FOOTIEMOOSE : Great Article on Slur Alex ... Sir Alex Ferguson is a diminished man this morning. Which is presumably not where he intended to be when he took the decision to sit down and pen the artistically titled “Alex Ferguson. My Autobiography”. To be fair, Ferguson always was the artisan, rather than the artist. His triumphs were built on raw willpower, not tactical acumen. But he projected an aura; a presence. Yesterday, as he settled in for each of the promotional interviews organised by his publishers, he began to shrink. It started at the opening press conference. As he opened his mouth to answer the first slightly awkward question, there was a millisecond’s hesitation. It signified the moment that he realised he was sitting there as Alex Ferguson the man, not the manager. There could be no stonewalling, or curt instructions to have the offending journalist removed. The power balance between questioner and questioned had been reset. Some of his interrogators were slow to recognise the shift. David Bond can safely set aside dreams of being anointed BBC Sport’s Jeremy Paxman. “Can I start just by asking you what you think your greatest legacy is?” was the first of his probing questions. But others did not. If Jon Snow’s interview isn’t sparking the interest of Michael Sheen, Frank Langella and Ron Howard, it should be. It only lasted 11 minutes, but while it did Ferguson was subjected to his toughest public grilling for 26 years. Why did he fall out with all his big-name players? What about his son’s dealings in the transfer market? Wasn’t he, not to put too fine a point on it, a bit of a Stalinist? Unsettled, Sir Alex responded by telling Snow to “get your facts right … you got that one wrong again”. But it was ineffective. The hairdryer had been unplugged. Ferguson’s record speaks for itself. Or it would have done, had the most successful manager in English football history not felt the need to put his own peculiar gloss on it. He said he’d reached an agreement with Hodder & Stoughton three and a half years ago to publish the book, and had been keeping notes ever since, as well as relying on his prodigious memory. But if you actually read the extracts, that memory seems to fail him. Ferguson’s main contention is he managed in the way he did, offloading his stars at the drop of a hat, because no player could be allowed to become bigger than the club. But when penning his section on David Beckham he writes, The minute a Manchester United player thought he was bigger than the manager, he had to go. David thought he was bigger than Alex Ferguson.” It’s clear by that stage Ferguson was guilty of the very crime he accuses Beckham and his other stars of committing. He thought he was bigger than Manchester United. In fact, he clearly thought he was Manchester United. Ferguson also places a high premium on a manager maintaining the respect of his players. But this is again undermined by an amazing passage on the infamous dressing room boot incident that lead directly to Beckham’s departure for Real Madrid. He was around 12 feet from me, wrote Ferguson. David swore. I moved towards him and, as I approached, I kicked a boot. It hit him right above the eye. Of course, he rose to have a go at me and the players stopped him. Sit down, I said. Youve let your team down. You can argue as much as you like. I called him in the next day to go through the video and he still would not accept his mistake. The next day the story was in the press. It was in those days that I told the board David had to go.” Ferguson kicks a boot in a player’s face, then insists it is the player who must apologise. When he refuses, he goes to the board and tells them the player has to be sold. Is that really how you cultivate respect? The irony is that until yesterday the breakdown of Ferguson’s relationship with a host of Manchester United’s most iconic players – Roy Keane, Ruud van Nistelrooy, Beckham, Paul Ince, Wayne Rooney – was perversely held up as evidence of the strength of his man-management skills. It didn’t matter who you were, it was either the bosss way or the highway. And in an era of the million-pound-a-month footballing prima donna, this narrative was appealing. But it’s now clear it was actually the failure of Ferguson’s man management that lead directly to many of these ruptures. And they were exacerbated in part not by the player’s egos, but Ferguson’s own. Part of his motivation for writing the book may have been a characteristically competitive desire to have the final word on Manchester United’s internal psychodramas. Freed of the omerta of the dressing room, he saw the opportunity to set the record straight. But if that was his intention, it hasn’t worked. The biography runs to just over 400 pages. But the phrase I suspect most people will come to associate with its publication is not contained within them, but in a response to them. Roy Keane was asked during ITV’s Champion’s League coverage what he though of Ferguson’s scathing criticism of him. “I do remember having conversations with the manager when I was at the club about loyalty,” he said. “In my opinion he doesn’t know the meaning of the word.” It’s an accusation that would have carried little weight a week ago. Last night it struck home. Sir Alex Ferguson is still the most successful manager of an English football team in history. But I’m not sure he’s still the greatest.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 22:30:22 +0000
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