The game itself was a marvellous drama which drew some terrific performances from our side. I thought Wes Brown had one of his best games for United and set up Ronaldo’s opening goal with an excellent cross.
In Chelsea’s semi-final, Michael Essien had played right-back, and I decided while watching Avram Grant’s team that Ronaldo would play wide left to make life uncomfortable for Essien, a midfielder by trade.
For our goal, Ronaldo out-jumped Essien, so the plan worked. A midfielder playing right-back against an attacker of Ronaldo’s brilliance was a big ask, and our man tore him apart. Moving Ronaldo left opened the door for someone to play wide right. I chose Hargreaves, who was quick, had energy and could cross the ball. He did well in that role. In the centre of midfield we had Scholes and Carrick, though Scholes was to come off with a bleeding nose. His breathing was starting to become congested. Giggs went on in his place and prospered.
Despite the culture shock of Moscow and the hotel, our preparation had been smooth. In the semi-finals we had beaten Barcelona, drawing 0–0 over there and winning by a single goal at our place. Scholes’ goal was magnificent, a typical thunderbolt from 25 yards. In the first 20 minutes at Camp Nou we played well, as we often did against them, striking the bar and missing a penalty. When they took a grip on the game we just retreated towards the box, which we might have done again in the 2009 and 2011 finals, had I not been determined to win those games our way.
You could call that tactically naive if you wish, but I disagree. We were trying to strengthen our philosophy about winning in the right manner. My thought on two semi-finals was that we endured a lot of heart-stopping moments. We lived on the edge of the box, or inside it, desperate to escape. At Old Trafford, in an even game, we ought to have won by more, with our good counter-attacking. Equally, when they brought on Thierry Henry for the last 15 minutes, they besieged us in our penalty box. It was agony on the touchline, looking at my watch. Later I called it the greatest example of the fans getting behind our men. Every clearance from our box raised a cheer, unusually. Henry missed a sitter. We showed great character. The team absorbed immense pressure and maintained their concentration.
After the game I also said: ‘They can’t be shrinking violets here. They have to be men, and they were men that night.’
We always fancied our chances of adding to the European Cups of 1968 and 1999, provided we could take control of the ball quickly in Moscow, which we did from the start. Our game was full of thrust and invention and we might have been three or four goals up. I started to think it would be a massacre.
Goals can turn games upside down, however, and Chelsea enjoyed a dash of luck just before half-time, equalising through Frank Lampard, which set us on the back foot. Chelsea progressed from there and were the better side for 25 minutes of the second half. Drogba struck a post. That was my signal to think fast about how we might regain a hold on the game. I sent Rooney wide right and brought Hargreaves into a more central position, which put us on top in the game again. By the end I felt we were the superior group of players.
Caught in the ebb and flow of events at pitch level, you can never be quite sure whether the spectacle in front of you is entertaining. But everyone felt this was a terrific piece of theatre, one of the best European Cup finals. It was satisfying to be part of a show that displayed our League in such a good light. I must give credit to Edwin van der Sar for the intelligence of his shot-stopping. As Anelka jogged towards the penalty spot I was thinking – dive to your left. Edwin kept diving to his right. Except for the penultimate Chelsea kick, which Salomon Kalou took, when Edwin dived to his left. So when Anelka approached his moment of truth, he must have been the first Chelsea player to ask himself: ‘I wonder whether he’s going to dive to his right or his left?’ Van der Sar kept pointing to his left to unnerve the taker. Yes, Anelka’s penalty was poor, but Edwin chose the right way to dive.
Avram Grant is a nice man. My fear was always that he might not be strong enough for that group of Chelsea players. Their behaviour in the final was terrible, dragging themselves out for the second half one at a time, giving the referee stick on the way into the dressing room. A team goes out together, they don’t amble out one by one. The referee had been urging them to get a move on, but they just ignored him. At the interval they tried every trick in the book. That might have played on the referee’s mind when Drogba was sent off.
