Alex Ferguson My Autobiography

As a player I was always having a go at the goalkeepers and defenders for conceding goals. So I knew that if I missed a chance at the other end, I would be receiving it back with interest from those with the less glamorous jobs whom I had criticised on previous occasions. Those were the risks of being outspoken. These days, managers always have their say after the game. If they want to analyse, criticise or praise, there’s an area of managerial involvement right after the final whistle where influence can be brought to bear: 10 to 15 minutes.

With Roy there were episodes of great friction and drama as he tried to impose his will on the team. On one occasion, as I came into the dressing room, Roy and Ruud van Nistelrooy were at it, hammer and tongs. They had to be pulled apart by the players. At least Van Nistelrooy had the courage to stand up to Roy, because not everyone did. He was an intimidating, ferocious individual. His mode when angry was to attack, to lay into people.

I believe – and Carlos Queiroz was at one with me on this – that Roy Keane’s behaviour pattern changed when he realised he was no longer the Roy Keane of old. We’re certain of that. Acting on a conviction that some of his strengths had been stolen from him by injury and age, we tried to change his job description, for his benefit as much as ours.

We tried to alter his role by discouraging him from charging all over the pitch and making forward runs. Every time a team-mate received the ball, Roy would want it off him. That was an admirable quality. The religion at United was that when one of our players had the ball, we moved, and all the others supported the play. Roy was at an age where he shouldn’t have been doing that, but he could not accept the new reality.

I think he could see the truth of what we were saying to him, but to surrender to it was too threatening to his pride. He was a player constructed around his own passions. In the season prior to the fall-out, he was beginning to show physical signs of weakness in terms of getting back to fulfil his defensive duties. He wasn’t the same player – but how can you be, after hip operations, and cruciate knee ligament operations, and being on the front line of so many ferocious battles for so long?

The energy Roy expended in games was quite exceptional, but when you enter your thirties it’s hard to comprehend where you’re going wrong. You can’t change the nature that has driven you to so much success. It became transparent to us that we were no longer dealing with the same Roy Keane.

Our solution was to tell him to stay in that same area of central midfield. He could control the game from there. Deep down, I believe, he knew that better than anyone, but he simply could not bring himself to abandon his old talismanic role.

That was the long-term context to the confrontation that ended with him leaving the club and joining Celtic. He thought he was Peter Pan. Nobody is. Ryan Giggs is the closest you might come to that mythical ageless figure, but Ryan never had any serious injuries. Roy had some bad ones. His hip problem was the one that caused the biggest deterioration in his physical prowess.

The first major fracture in our relationship appeared in pre-season, before the 2005–06 campaign, on our trip to a training camp in Portugal. Carlos Queiroz went out to set it up because it had been his idea, and led us to the most marvellous facility. Vale do Lobo. It was out of this world. Training pitches, a gym and small houses, which were perfect for the players.

I arrived there at the end of my summer holiday in France. All the staff and players were nicely ensconced in their villas. But bad news awaited me. Carlos was having a nightmare with Roy.

I asked what the problem was. Carlos explained that Roy considered the houses at Vale do Lobo to be beneath the required standard and was not willing to stay in his. According to Carlos, Roy had rejected the first house because one of the rooms lacked air conditioning. The second threw up a similar problem. The third, which I saw, was a fantastic house. Roy wouldn’t take it. He wanted to stay in the next village, Quinta do Lago, with his family.

That first night, we organised a barbecue on the patio of the hotel. It was beautifully presented. Roy approached me and said he needed to talk to me.

‘Roy, come on, not now. We’ll talk in the morning,’ I said.

After training I pulled him to one side. ‘What’s going on, Roy?’ I started. ‘I’ve looked at the houses, they’re fine.’

Roy erupted, issuing a long list of complaints, which included the air conditioning. Then he started on Carlos. Why were we doing the pre-season here?, and so on. It was all criticism. It placed a strain on his relationship with us. He became quite reclusive, I thought, on that tour. I was disappointed. Carlos had worked his socks off to make the trip right for everyone.

When the visit was over, I resolved to bring Roy up to the office to at least get him to say sorry to Carlos. He was having none of it.

When we were embroiled in an argument once, Roy said to me, ‘You’ve changed.’

I replied, ‘Roy, I will have changed, because today is not yesterday. It’s a different world we’re in now. We have players from twenty different countries in here. You say I’ve changed? I hope I have. I would never have survived if I hadn’t changed.’

He said: ‘You’re not the same man.’

We had a real set-to. A proper argument. I told him he was out of order. ‘You’re the captain. You showed no responsibility to the other players. It’s not as if we asked you to live in a hovel. They were nice houses. Good places.’

The bad feeling didn’t subside. The deterioration in our relationship really started there. Then came the MUTV interview episode, in which Roy let rip at some of the younger members of the squad for supposedly failing in their duties. We had a rota for MUTV interviews, and on this occasion it was Gary Neville’s turn. On the Monday after we played Middlesbrough, I was not particularly interested when a press officer informed me that Roy was taking over the slot from Gary. It didn’t strike me as significant.

But apparently Roy had been giving the other players terrible stick about Saturday’s game. Cut to 4 p.m. I receive a call at home: ‘You need to see this.’

In the interview Roy described Kieran Richardson as a ‘lazy defender’, doubted why ‘people in Scotland rave about Darren Fletcher’ and said of Rio Ferdinand, ‘Just because you are paid a hundred and twenty thousand pounds a week and play well for twenty minutes against Tottenham, you think you are a superstar.’

The press office had phoned David Gill right away. It was stopped pending a decision from me on what we ought to do with the tape. ‘OK, get the video to my office tomorrow morning and I’ll have a look at it,’ I said.

Jesus. It was unbelievable. He slaughtered everyone. Darren Fletcher got it. Alan Smith. Van der Sar. Roy was taking them all down.

There was no game that week and I was due to go to Dubai to visit our soccer school. That morning Gary Neville called me from the players’ dressing room and asked me to come in. Down I went, expecting Roy to have apologised. I took my seat. Gary promptly announced that the players were not happy with the training. I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘You what?’ I said. Roy had a major influence on the dressing room and I believe that he had used that influence to try and turn the situation. Listen, Carlos Queiroz was a great coach, a great trainer. Yes, he could be repetitive with some exercises, but that’s what makes footballers: force of habit.

I let them have it. ‘You pulled me down here to complain about the training? Don’t you start, the pair of you … Who are you talking to?’ And I walked out.

Later, Roy came up to see me and I told him, ‘I know what’s happened.’ Then I started on the video. ‘What you did in that interview was a disgrace, a joke. Criticising your team-mates. And wanting that to go out.’

