The main conclusion to which Ferguson came, however, was that he had to get rid of Strachan, whom he felt had been intimidated by Stuart Pearce.
Two days later, Ferguson had an offer of £200,000 from Ron Atkinson, now managing Sheffield Wednesday. He then rang Howard Wilkinson at Leeds United, whom he had promised to contact if Strachan ever became available, and asked for £300,000, which was agreed. Strachan made his Leeds debut at the weekend. He was thirty-two and dropping a division, but not for long. The following season Leeds were promoted as champions and Strachan received a letter of congratulation from Ferguson.
Two seasons after that, they were champions of all England. Strachan had beaten Ferguson to the honour. Leeds, with Gary McAllister, David Batty and Gary Speed joining Strachan in a wonderfully balanced midfield, had overtaken Ferguson’s United in the closing stages of the race to the title. This time there was no letter.
Nor did the course of events imply that Ferguson had blundered in getting rid of Strachan. ‘People said that,’ reflected Strachan later, ‘but he was right to sell.’ The replacement Ferguson had in mind went elsewhere, for United could not match the salary Rangers offered Trevor Steven to leave Everton for Scotland (Ferguson’s old club had become hugely and, as it turned out, overly ambitious). But the association was over. Strachan had become stale. The move to Elland Road revived him. He would never have been the same player under Ferguson at Old Trafford.
A consequence of the Old Trafford defeat that had sent him to Howard Wilkinson at Leeds was that United’s season petered out. If only that had been all.
Forest strode on to play Liverpool in the semi-final at the neutral venue of Hillsborough, the home of Sheffield Wednesday, where, as the match kicked off, ninety-five people died in the crush at the Liverpool supporters’ Leppings Lane End. Among the first telephone calls taken by Kenny Dalglish was one from Ferguson.
When the abandoned match was played at Old Trafford three weeks later, Liverpool won 3-1. They proceeded to Wembley and beat Everton in the final. Dalglish’s team, for all the strains of the mourning process, also kept winning in the League and would have taken the title as well but for the most dramatic transformation in the history of the competition.
Needing only to avoid a two-goal defeat by Arsenal at Anfield in the final match to fend off the challenge of George Graham’s men, they trailed by one until the ninety-fourth and concluding minute, when Michael Thomas struck. Ferguson, watching on television, celebrated like an Arsenal supporter. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so delighted in my life to see anyone score a goal,’ he said. ‘You have to bear in mind that I had a fear of Liverpool when I came down.’ And he believed this rough displacement from their perch could only assist him, even though his own team had finished ten places and twenty-five points behind the champions.
Welcome to Hell
For United – no matter what happened to Liverpool – things had to get better. And they did, but only after they had got worse. The season 1989/90 was to be Ferguson’s most hellish and yet there was a glimpse of heaven at the end, with his first trophy. It was a season that had everything, including the most bizarre pre-match entertainment, provided by one Michael Knighton.
The background was that Martin Edwards, having sunk himself £1 million into debt to buy a 50.2 per cent stake in United (his father had left him only 16 per cent), wanted to sell. He had earlier entertained advances from Robert Maxwell – the entrepreneur, media mogul and owner of Oxford United – whose crooked business dealings were later revealed. Edwards had become deeply unpopular with United’s fans in the process. But now United, as well as Edwards, needed money because of Hillsborough and the Taylor Report. The redevelopment of Old Trafford’s Stretford End, a project close to Edwards’s heart, would cost £10 million which the club did not have. Edwards had already told Ferguson he would sell to anyone who paid for the Stretford End and gave him a further £10 million for his shares.
And then Knighton appeared on the scene. An affable man, slightly chubbier than you would expect from a thirty-seven-year-old whom only injury, we gathered, had denied a career with Coventry City, he met Edwards in the summer of 1989 through an intermediary. Explaining that he had made a lot of money in property, he offered to meet Edwards’s twin terms. Edwards, unaware that football would boom so spectacularly that massively richer pickings could be made, thought his dreams had come true – and shook hands on the deal.