The red card for Drogba followed a clash with Carlos Tévez, which brought Vidić over to support his team-mate. Up went Drogba’s hand to flick Vida’s face. If you lift your hands, you’ve no chance. My understanding was that the referee asked the linesman who the offender had been. And boomph, Drogba was off. By then we had already restored our hold on the game. Drogba’s dismissal was not the turning point. Giggs had a shot cleared off the line. We created chances in extra time and should have killed them off. Chelsea, in my view, played for the draw and gambled on winning the shoot-out.
Though he was removed from the fray that night, Drogba was always a handful for us. He was a powerful, big lad, but what marked him out in my book was a talent for spectacular goals, say, on the turn, from 30 yards. I was surprised to see him missing from the team-sheet against us in a game during Carlo Ancelotti’s finals weeks in charge. Torres started, but Drogba came on to score and force Chelsea back into the match.
From that Chelsea team, which we found it difficult to play against, the goalkeeper, Petr Ĉech, was outstanding. I should have signed him at 19 when I had my chance. Instead, Chelsea took him that summer for £8 million.
John Terry was always an influence in their team. Ashley Cole always gave them energy going forward. And Frank Lampard was incredibly reliable and consistent from box to box. He avoided defensive work a bit in his prime, but he was end to end and hardly missed a game. With Drogba, they were the core, the central five. They were a powerful presence in the dressing room.
At no point before the game did I accept that Chelsea would be under more pressure than us by virtue of Abramovich’s Moscow background, though he was there in the stands, gazing down on his vast investment. I didn’t see that as a factor in the game itself. Security was my main concern. Moscow is a city of great mysteries. I’ve read books on the Russian Revolution and on Stalin, who was worse than the czars, killing his own people to collectivise agriculture. We took two chefs with us, and the food was mostly fine, unlike in Rome, where it was a joke, a disgrace.
What a season Ronaldo had in that European Cup winning campaign. Forty-two goals for a winger? In some games he played centre-forward, but he was essentially a wide man in our system. In every game he would create three chances for himself. I watched him one night at Real Madrid and he had about 40 shots on goal.
Moscow was a relief, above all, because I always said Manchester United ought to be achieving more in Europe. It was our third European Cup victory and took us closer to Liverpool’s five. I always felt we would match Liverpool’s total within a reasonable stretch of time, even after the two defeats to Barcelona in 2009 and 2011, because we had earned extra respect in Europe. With a win in either of those Barcelona finals, we would have been on four, equal with Bayern Munich at the time, and with Ajax.
In our moment of triumph there was no champagne to be found at the Luzhniki Stadium. In the absence of the real stuff, staff were dispatched to a bar to buy some kind of fizzy liquid. Heaven knows what it was. ‘I can’t even offer you a glass of champagne,’ I apologised to Andy Roxburgh, who came into our dressing room to congratulate us. Whatever was in those bottles, we shook it about and made a fuss. There was a lot of hilarity and nonsense, with the players giving each other stick. You’re pleased and proud of them. I was soaked to the skin from the rain, and forced to change into my tracksuit. There was no sign of Abramovich and I don’t recall any Chelsea players coming in.
The 1999 final in Barcelona, when we beat Bayern Munich, fell on the late Sir Matt Busby’s birthday. Sometimes you hope the gods are with you, or that old Matt
is looking down. I’m not a great believer in coincidences, but there is such a thing as fate, and I wondered whether it played a hand in both victories. Matt had taken our club into Europe when the English League was firmly set against it. Matt was shown to be right because English football has had some glorious nights in Europe.
With a major trophy in your possession, you should always buy players to refresh the squad and avoid the risk of stagnation. It was in the weeks after Moscow that we added Dimitar Berbatov to our squad. Berbatov had been on our target list before he moved to Spurs. He had talent in abundance: good balance, composure on the ball and a fine scoring record. He was a good age, tall, athletic. I felt we needed a bit more composure in the last third of the field, the attacking third.