Roy’s suggestion was that we should show the video of the interview to the players and let them decide. I agreed and the whole team came up to see it. David Gill was in the building, but declined my invitation to take a seat for the show. He thought it best to leave it to me. But Carlos and all the staff joined the audience.

Roy asked the players whether they had anything to say about what they had just seen.

Edwin van der Sar said yes. He told Roy he was out of line criticising his team-mates. So Roy attacked Edwin. Who did he think he was, what did Edwin know about Manchester United? Van Nistelrooy, to his credit, piped up to support Van der Sar, so Roy rounded on Ruud. Then he started on Carlos. But he saved the best for me.

‘You brought your private life into the club with your argument with Magnier,’ he said.

At that point, players started walking out. Scholes, Van Nistelrooy, Fortune.

The hardest part of Roy’s body is his tongue. He has the most savage tongue you can imagine. He can debilitate the most confident person in the world in seconds with that tongue. What I noticed about him that day as I was arguing with him was that his eyes started to narrow, almost to wee black beads. It was frightening to watch. And I’m from Glasgow.

After Roy had left, Carlos saw I was quite upset. Never in his life, he said, had he witnessed a scene of that nature. He called it the worst imaginable spectacle in the life of a professional football club. ‘He needs to go, Carlos,’ I said. ‘One hundred per cent,’ he said. ‘Get rid of him.’

I was away until the following Wednesday, but phoned David Gill from Dubai and told him, ‘We need to move Roy out.’ His response was that, from the accounts I had given him, there was no choice. He said he would need to speak to the Glazers, who approved the move. I agreed with David Gill that the club would pay Roy’s contract up and honour his testimonial. No one could say we had treated Roy unjustly.

When I returned from the Middle East, David instructed me that the Glazers were coming over on the Friday, and that he had phoned Michael Kennedy to say we wanted a meeting with him. We called Michael and Roy into the meeting and set out our decision, with all the details.

Roy said publicly later that he was disappointed I didn’t end his Manchester United career on my own. But after the original confrontation, I was finished with him. There was no way I wanted another war with him or even to get involved with him again.

I walked out to the training pitch and told the players, and registered the shock on each face.

I always felt that my best moments as a manager were when I made quick decisions based on irrefutable fact, on conviction. It was so clear to me what I had to do to stem this crisis. If I had prevaricated, it would have given Roy more strength in the dressing room, more confidence in his own mind that he had been right, more time to convince everyone he was correct in his behaviour. And he was not right. What he did was wrong.

There was so much to look back on, so much to process as Roy Keane became an ex-Manchester United player. High on the list would be the 2002 World Cup, and Roy flying home after a bust-up with Mick McCarthy, the Republic of Ireland manager.

My brother Martin had taken me for a week’s holiday for my 60th birthday. At dinner I didn’t take my phone along with me, but Martin had taken his, and as we left, it rang. It was Michael Kennedy saying he had been trying to contact me. Michael made it clear there had been an eruption in Saipan, where the Republic of Ireland team had arrived to prepare for the World Cup. ‘You need to talk to him. You’re the only man he’ll listen to,’ Michael said. I was baffled. I couldn’t imagine what Michael could have been so distressed about. He told me the story of Roy’s confrontation with Mick McCarthy. The number Michael gave me was no good so I suggested Roy should ring me instead.

Keane’s voice came on the line. ‘Roy, what on earth are you thinking about?’ Roy unspooled all his anger at McCarthy. I said: ‘Calm down. A bit of advice. You cannot afford to make your children go to school every day with this as the background to their lives. Think of your family. It will be horrendous. Forget the World Cup finals. This will be the biggest story all summer.’

He knew I was right. I told him to get back in there with McCarthy, just the two of them, sort it out and tell the manager he would be playing. Roy agreed. But by the time he went back, Mick had already given a press conference to explain what had been going on. There was no way back for Roy.

I defended Roy to the hilt because he had come from Manchester United, with the high standards we had. Going to a substandard training base, with no training kit, is a reasonable issue to get angry about, and as captain he had every reason to complain. The question in life is: how far do you take a grievance?

As bad as the conditions were in Korea, Roy shouldn’t have pushed his anger to such levels. But that was Roy. He was a man of extremes.

I always protected my players and Roy was no exception. It was my job. For that reason I can’t apologise for the times I stuck up for them when there were sound reasons to lurch the other way. There were times when I thought, ‘Christ, what were you thinking about?’ Cathy posed that question to me many times. But I couldn’t take sides against my players. I had to find solutions other than castigating them in public. Sometimes I had to fine or punish them, of course, but I could never let it out of the dressing room. I would have felt I had betrayed the one constant principle of my time as a manager: to defend. No, not to defend, but to protect them from outside judgments.

In modern football, celebrity status overrides the manager’s power. In my day you wouldn’t whisper a word about your manager. You would fear certain death. In my later years, I would hear constantly about players using their power against managers, and the player receiving the support of the public and even the club. The player will always spill his resentments to whoever might care to listen, but the manager will not do that, because he has wider responsibilities.

I think Roy realised he was coming to the end of his playing career and was starting to think he was the manager. He was assuming managerial responsibilities, and, of course, it’s not a managerial responsibility to go on Manchester United television and slaughter your team-mates.

By stopping it going out, we saved Roy from losing the respect of everyone in that dressing room. But once the meeting in my room developed such a venomous tone, that was the end of him.

The one thing I could never allow was loss of control, because control was my only saviour. As with David Beckham, I knew the minute a football player started trying to run the club, we would all be finished. The real players like that. They like a manager who’s tough. Or can be tough.

They like the manager to be a man. There’s a reward. The player will be thinking: ‘1. Can he make us winners? 2. Can he make me a better footballer? 3. Is he loyal to us?’ These are vital considerations, from the player’s side. If the answer to all three is yes, they will tolerate murders. I had some terrible mood-storms after games and was never proud of my outbursts. Some nights I would go home assailed by fear of the consequences. Maybe the players wouldn’t be talking to me next time I entered the training ground. Perhaps they would be raging or conspiring against me. But on Mondays, they would be more terrified of me than I was of them, because they had seen me lose my temper and were not keen to see it happen again.

Roy’s an intelligent guy. I saw him reading some interesting books. He’s a good conversationalist and good company when he’s in the right mood. The physio would come in and ask, ‘What sort of mood is Roy in today?’ because that would determine the whole mood of the dressing room. That’s how influential he was in our daily lives.

With his contradictions and mood swings he could be wonderful one minute and antagonistic the next. The switch would flick in a moment.

In one deep sense, him leaving was the best thing that could have happened, because a lot of the players were intimidated by him in the dressing room, and those players emerged well from his departure. John O’Shea and Darren Fletcher were certainly beneficiaries. When we went to France to pay Lille in Paris in November 2005, the players were booed on the pitch in the warm-up, partly as a consequence of what Roy had said in the MUTV interview. Fletcher and O’Shea took most of the heckling.