When his fellow directors found out, there was dismay – they suspected that Knighton, despite the Scottish castle in which he had entertained Edwards, might have difficulty raising the scale of resources required – and embarrassment, which went only too public on the first day of the new season.
An hour before the match between United and Arsenal, the new champions, Ferguson and George Graham were having a cup of tea when the kit man, Norman Davies, said Knighton had asked for a United strip to wear. Ferguson laughed and agreed but joked that the team had already been picked.
Soon Davies reappeared and what he said caused Ferguson to turn on a television monitor that showed the pitch. There was Knighton, introducing himself to the fans who thought he was buying their club by trotting out to the centre circle in his strip and juggling the ball all the way to the goal at the Stretford End, where he whacked it into the empty net. ‘I was starting to have a terrible gut feeling,’ said Ferguson, ‘about my new chairman.’ It was magnificent showmanship nonetheless, and the 4-1 victory over Graham’s champions that followed only enhanced the fans’ good humour.
One of the goals came from the newcomer Neil Webb, from Nottingham Forest. The side also featured Michael Phelan, just arrived from Burnley, and soon there would be more signings.
Did Ferguson try to bring McLeish south from Aberdeen to partner Bruce? His autobiography makes no mention of it. Yet McLeish many years later, speaking in the build-up to a match between his Birmingham City and Ferguson’s United, remained under the impression that a bid had been made. He told a long and amusing story about his old boss.
It went back to 1984, when McLeish, though due to sign a new contract with Aberdeen before the summer holiday, heard of interest from Tottenham and told a reporter he had ‘an open mind’. Ferguson read this and called him in. McLeish said the signing could wait until after the holiday, but Ferguson insisted.
‘So I go to see him,’ said McLeish, ‘and, as I’m getting out of the car I’m saying to Gill [his wife] I’m going to tell him it’s time for a change. But I didn’t have an agent. It’s much easier now because players just take a back seat and let the agent knock on a manager’s door. I told Gill I’d be back in five minutes because I predicted he’d go mad and throw me out of his office.
‘And then I tap on the door, and I hear that cough, and my legs go.
‘“Hi, boss,” I says.
‘“What’s all this shit in the papers?”
‘“Well, boss, I’d like to test myself down there.”
‘“This is about money, isn’t it?”
‘“Well,” I says, “I wasn’t that happy with the offer . . .”
‘“You and Willie Miller are bleeding this club dry,” he says. “I’ll give you another fiver a week.”
‘And I go “Okay”.
‘I know – ridiculous. But he could be very persuasive. When I went out to the car, Gill asked if we were packing our bags and I said I’d just signed a new three-year contract and she said she knew I would.’
The contract had a year to run when Ferguson left Aberdeen. He told McLeish he would return to take him to United. ‘He phoned me to say he had an agreement with the chairman that allowed him to come back for a few of us – Jim Leighton, Willie Miller, myself. But, when it came to bidding for me, he felt Aberdeen were asking too much.’
McLeish was thirty by then. Whatever the bid was supposed to be, the £2.4 million Ferguson instead gave Middlesbrough for the twenty-four-year-old Gary Pallister dwarfed it. It was the biggest fee a British club had ever paid.
Four of the five signings were in the team in early October, when Edwards took his fellow directors’ advice and pulled out of the agreement with Knighton, whose money had turned out to be a loan from the Bank of Scotland. Webb had been lost to the side through a serious injury suffered when playing for England and missed a shocking 5-1 defeat in a derby at Manchester City. There were other disappointments and, by the time winter’s chill had set in, the sunny disposition of the 47,245 who had revelled in the triumph over Arsenal had turned to scorn.
It was audibly worse, Edwards recalled, than at any time under Atkinson.
United, for all their spending, had been knocked out of the League Cup by Tottenham at Old Trafford and went into December lying tenth. By Ferguson’s forty-eighth birthday at the end of a month during which they had taken just two points from six matches, they were fifteenth out of twenty. During a home defeat by Crystal Palace, a banner was unfurled telling Ferguson it was time to go. ‘It was a terrible month for me.’ He could not bring himself to speak to anyone about the depths of it, not even Knox, and presented a defiantly nonchalant face to the family.