But it ended up as a scrap with Daniel Levy, the Tottenham chairman, which left us reluctant to return to Spurs for players. This was our second trip on the Big Dipper following our move for Michael Carrick. You come off dizzy. You can’t discuss both sides of the issue with Daniel. It’s about him, and Tottenham, nothing more, which is no bad thing from his club’s perspective.
eighteen
FIRST of all, you must tell them the truth. There is nothing wrong with presenting the hard facts to a player who has lost his form. And what I would say to anyone whose confidence was wavering is that we were Manchester United and we simply could not allow ourselves to drop to the level of other teams.
Faced with the need to confront a player who had performed below our expectation, I might have said: ‘That was rubbish, that.’ But then I would follow it up with, ‘For a player of your ability.’ That was for picking them back up from the initial blow. Criticise but balance it out with encouragement. ‘Why are you doing that? You’re better than that.’
Endless praise sounds false. They see through it. A central component of the manager–player relationship is that you have to make them take responsibility for their own actions, their own mistakes, their performance level, and finally the result. We were all in the results industry. Sometimes a scabby win would mean more to us than a 6–0 victory with a goal featuring 25 passes. The bottom line was always that Manchester United had to be victorious. That winning culture could be maintained only if I told a player what I thought about his performance in a climate of honesty. And yes, sometimes I would be forceful and aggressive. I would tell a player what the club demanded of them.
I tell young managers now: don’t seek confrontation. Don’t look for it, because you can bet your life it will come your way. If you seek a clash, the player is placed in a counter-attacking role, which gives him an advantage. When the former Aberdeen, United and Scotland captain Martin Buchan went to manage Burnley, he punched the captain on the first Saturday. ‘That was a good start, Martin,’ I told him.
He was a very principled guy, Martin Buchan. In his playing days, he moved to Oldham and was given a £40,000 signing-on fee, which was a lot of money back then. Struggling for form, he handed the £40,000 back to the board. He couldn’t bring himself to keep money he felt he had not earned. Imagine that happening today.
In general, across my career, people always assumed I had elaborate Machiavellian strategies. In reality I didn’t set out to master the dark arts. I did try the odd trick. Saying we always finished the campaign at a higher gallop and with heightened resolve could be classified as a mind game, and I was intrigued to see Carlo Ancelotti, the Chelsea manager, twig it, in the winter of 2009. To paraphrase, he said, ‘Alex is saying United are stronger in the second half of the season, but we are, too.’
I did it every year. ‘Wait till the second half of the season,’ I would say. And it always worked. It crept into the minds of our players and became a nagging fear for the opposition. Second half of the season, United would come like an invasion force, hellfire in their eyes. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Tapping my watch was another psychological ploy. I didn’t keep track of the time in games. I kept a loose eye on it but it was too hard to work out how long might be added for a stoppage to have an accurate sense of when the game should end. Here’s the key: it was the effect it had on the other team, not ours, that counted. Seeing me tap my watch and gesticulate, the opposition would be spooked. They would immediately think another 10 minutes were going to be added. Everyone knew United had a knack of scoring late goals. Seeing me point to my timepiece, our opponents would feel they would have to defend against us through a spell of time that would feel, to them, like infinity.
They would feel besieged. They knew we never gave up and they knew we specialised in late drama. Clive Tyldesley said it, in his ITV commentary on the 1999 Champions League final, at the beginning of stoppage time: ‘United always score’, which was comparable to Kenneth Wolstenholme in the 1966 World Cup final. That’s a mind game.
There is a psychological dimension also to handling individual players. With errant behaviour it helps to look for a moment through their eyes. You were young once, so put yourself in their position. You do something wrong, you’re waiting to be punished. ‘What’s he going to say?’ you think. Or, ‘What’s my dad going to say?’ The aim is to make the biggest possible impact. What would have made the deepest imprint on me at that stage of life?