I think the dressing room relaxed when Roy left. Relief swept the room. They no longer had to listen to the barrage that some of them had grown to expect. Because he’d been a declining force, the gap he left was not as big as it would have been three years previously. I watched him in a Celtic v. Rangers game and said to Carlos beforehand, ‘He’ll be the star man today.’

Roy was never in the game. He played a passive role. The dynamic, fist-clenching, demanding Roy Keane wasn’t there. He loved it at Celtic Park. I spoke to him about it and he praised the training, the facilities, the Prozone. Things did settle down between us. About two months later I was sitting in my office discussing team business with Carlos, when a member of staff called to say that Roy was here to see me. I was startled.

‘I just want to apologise to you for my behaviour,’ he said. That’s when he began describing the scene at Celtic and telling me how well his work was going. But when I saw him in that Rangers–Celtic game I knew he wouldn’t carry on with it.

Changes were already in motion before Roy left, but they weren’t yet apparent. There is one abiding truth about Manchester United: we are always capable of producing new players, fresh names, and we had them on tap again as Roy was heading out. Fletcher was acquiring maturity and experience; I brought Ji-Sung Park to the club; Jonny Evans was breaking through.

Often first-team players can’t recognise the regeneration going on around them because they can’t see beyond themselves. They have no clue what’s going on further down the scale. Giggs, Scholes and Neville were exceptions. Maybe Rio and Wes Brown. Others would have no idea. They see their job as playing. But I could see foundations developing. That wasn’t a great period for us in terms of trophies. Yet when you’re managing change, you have to accept the quieter spells and acknowledge that transformations take longer than a year.

I could never ask for three or four years to achieve change, because at Manchester United you would never have that time, so you try to expedite it, and be bold sometimes: play young players, test them. I was never afraid of that. It was never just a duty, but a part of the job I loved. It’s who I am. I did it at St Mirren and Aberdeen and Manchester United. So, when we faced those periods, we always put our trust in younger players.

In terms of recruitment targets, Carlos fancied Anderson strongly. In one day, David Gill travelled to Sporting Lisbon to sign Nani and then drove up the motorway to buy Anderson from Porto. They cost a bit of money, but it showed what we thought, as a club, about young talent. We had a good defensive nucleus of Ferdinand, Vidić and Evra. We were a solid unit at the back. Rooney was developing. We let Louis Saha go because he was always picking up injuries. We had Henrik Larsson for a while, and he was a revelation.

After an initial rapprochement, relations with Roy soured again. I saw a remark he had made in the newspapers to the effect that he had washed Man United out of his life. His claim was that we would all have forgotten him by then. How could anyone forget what he did for the club? The press used to see him as a quasi-manager, because of his winning appetite, and the way he drove the team on. They would ask me all the time: ‘Do you think Roy Keane will be a manager?’ As his career in coaching developed, it became apparent that he needed to spend money to achieve results. He was always looking to buy players. I didn’t feel Roy had the patience to build a team.

In the 2011–12 season, we crossed swords again when Roy was highly critical of our young players after the defeat in Basel, which knocked us out of the Champions League, and I responded by referring to him as a ‘TV critic’. If you studied his final days at Sunderland and Ipswich, his beard would get whiter and his eyes blacker. Some might be impressed with his opinions on TV and think: ‘Well, he’s got the balls to take on Alex Ferguson.’ From the minute he became a TV critic, I knew he would focus on United.

As for blaming the young players? He wouldn’t have aimed that accusation at Wayne Rooney, who wouldn’t have stood for it. The senior players would sort him out. Fletcher and O’Shea are the two he picked on, and they were booed as a result by our fans when we played Lille in Paris. His two spells in management proved one thing: he needs money. He spent at Sunderland and failed. He spent a lot at Ipswich and came up short.

He gave an interview to David Walsh of the Sunday Times saying I only looked after myself, and used the John Magnier/Rock of Gibraltar situation as an example. Unbelievable. That day in my office, when we clashed, I saw the anger in him. His eyes blackened. He went on about John Magnier that day as well. I never understood his obsession with the Rock of Gibraltar affair.

In the arrangement we reached on that momentous Friday, it was agreed that no one would ever talk about our fall-out. I would have honoured that agreement, but for the fact that Roy breached it first. When Roy was at Sunderland he accused United of insulting him and lying to him in the build-up to his departure. The club considered legal action against him. Roy said he would not retract the accusation. My feeling was that he was looking for a day in court to impress the fans. He was still a hero to them, after all. So my advice to David Gill was to pull the legal action. I feel we preserved our dignity.

ten

THE football-watching public probably saw me as an obsessive who seldom looked beyond Manchester United for entertainment. But as the demands of the job intensified, I found refuge in numerous interests and hobbies that kept my mind stretched, my book shelves packed and my cellar stocked with good wines.

Apart from my love of horse racing, this other life stayed hidden from view. It was the world I returned to when the day had run its course at Carrington, our training ground, or when the match had been played, commented upon and filed away. Over the final ten years or so, I eased myself into a range of other interests that helped me manage United more effectively. I worked just as hard but used the muscles of the mind in a more varied way. Home was a base for all my fascinations, from biographies of the dictators to documents on the John F. Kennedy assassination and files on my wine collection.

My political convictions have remained largely unchanged from my time as a shop steward in the shipyards of Govan. People’s opinions change over time with success and wealth, but in my youth I acquired not so much a range of ideological views as a way of seeing life; a set of values.

I’ve never been active in the sense of becoming a Labour Party animal who attended every dinner and popped up in every election campaign. But I always supported local Labour MPs. Cathy would say that the minute you extend yourself into politics, they will want you every time. An expectation will develop that you’re always ready and willing to give your time. Being a believer in the Labour Party and socialist principles is one thing, but becoming an active member was another. I just didn’t have the time as Man United manager to accommodate those demands. I would put my cross on the ballot paper and support them in a visual way. You wouldn’t see me sitting beside David Cameron, would you? You would see me alongside a Labour MP. That would be my impact.

I’ve always been on the left of the party, which explains my high opinion of Gordon Brown’s work. John Smith’s, too. The late John Smith would have been a fine Labour prime minister. I felt sorry for Neil Kinnock: a good guy with bad luck. I would have loved to see him in Downing Street. He had that fiery nature. I was closer to Brown in principle but accept that Blair’s more populist way was the route to get elected. He was correct in his positioning. Plus, he had charisma to go with it and was popular for a long time until the invasion of Iraq undermined the public’s view of him.