‘Dad never brought his work home,’ his son Darren told the Sunday Times in 2009, when he was manager of Peterborough United. ‘I remember him coming home the evening United were beaten 5-1 by City. He just laughed, not because he didn’t care but because it was just one of those things that happen in football, things you don’t see coming and can’t do much to avert.’
So inwardly, through that long cold winter, Alex Ferguson questioned his methods, his routines, everything. Was he just another successful manager in Scotland who couldn’t make it down south? And then came the FA Cup draw. ‘Nottingham Forest, arguably the best Cup team in the land – away. Fucking hell! So that night Bob Cass phoned me [Cass, of the Mail On Sunday, was one of his favourite journalists] to get my reaction to the draw. What could I say? We go there with great optimism!’
This was many years later and he could laugh about it, but Ferguson was grateful for Edwards’s words on the way to Nottingham: ‘Whatever happens, you’re staying.’ He appreciated what he saw as an attempt to raise his morale, but Ferguson was too low to respond fully. ‘Everyone’s got their pride,’ he was to reflect, ‘and everyone’s got a sensibility in respect of what people think of you, what your players think of you, and what people are writing about you.’
He was never one of those managers who claimed not to read the papers. ‘The person who helped me most at that time,’ he recalled, ‘was Paul Doherty.’ Doherty knew a bit about football and the media. The son of Peter Doherty, a brilliant footballer who had gone on to manage his native Northern Ireland, most notably at the World Cup in 1958, he was head of sport at Granada television, a big and affable fellow, confident enough habitually to refer to Ferguson as ‘young man’.
One day he came to offer Ferguson a bit of advice and Ferguson listened. ‘I liked Paul,’ he said. ‘He was a straight-shooter. He began by saying I was probably getting more advice than I wanted but that, as a media man, he could help me. I said, “What?” He said that, when I went into a press conference after a match, I’d not to hurry but give myself a good half-hour to regroup my thoughts. No matter the result. “Because these guys,” he said, “are looking to kill you. Week after week, they’re waiting for you to crack.”’
Ferguson didn’t – at least not for another couple of years, by which time, having won trophies, he was in a position of relative strength. It was when United were striving to overtake Leeds at the top of the League late in the 1991/2 season. They visited West Ham, who were already relegated, and lost to a side whose efforts Ferguson described as almost ‘obscene’ (he later acknowledged this as a slight on the east London club’s pride in adversity). The hint of paranoia was noted. But by then, according to Edwards, the feeling in the boardroom was that the wait for the title would not last much longer.
The picture of an inexorable process was not visible to Ferguson in the depths of his 1989/90 winter. He arrived at Nottingham Forest’s City Ground on 7 January without the injured Robson, Webb, Ince, Sharpe and Wallace, but in the second half, as he records in his autobiography, ‘a Mark Hughes pass set Robins up for the goal that settled the match’.
The goal credited, however mythically, with having saved Ferguson’s career at United deserves more detailed description. As Forest try to work the ball to Toddy Örlygsson on their right flank, he is determinedly challenged by Lee Martin, who just keeps the ball in play and knocks it inside to Hughes. This is when the goal is made. An ordinary player might have tried to find Mark Robins with an orthodox right-footed cross from the left. But Hughes did not fancy little Robins’s chances in a straightforward aerial challenge. So, using the outside of his right foot, he bent his pass round Forest’s central defenders, Des Walker and Steve Chettle, the spin on the ball making it break sharply back into the goalmouth so Robins could stay just ahead of Stuart Pearce and, as it bounced up off the muddy pitch, head it past Steve Sutton.
Forest had what they claimed as an equaliser correctly disallowed for a foul on Leighton before the final whistle sounded. ‘United are through,’ sighed Barry Davies on BBC television. ‘Some joy at last for Alex Ferguson.’