A manager’s advantage is that he knows the player wants to play. Fundamentally, they all want to be out there on the park. So when you deprive them of that pleasure you’re taking away their life. It becomes the ultimate tool. This is the greatest lever of power at your disposal.
With the incident with Frank McGarvey at St Mirren, I was consistent in telling him, ‘You’re never going to play again.’ He believed that. For three weeks he believed it. He finished up begging me for another chance. In his mind was the idea that all the power was on my side. Freedom of contract wasn’t a reality then.
People talked non-stop about my mind games. Every time I made a public utterance, a swarm of analysts would look for the hidden meaning, when 98 per cent of the time there was none. But psychological pressure has its place. Even superstitions, because everyone has one.
A woman said to me at Haydock races one day in 2010: ‘I see you on the television and you’re so serious, yet here you are laughing and enjoying yourself.’
I told her, ‘Well, do you not want me to be serious at work? My job is about concentration. Everything that goes on in my brain has to be beneficial to the players. I cannot make mistakes. I don’t take notes, I don’t rely on video evidence, and I have to be right. It’s a serious business and I don’t want to be making mistakes.’
I made plenty, of course. In a Champions League semi-final against Borussia Dortmund, I was convinced Peter Schmeichel had made an error. But at that time I wasn’t wearing my spectacles at games. Peter said: ‘It took a deflection.’
‘Deflection, my arse,’ I shouted. ‘No deflection.’
When I saw the replay later, I could see the ball had made a violent change in direction. So I started wearing my glasses to games. I couldn’t afford to make mistakes like that, to embarrass myself. If you ask a defender, ‘Why did you try to play him offside?’ and his reply is, ‘I didn’t try to play him offside,’ you need to know you’re correct in your assertion.
It makes no sense to offer players an easy chance to tell themselves, ‘The manager’s lost it.’ If they lose faith in your knowledge, they lose faith in you. That grasp of the facts must be kept at a high level, for all time. You have to be accurate in what you say to the players. Trying to be right could be fun, too. It wasn’t all a quest for the truth. A game we would play was trying to guess the opposition’s starting XI. One night I made my usual confident prediction about who would play. When the team came under the door, for a Champions League game, René announced, ‘Boss, they’ve made six changes.’
I froze, then saw my opportunity. Indignation would get me out of this hole. ‘See this?’ I barked at the players. ‘They’re taking the piss out of us. They think they can come here with their reserve team!’
An early
experience was playing Coventry in the FA Cup, at Old Trafford, after we had knocked Man City out in the third round. The week before, I had been to watch Coventry play Sheffield Wednesday. You wouldn’t believe how bad Coventry were. Archie Knox and I drove home without a care. Guess what? Coventry were brilliant against us at Old Trafford. Teams who came to our ground often became a different species. Different tactics, different motivation; everything. From those early lessons, I learned always to prepare in home games for the opposition’s best team, best tactics, best performance, and make sure they were not in the game.
The better teams would always come to Old Trafford looking to give us a fright. Arsenal, especially; Chelsea, to an extent, and often Liverpool. City, when the Sheikh Mansour era started, would also arrive with noticeably enhanced ambition. Clubs managed by ex-Manchester United players would also be bold. Steve Bruce’s Sunderland, for example, were not shy on our turf.
My longevity rendered me immune in the end to the normal whispering and speculation that would envelop other managers after three defeats in a row. My success insulated me against the media calling for an execution. You saw that with other clubs but not with me. That gave me strength in the dressing room. Those benefits transferred themselves to the players. The manager would not be leaving so nor would the players. The coaches and the backroom staff would not be leaving because the manager was staying. Stability. Continuity. Rare, in the modern game. In a bad run we didn’t panic. We didn’t like it, but we didn’t panic.
Alex Ferguson My Autobiography Page 21