My friendship with Alastair Campbell developed through that great man, veteran Scottish football reporter and confidant of several Labour prime ministers, Jim Rodger. He called and asked me to do a piece with Alastair, who was with the Mirror at the time. Alastair and I got on well and he would send me wee letters and so on. He was a good networker. Then he became Tony’s press secretary and we became good friends through his role in the Labour Party. I had dinner with Alastair, Tony and Cherie in the Midland Hotel in Manchester the week before the 1997 election. I told Tony, ‘If you can keep your government in one room and lock the door you’ll have no problems. The problem with government is that they all fly off on their own, they have their own allies, their own journalistic contacts. Controlling the cabinet is going to be the hard part.’

Tony was receptive to that message. In any position of power there is fragility. If you’re leading the country there is vast responsibility and a certain loneliness that I could relate to. I would sit in my office in the afternoon, with my work complete, wanting company. There is a vacuum attached to the job that people don’t want to break into. Tony was a young man going into that position.

In his memoirs he wrote that he had asked my opinion on sacking Gordon Brown when he was prime minister and Gordon was next door in No. 11. My recollection is that Tony wasn’t specific about Gordon. His question was about superstars and how I dealt with them. My answer was: ‘The most important thing in my job is control. The minute they threaten your control, you have to get rid of them.’ He did say he was having problems with Gordon but didn’t ask me specifically what I thought he should do. I kept my advice general because I didn’t want to get into personality issues.

I’ve always found that you have to take the hard road all the time, whether it’s popular or not. If you have a worry about one of your staff, that tells you straight away there is a problem. It never made sense to me to go to bed every night worrying when you could do something to cut the problem away.

Power is useful if you want to use it, but I don’t think it resonates with footballers, who are mostly working-class men. But control was my aim. I could use my power if I wished, and I did, but when you reach the station I attained at United, power came with it naturally. The big decisions you make in those jobs are usually seen by outsiders as exercises in power, when control is really what it’s about.

Labour politics and the great vineyards aside, America was the source of my main intellectual interests. JFK, the Civil War, Vince Lombardi and the great American ball games: these were among my escapes from the pressures of football. New York was my entry point to American culture. We bought an apartment there, which all the family used, and Manhattan became the ideal venue for short breaks when the international calendar took the players away from Carrington.

The States always intrigued and inspired me. I fed off America’s energy and vastness, its variety. My first trip there was in 1983, when Aberdeen won the European Cup Winners’ Cup. I took the family to Florida, for a routine kind of holiday. By then, though, America and its history had already entered my blood. The killing of John Kennedy in Dallas in 1963 left its mark on me from the day I heard the news. Over time I developed a forensic interest in how he was killed, by whom, and why.

I remember the day that shook the world. It was a Friday night and I was shaving in the mirror, at the bathroom sink, before going to the dancing with my mates. My dad, who was a bit deaf, called out: ‘Is that right that John Kennedy has been shot?’

‘Dad, you’re deaf. You’re imagining it,’ I called back, and dried myself off, thinking nothing of it. Half an hour later the news flashed up. He had been taken to Parklands Hospital.

I always remember, at the dancing, at the Flamingo, near Govan, hearing the song that went to No. 1: ‘Would You Like to Swing on A Star?’ The atmosphere was muted. Instead of dancing we sat upstairs and talked about the murder.

For a young lad like me, Kennedy captured the imagination. He was a good-looking boy and there was a certain spark about him. It resonated that someone as fresh and dynamic as him could become president. Though he stayed in my consciousness, as a defining figure, my interest in the assassination developed along an unexpected route when I was invited to speak at a dinner in Stoke by Brian Cartmel.

Stanley Matthews and Stan Mortensen were both present, along with Jimmy Armfield, and I remember thinking: ‘What am I doing here, with all these great players? Surely they’d prefer to listen to Stanley Matthews rather than me?’

But during the dinner, Brian asked me, ‘What are your hobbies?’

‘I don’t have time for hobbies,’ I said. I was obsessed with United. ‘I have a snooker table in the house, I like a round of golf and I like watching movies at home.’

He pulled out a card. ‘My son has a firm in London, he gets all the early releases. Any time you want a film, give him a call.’

The previous night I had been to the pictures in Wilmslow to see JFK. ‘Are you interested in that?’ asked Brian. By then I had assembled several books on the shooting. ‘I was in the fifteenth car in the motorcade,’ Brian said. There we were in The Potteries and this guy was telling me he had been in the JFK motorcade.

‘How?’

‘I was a Daily Express journalist. I emigrated to San Francisco and worked for Time magazine,’ he said. ‘I applied to the Kennedy administration in 1958 to work on the election.’ Brian had been on the plane when Johnson was sworn in as president.

That personal connection drew me deeper in. I started going to auctions. A lad from America who had read about my interest in the subject sent me the autopsy report. I kept a couple of photographs at the training ground – one I bought in an auction, and another that was given to me. I also bought the Warren Commission report signed by Gerald Ford at auction. That cost me $3,000.

When Cathy and I went back to the States in 1991 for our wedding anniversary we travelled to Chicago, San Francisco, Hawaii, Las Vegas and on to friends in Texas, with New York at the finish. We went most years after that. My book collecting gathered pace. The definitive biography of John Kennedy is probably Robert Dallek’s An Unfinished Life, John F. Kennedy 1917–1963. That’s an exceptional book. Dallek had access to Kennedy’s medical files and showed that he was a walking miracle, with Addison’s disease and liver problems.

In the three years of his presidency, plenty of battles came his way, with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, for which he took the blame, as well as segregation, the Cold War, Vietnam and the Cuban missile crisis. Medicare was another rumbling issue, as it is today. It was some workload. Here’s an aside that casts light on the importance of the world’s favourite game. Later, in 1969, do you know how the CIA realised the Soviets were at work in Cuba? Football pitches. Aerial shots of football pitches laid out by Soviet workers. The Cubans didn’t play football. Henry Kissinger was European in temperament and understood that.

My reading on the Kennedys brought me into contact with some wonderful literature: David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest stands out. It concentrates on the reasons for going into Vietnam, and the lies the Kennedy brothers were told. Even Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense and a friend of the family, was misleading them. He apologised, in retirement, to the Kennedy family

On our summer tour of America in 2010, I visited Gettysburg and went to lunch at Princeton University with James M. McPherson, the great Civil War historian who wrote Battle Cry of Freedom. I was also shown round the White House. My fascination with the Civil War started when somebody gave me a book about the generals in that conflict. Both sides had dozens. Teachers were made generals. Gordon Brown asked me one day what I was reading about. ‘The Civil War,’ I said. Gordon said he would send me some tapes. Soon I was taking delivery of 35 recordings of lectures by Gary Gallagher, who went on to work with James McPherson on the role of the navy in the war, a largely untold story.