Whoever deserved any thanks that were going, neither Hughes nor Robins got them. Indeed, as Robins mentioned in 2009, when he was manager of Barnsley and Ferguson brought United to Oakwell for a League Cup tie, his old boss had joked that he scored only because Pearce had given him a shove in the back: ‘Excellent. So did I save his job? Yes, I did! He never thanked me, but he was a brilliant manager to work for. People said the pressure was on him but, as a young player trying to get into his side, I was oblivious to anything going on around him.’
A closer view of Ferguson’s travails, which continued long after the win at Forest, was available to his son Darren, by now a United trainee and soon to be joined by Ryan Wilson (later Giggs). The list of associated schoolboys discovered by Kidd and the scouts makes for an even more impressive small-print read in retrospect. It featured not only Beckham, Scholes, Butt and Gary Neville but Ben Thornley and Chris Casper, who were to have promising careers ruined by injury, and Keith Gillespie, who was to go to Newcastle and onwards, becoming a seasoned Northern Ireland international, and Robbie Savage, who was likewise allowed to ply his energetic trade at Leicester, Blackburn and elsewhere, becoming an important player for Wales. ‘This was part of the reason we had such faith in Alex,’ said Edwards. ‘The quality of young players coming through was startling.
However: ‘The fans were still very unhappy. All they could see was that we had made five big signings and things seemed to be getting worse.’
You Bastard!
Even as United kept winning Cup ties – 1-0 at Hereford, 3-2 at Newcastle, 1-0 at Sheffield United – their League form remained grim and it was not until late March that they embarked on the run of victories over Southampton, QPR, Coventry and Aston Villa that lifted the threat of relegation. Robins scored in the first three of these matches after coming on as a substitute and rewarded Ferguson for starting him in the fourth with both goals in the 2-0 win over Villa. He also had a further contribution to make to the Cup run.
In early April, when Ferguson took his players across Manchester for their semi-final against Oldham Athletic, a vibrant Cup side under Joe Royle, Robins came off the bench but did not score in a 3-3 draw; it was quite a day for goals, because in the other semi-final Steve Coppell’s Crystal Palace, despite the injury to Ian Wright that disrupted his renowned striking partnership with Mark Bright, beat Liverpool 4-3.
Three days later, Ferguson again had
Robins on the bench. Again he used him in place of Lee Martin. And this time it worked. Robins took a pass from Phelan and expertly steered a low shot away from the Oldham goalkeeper, Jon Hallworth. United were at Wembley.
They remained a work in progress; their modest League position emphasised that. But Ferguson had brought down the age of the side with the promotion of Martin and Robins and the signings of Ince (twenty-one), Pallister (twenty-four), Wallace (twenty-five), Webb (twenty-six) and even the twenty-seven-year-old Phelan.
There were still problems. Though the arrival of the tall and pacy Pallister to complement the commanding Bruce had, after the horrendous early setback at Manchester City, given Ferguson the makings of a new Miller/McLeish partnership to protect Leighton, as at Aberdeen, the goalkeeper’s form had been troubling him. Ferguson had even considered leaving Leighton out of the semi-final against Oldham, only to be dissuaded by Archie Knox, who said it would further erode Leighton’s confidence.
So he stayed in for the final. But it had been obvious from Palace’s triumph over Liverpool that their aerial threat at set pieces would be significant and so the plan was that Leighton would come for the ball only if certain he would get it. Palace nevertheless went ahead when their big central defender Gary O’Reilly scored from a free-kick. Robson equalised, Hughes put United ahead but, when Wright appeared as a substitute to equalise, a thrilling match in sapping heat demanded extra time. Wright then scored again, as did Hughes. Another replay it would be.
For this, Ferguson dropped Leighton. He had noticed the goalkeeper with his head in his hands after the first Wembley occasion – ‘Jim knew he had given another poor performance and I think he felt helpless’ – and decided to use Les Sealey, a cocky Londoner he had borrowed from Luton. Not quite as good a goalkeeper as Leighton, but more assertive and, given the Scot’s apparent state of mind, less liable to cost United the Cup. At least in Ferguson’s opinion; Knox still disagreed.
Football – Bloody Hell! Page 18