an advantage.
In no sense was this a conventional European final. The time zone was the first quirk, which meant the game had kicked off at 10.45 p.m. I always remember, too, that the rain had drenched me and ruined my shoes, so I attended the victory party in trainers, for which I took plenty of stick from the players. I knew I should have packed a spare pair of shoes. It was between 4 and 5 a.m. by the time we sat down for the buffet. The food was poor but the players gave Giggs a wonderful gift to commemorate him passing Bobby Charlton’s appearance record. This was his 759th game. On the stage they all sang his name.
Alex Ferguson My Autobiography Page 20