Then along came horse racing, another great passion, another outlet. Martin Edwards, the former chairman, had called me one day to say, ‘You should take a day off.’

‘I’m all right,’ I replied.

But I was at the stage where Cathy was saying, ‘You’re going to kill yourself.’ At home, after work, I would be on the phone until 9 o’clock at night and thinking about football every minute.

I bought my first horse in 1996. On our 30th anniversary we went to Cheltenham, where I first met that fantastic man, John Mulhern, the Irish trainer, for lunch. That night I joined them in London for dinner. Inevitably I found myself saying to Cathy in the aftermath, ‘Do you fancy buying a horse? I think it’ll be a release for me.’

‘Where did you get that one from?’ she said. ‘Alex – the problem with you is that you’ll want to buy every bloody horse.’

But it did open this release valve for me. Instead of stagnating in my office or burning time in endless telephone conversations, I could switch my thoughts to the Turf. It was a welcome distraction from the gruelling business of football – and that’s why I threw myself into it, to enable me to escape the obsession with my job. Winning two Grade 1 races with What A Friend has been a highlight. The Lexus Chase and the Aintree Bowl. The day before the Aintree race, we had been beaten by Bayern Munich in the Champions League. One minute my head was on the floor. The next day I was winning a Grade 1 race at Liverpool.

My first horse, Queensland Star, was named after a ship my dad worked on and helped to build. Trainers have told me of owners who’ve never had a winner. I’ve had 60 or 70 and I now have shares in around 30 horses. I’m very keen on the Highclere Syndicate: Harry Herbert, who runs it, is a great personality and a fine salesman. You know exactly what’s happening with the horses, with information every day.

Rock of Gibraltar was a wonderful horse; he became the first in the northern hemisphere to win seven consecutive Group 1 races, beating Mill Reef’s record. He ran in my colours under an agreement I had with the Coolmore racing operation in Ireland. My understanding was that I had a half share in the ownership of the horse; theirs was that I would be entitled to half the prize money. But it was resolved. The matter was closed when we reached a settlement agreeing that there had been a misunderstanding on both sides.

Obviously there was a potential clash between my racing interests and the ownership of the club, and when a man stood up at the AGM and insisted I resign there was awkwardness for me. I have to say that at no point was I sidetracked from my duties as manager of Manchester United. I have an excellent family lawyer in Les Dalgarno and he managed the process on my behalf. It didn’t affect my love of racing and I am on good terms now with John Magnier, the leading figure at Coolmore.

Racing taught me to switch off, along with reading books and buying wine. That side of my life developed really from 1997, when I hit that wall and realised I needed to do something else to divert my thoughts from football. Learning about wine also helped in that respect. I started buying with Frank Cohen, a big collector of contemporary art and a neighbour of mine. When Frank went abroad for a while, I started buying on my own.

I could never call myself an expert but I’m not bad. I know the good years and the good wines. I can taste a wine and recognise some of its properties.

My studies took me to Bordeaux and the champagne region, but generally it was through reading that I extended my knowledge, and through conversations with dealers and experts over lunch or dinner. It was exciting. I had dinner with wine writer and TV presenter Oz Clarke and the wine merchant John Armit. Corney & Barrow wine bars put on great lunches. These men would hold conversations about grapes and years that I couldn’t hope to follow, but I was always enthralled. I perhaps ought to have learned more about the grapes. That was the essence of it all. But soon I was developing a working knowledge.

In the autumn of 2010 I was asked about retirement, and found myself saying, instinctively: ‘Retirement’s for young people, because they have other things they can do.’ At 70 years of age, with idleness, the system breaks down quickly. You have to have something in place when you retire. Right away, the next day, not after a three-month holiday.

When you’re young, the 14-hour days are necessary, because you have to establish yourself, and the only way to do that is by working your balls off. By those means, you establish a work ethic for yourself. If you have family, it’s passed on to them. My mother and father conveyed the fruits of their labour to me and I have done so with my own children and beyond. With youth you have the capacity to establish all the stability of later life. With age you have to manage your energy. Keep fit. People should keep fit. Eat the right foods. I was never a great sleeper, but I could get my five to six hours, which was adequate for me. Some people wake up and lie in bed. I could never do that. I wake and jump up. I’m ready to go somewhere. I don’t lie there whiling my time away.

You’ve had your sleep – that’s why you woke up. I would be up at six, maybe quarter past six, and be in the training ground for seven. I was only a quarter of an hour away. That was my habit. The routine never changed.

I came out of a wartime generation that said: you’re born, that’s you. You were safe. You had the library and the swimming baths and football. Your parents worked all the time, so either your granny looked in to make sure you were all right, or you reached an age where you looked after yourself. Your basic pattern was laid down that way. My mother used to say, ‘That’s the mince, that’s the tatties, all you need to do is put it on at half past four.’ It would all be ready to cook. You would light the fire for them coming in from work. My dad would get in about quarter to six with the table all set – that was your duty – and you would take the ashes down to the midden. Those were the chores when you came in from school, and we did our homework later, my brother and I, at seven o’clock at night.

It was a simple regime, born of a lack of modern amenities.

Now we have more fragile human beings. They’ve never been in the shipyards, never been in a pit; few have seen manual labour. We have a generation of fathers, my own sons included, who do better for their children than I did for them.

They attend more family events than I did. Picnics, with the kids. I never organised a picnic in my life. I would say, ‘Go and play, boys.’ There was a school ground beside our house in Aberdeen and the lads would be out there with their pals every day. We didn’t have a video recorder until 1980. It was grainy, terrible. Progress brings CDs and DVDs and grandsons who can pull up their fantasy football team on your home computer.

I didn’t do enough with my boys. Cathy did it, my wife did it, because she was a great mother. She would say, ‘When they get to sixteen, they’ll be daddy’s boys,’ which was true. As they grew older they were very close, and the three brothers were very close, which pleased me greatly, and Cathy would say: ‘I told you.’

‘But you produced them,’ I would tell her. ‘If I ever said a bad word about you to those three boys, they would kill me. You’re still the boss.’

There’s no secret to success in this world. The key is graft. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success, could just have been called Graft. Hard Graft. The examples there run all the way back to Carnegie and Rockefeller. There is a story about Rockefeller I love. The family were big churchgoers. One day his son said to him, as the contributions tray was coming round, and each worshipper was donating a dollar: ‘Dad, wouldn’t it be better if we gave them fifty dollars for the whole year?’

‘Yes,’ says the father, ‘but we’d lose three dollars, son. Interest.’

He also taught his butler how to make a fire that would last an hour longer, how to construct it that way. And he was a billionaire.

Rockefeller’s hard work instilled a frugal nature in him. He didn’t waste. There is a touch of that in me. Even today, if my grandchildren leave something on the plate, I take it. I was the same with my three sons. ‘Don’t leave anything on your plate,’ was a mantra. Now, if I went near Mark, Jason or Darren’s food, they would cut my hand off!

You cannot beat hard work.

Of course, graft and stress place an invisible strain on the body. So does age. From somewhere in that mix I developed heart trouble. In the gymnasium one morning, with the belt on, I saw my heart rate soar from 90 to 160. Summoning the weight trainer, Mike Clegg, I complained: ‘There must be something wrong with the belt.’

We tried another. Same numbers. ‘You need to see the doc,’ Mike said. ‘That’s not right.’

The doctor referred me to Derek Rowlands, who had looked after Graeme Souness. It was fibrillation. His advice was to try electric shock treatment to control the heart rate. Seven days later it was back to normal. In our next game, however, we lost, and my heart rate shot back up. I blame our players. A victory might have kept me inside normal parameters. The treatment had come with a 50–60 per cent success rate, but now I knew more action was required. The advice was to have a pacemaker fitted and take an aspirin every day.

The insertion in April 2002 took half an hour. I watched it on a screen. I’ll always remember the blood spurting up. The device was changed in the autumn of 2010. They last eight years. That time I slept right through the changeover. Throughout these consultations, I was told I could still do what I liked in life: exercise, work, drink my wine.

The initial episode did unsettle me, I admit. The previous year I had taken a health check and returned a heart rate of 48. Albert Morgan, our kit man, had said, ‘I always thought you hadn’t got a heart.’ My fitness was excellent. Yet 12 months later, there I was in need of a pacemaker. What it told me was that getting older comes with penalties. We are all susceptible. You think you are indestructible. I did. You know life’s door will slam in your face one day, but consider yourself unbreakable up to that day. All of a sudden, God’s drawing the reins in on you.

In my younger days I would be up and down that touchline, kicking every ball, immersing myself in every nuance of the game. I mellowed with age. By the end I was tending to observe events more than getting caught up in the drama, though some games still had the power to suck me in. From time to time I would offer a reminder that I was still alive. That message would go to referees, my players, opponents.

On health generally I would say: if you get the warning, heed it. Listen to your doctors. Get the check-ups. Pay attention to your weight and what you’re eating.

I’m glad to say that the simple act of reading is a marvellous release from the hassles of work and life. If I were to take a guest into my library, they would see books on presidents, prime ministers, Nelson Mandela, Rockefeller, the art of oratory, Nixon and Kissinger, Brown, Blair, Mountbatten, Churchill, Clinton, South Africa and Scottish history. Gordon Brown’s book on the Scottish socialist politician James Maxton is in there. Then there would be all the volumes on Kennedy.

Then I have my despots section. What interested me here were the extremes to which humanity will go. Young Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore; the dictators – Stalin and Hitler, and Lenin; World War II: Behind Closed Doors by Laurence Rees; Stalingrad and Berlin: The Downfall 1945 by Antony Beevor.

On a lighter note I can pull out Edmund Hillary and David Niven. Then it’s back to the dark side with crime: the Krays and the American Mafia.

I was so immersed in sport in my working life that I tended not to read many books about sport. But there are a few touchstones on the shelves. Reading When Pride Still Mattered, the David Maraniss biography of Vince Lombardi, the great Green Bay Packers coach, I was thinking: ‘That’s me he’s writing about, I’m just like Lombardi.’ The obsession. I could identify closely with one of Lombardi’s greatest sayings: ‘We didn’t lose the game, we just ran out of time.’

eleven

I WAS at home on a snowy January night in 2010 when my phone beeped with a text message. ‘I don’t know whether you remember me,’ it started, ‘but I need to call you.’ Ruud van Nistelrooy. Christ, what was this? I said to Cathy, ‘He left four years ago.’ Cathy’s reply: ‘What’s he wanting? Maybe he’d like to come back to United.’

‘No, don’t be silly,’ I told her.

I had no idea what it might be. But I texted him back: OK. So he rang. First, the small talk. Had some injuries, fit now, not getting a game, blah blah. Then he came out with it. ‘I want to apologise for my behaviour in my last year at United.’

I like people who can apologise. I’ve always admired that. In the modern culture of self-absorption, people forget there is such a word as sorry. Footballers are cocooned by the manager and the club, the media, agents, or pals who just tell then how flipping good they are. It’s refreshing to find one who can pick up a phone much later and say, ‘I was wrong, and I’m sorry.’

Ruud offered no explanation. Perhaps I should have taken that chance to say, ‘Why did it go that way?’

Mulling over Ruud’s call to me, that winter night, I knew that two or three Premier League clubs were looking at him, but couldn’t see that being a reason for him wanting to speak to me. There would have been no need for him to repair his relationship with Manchester United in order for him to play for another club in England. Perhaps it was a guilt complex. It might have been playing on his mind for ages. Ruud was doubtless a more mature person by that stage.

The first sign of trouble in our relationship had been that Ruud had started to mouth off all the time to Carlos Queiroz about Ronaldo. There were a few stand-up confrontations, but nothing unmanageable. Then Ruud switched his fire to Gary Neville. Gary was ready for that and won the battle. David Bellion was another who seemed to arouse anger in Ruud. There were quite a few altercations all the way through his final season with us, but it was mainly Van Nistelrooy on Ronaldo.

At the end of the previous season, 2004–05, we had reached the final of the FA Cup, against Arsenal. Van Nistelrooy had a horrible game. The previous Wednesday his agent, Rodger Linse, had sought out David Gill and asked for a move. ‘Ruud wants to leave.’

David pointed out that we had a Cup final on the Saturday, and that perhaps this wasn’t the best moment for our main centre-forward to ask to leave. David asked why he wanted to go. Rodger Linse’s reply was that Van Nistelrooy thought the team had stagnated and didn’t believe we could win the Champions League. His view was that we couldn’t win the European Cup with young players – the likes of Rooney and Ronaldo.

After the Cup final, David called Rodger and asked him to get Ruud in for a meeting with me. Our position was strong because Real Madrid were not going to pay £35 million for him. That was obvious. And it was the reason, I believe, why Ruud was asking to leave. Had Real Madrid been willing to come up with £35 million, there would have been no need for him to push for a move. He was hoping to bargain with the club to find a fee United would find acceptable. Silly idea.

So we had our meeting. His stance was that he wasn’t prepared to wait for Ronaldo and Rooney to mature. ‘But they’re great players,’ I told him. ‘You should be leading these young players. Helping them.’ Ruud still said he didn’t want to wait.

‘Look, we’re going to sign players in the summer to bring us back to our usual level,’ I said. ‘We don’t like losing finals, we don’t like losing the League. When you build teams you have to be patient. Not just me, but the players, too. This is going to be a good team.’ He accepted my argument and we shook hands.

In that season we had signed Vidić and Evra in the January transfer window. Indirectly, those two acquisitions were to ignite the biggest flashpoint in all the time Ruud was with us. In the Carling Cup I had been playing Louis Saha all the way through. When we reached the final I said to Ruud, ‘Look, it’s not fair if I don’t play Saha. I know you like to play in finals. Hopefully I can get you a bit of the game.’ I did say that, no doubt about it.

We were on cruise control against Wigan and I saw an ideal opportunity to give Evra and Vidić a taste of the game. They were my final substitutions. I turned to Ruud and said: ‘I’m going to give these two lads a part of the game.’ They were going to get a touch, a smell of winning something with Manchester United. ‘You —,’ said Van Nistelrooy. I’ll always remember that. Could not believe it. Carlos Queiroz turned on him. It became fractious in the dug-out. The other players were telling him: ‘Behave yourself.’

But that was the end of him. I knew we would never get him back. He’d burned his boats. After that incident, his behaviour became worse and worse.

In the final week of that campaign we needed to win the last game of the season, against Charlton. With Saha’s injuries we were walking on eggshells with him. However, I didn’t feel I could select Ruud.

Carlos went to Ruud’s room and said, ‘We’re not taking you, go home. The way you’ve behaved all week – we’re not having it.’

Ronaldo had recently lost his father. During that week, Ruud had taken a kick at Ronaldo on the training ground and said: ‘What are you going to do? Complain to your daddy?’ He meant Carlos, not Cristiano’s dad. He probably wasn’t thinking. So then Ronaldo was upset, and wanting to have a go at Van Nistelrooy, and Carlos was upset by the insult. Carlos had looked after Ronaldo, as you would expect. He’s a coach with Portuguese origins, from the same country. Here was a young man with a dying father. If he couldn’t ask for help from Carlos, who could he seek it from?

The whole episode was very sad. Why Ruud changed, I don’t know. I can’t say for sure whether it was his way of getting himself out of Old Trafford. It didn’t do him any favours or bring him any credit in the sense of respect from the other players.

It was a pity because his numbers were sensational. He was one of our club’s greatest goal-scorers. Problems first surfaced after his second season, when he was up for a new contract, in accordance with his original deal. He asked for a clause that would allow him to leave for Real Madrid, specifically, in the event of Real offering a specified sum. A buy-out clause. I pondered this one for a long time. My feeling was that, without that concession, Van Nistelrooy would not have signed his name. Conversely, to concede that ground would give him a controlling hand. We ran the risk of losing him the following season.

So the figure we inserted was £35 million, which, we thought, would deter all-comers, even Real Madrid. They agreed it. To David, I said, ‘If they come back next year and pay thirty-five million, at least we’ll know we have doubled our money on him. If they don’t come, we’ll get the two years in his contract out of him, and he will be twenty-nine by that point. We’ve had him four years. We’ll be able to move him on.’ Fine, but the moment Ruud signed that contract he changed. In his last season he became a really difficult boy. I don’t think he was popular by the end. The alteration in him was dramatic.

My brother Martin had seen him play for Heerenveen and said: ‘I really like this lad, he does look the part.’ With that glowing review I needed to get cracking. We went back to see him again but received word he had already signed for PSV a month previously. That confused me. But it seemed a done deal. We kept an eye on him regardless and made our move in 2000.

On a short holiday in Spain, during an international break, I received bad news: a message from our doctor to say Ruud had failed the medical. We were sure we had spotted cruciate ligament damage. PSV disagreed, insisting that all their tests had shown only minor ligament disruption of the kind that would not prevent him passing the examination. Mike Stone, however, would not sign it off. So we sent him back to PSV, who sent him back into training and filmed it, for our benefit. In the practice session Ruud’s knee completely went. The footage found its way onto TV, where you could see him screaming. What should we do?

‘These days, if you have the right people looking after you, you can be back from this kind of injury in a few months,’ I told Martin Edwards.

Van Nistelrooy followed the trusted route to Dr Richard Steadman in Colorado and was out for almost a year. He returned towards the tail end of that season and we signed him in 2001, after I had been to watch him against Ajax. His mobility was not impaired and his pace had not diminished. He wasn’t the quickest striker; he was a galloper who had a quick brain in the penalty box.

I’d also been to see him at his home while he was convalescing and had told him we would still be taking him to Old Trafford, irrespective of his injury. That was an important message for him, because I don’t think he was the most confident lad at that point in his career. He was a country boy.

He was a typical old-fashioned Italian-type centre-forward. Forget all that running out to the wings and tackling. Back in the early 1960s, Juventus had a centre-forward called Pietro Anastasi, who would contribute little in games before winning them with sudden goal-scoring bursts.

That was the kind of centre-forward who dominated the game in that era. You left them to do their work in the penalty box. Van Nistelrooy was from that template. Opportunities had to be created for him. But he was a flawless finisher who scored some true poacher’s goals.

In fact, he was one of the most selfish finishers I ever saw. His personal goal tally was his guiding obsession. That single-mindedness gave him the edge of a great assassin. He had no interest in build-up play or how many yards he had run in a game, how many sprints he had made. The only aspect he was ever interested in was: how many goals did Ruud van Nistelrooy score. He was superb at the ‘early hit’. He would dart to the side of the defender and deliver that quick, lethal strike.

If you put my great goal-scorers together (Andy Cole, Eric Cantona, Van Nistelrooy, Rooney), Ruud was the most prolific. But the best natural finisher was Solskjaer. Van Nistelrooy scored some magnificent goals, but many were scabby, six-yard box goals. Andy Cole scored some fine goals, too, but plenty were close in, scrambled, off the leg, just-get-it-in goals. Solskjaer’s finishing, though, could be majestic. His thought processes underpinned his skills. He had that analytical mind. As soon as he arrived in a shooting position, he had it all sized up. He had mental pictures everywhere. Yet he didn’t play all the time because he wasn’t the most aggressive of strikers. He developed more of that later, but was a slender young man without the physique, in his early days, to clear a path.

In games, sitting on the bench, and in training sessions, he would make notes, always. So by the time he came on he had analysed who the opponents were, what positions they were assuming. He had those images all worked out. The game was laid out for him like a diagram and he knew where to go and when.

Ole was a sweet-natured boy who was never looking to be confrontational with me. There was no risk to my office door from Ole wanting to smash it down to demand a place in the first XI. We knew he was content with his role, and that helped us, because if we had a difficult decision to make about the other three strikers, which one to leave out, the fourth was content to play a supporting part. So we just had the three grumpy forwards to deal with. Yorke, Cole and Sheringham.

At first I believed Ruud’s range of attributes was wider than it turned out to be. I expected to see from him more of the donkey-work that Manchester United players have to do. There were times when he did his share, and would apply himself to it, but he was not inclined to be that kind of industrious player. He wasn’t endowed with great stamina. His test results were never startling. Yet you knew he could always put the ball in the net if you fed it into his path.

In the preceding years we had lost Cantona, Teddy Sheringham had gone, Ole was having his knee problems, Yorkie had lost a bit of focus and Andy was still fit, fresh. You could always rely on Andy, but I knew when I took Van Nistelrooy on, I was bound to have problems with Cole, because he thought he was the best centre-forward in the world. I say this affectionately, because it was a useful self-image to have, but he was miffed when I started pairing him with Ruud.

Displeasure had been apparent too in Andy’s relationship with Cantona. The only colleague he really related to was Yorkie. Their season in 1998–99 was made in heaven. Their partnership, their friendship, was phenomenal. They hadn’t known one another when Yorkie came to the club, but they just gelled. In training they would work on runs together, little dummies, one-twos. They synchronised beautifully. I think they scored 53 goals between them.

Pairing up with Van Nistelrooy wasn’t going to work for Andy, so I sold him to Blackburn Rovers. He was in his early thirties by that point and we felt we’d had some fine years out of him. We signed him in 1995, got seven years out of him and received £6.5 million from Blackburn. His cost from Newcastle had been £7 million, plus Keith Gillespie, who was worth no more than £1 million. So we almost recovered our money after seven years of productivity. Not bad.

Another striker who ran up against the problem of Ruud’s singularity was Forlán, a grand player. Ruud wanted to be the No. 1 finisher. That was his nature. Diego Forlán didn’t register on his radar at all, so when you put the two of them out there together there was zero chemistry. Diego was better with a partner. But he scored some priceless goals. Two at Anfield, a goal with the last kick of the game against Chelsea. He was a good player and a terrific pro.

The other complication I had with him was that his sister was an invalid, in Majorca, and it fell to him to look after her. But he was great about the place, always smiling. Spoke five languages. A breath of fresh air, as a person. We let him go for £2 million, which I thought was too cheap. With his wages, no club was willing to bid any higher. The next thing we knew he was moving on for £15 million. He floated over the ground. He was small but had a good upper body. Tough. He was such a good tennis player that he might have become a pro and had to choose between that and football. I knew that, when he joined. During our pre-season tennis tournament, I tried to get a bet on him. I said to Gary Neville, who ran the book: ‘What price is Diego?’

‘Why? Why?’ said Gary, alarmed. ‘Does he play?’

‘How would I know?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

But Gary was already on to me. There would be no betting on Diego. He slaughtered them all. Cut them to ribbons.

‘You think we’re stupid, don’t you?’ Neville said.

I said, ‘Well, it was worth a try. I was hoping you’d say ten-to-one!’

twelve

THE first time I recognised José Mourinho as a potential threat was at his opening press conference as Chelsea manager in the summer of 2004. ‘I’m the special one,’ José announced. ‘What a cheeky young sod,’ I thought, as I watched him entertain the press with richly quotable material.

An internal voice told me: New kid on the block. Young. No point in discussing him. No point in taking him on. But he’s got the intelligence, the confidence, to deal with the Chelsea job.

I had spoken to Carlos a lot about José and he had told me, ‘He is a very clever boy.’ His knowledge of Mourinho stretched back to a time they had shared in academia. José was one of Carlos’s students in Portugal. ‘My best student by far. By far,’ Carlos told me. Forearmed with that knowledge, I watched him ride the wave of expectation he had created for himself; the wave that carried him from Porto to London to work for Roman Abramovich. José was one of those guys on a surfboard who can stay longer on the wave than everyone else. I knew straight away it would be unwise to engage him in psychological conflict. I would find another way to tackle him.

In the period from August 2004 to May 2006, we won one trophy: the 2006 League Cup. Chelsea and José won the Premier League in both those campaigns. As Arsenal dropped away, Abramovich’s wealth and José’s managerial ability became the biggest obstacle to our rebuilding.

Traditionally, our preparation for a new season had emphasised the second half of the 38-game programme. We always finished strongly. There was science as well as spirit behind our talent for winning games in the months that really mattered.

José was fresh in town, working for an employer with stacks of money, and with hype clearing his path. In the autumn of 2004 he needed to make a strong start in his first weeks at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea skated to a six-point lead and we could never make it up. Once they hit the front in the title race, José made sure they won plenty of games narrowly. It was all one- and two-nil victories. They would take the lead in games and then consolidate. Chelsea were becoming an incredibly hard team to break down. They were much better organised than before. I didn’t win a game at Stamford Bridge after Mourinho arrived.

José put in lots of pre-season work on the defensive shape and played initially with a back three, two wide men and a midfield diamond. Very hard to play against, that formation.

Our first encounter had been the 2003–04 Champions League campaign, when José’s Porto knocked us out. I had a spat with him at the end of the first leg. But I often had disagreements with fellow managers when first running into them. Even George Graham and I clashed after our first meeting when George was at Arsenal. Later, we became good friends. The same is true of Mourinho. I always found him very helpful and very communicative. I think he realised he was dealing with someone who had experienced all the emotional extremes in the game and enjoyed our conversations.

My indignation in that first leg stemmed from all the diving his Porto players were doing. I think he was a bit taken aback by my anger. I went too far. There was no need for me to vent my feelings on José. I was more angry with Keane for being sent off. Playing on my mind was the knowledge that Martin O’Neill had complained about the conduct of José’s players in the UEFA Cup final between Porto and Celtic, which Porto won. There was a seed in me. I had watched that final but didn’t think they were atypical of a Portuguese team. But when Martin O’Neill kept on and on about it, I started to persuade myself that José’s team were cynical.

My first impression in the away leg was that Roy had been the victim of a refereeing misjudgment. On review, it was clear he’d tried to leave his mark on their goalkeeper. That reduced us to ten men and meant Keane was suspended for the return leg.

In the Old Trafford leg, the referee behaved bizarrely. We attacked three or four minutes before the end of the game. Ronaldo beat the full-back and he chopped him down. The linesman flagged but the Russian referee played on. Porto went to the other end and scored.

I congratulated José at the end of that match. When a team knock you out, it’s imperative to find a way to say ‘all the best’. We had a glass of wine and I told him: ‘You were lucky, but good luck in the next leg.’

The next time he appeared at Old Trafford, he brought a bottle of his own wine, a Barca-Velha, and that started a tradition. The wine at Chelsea was awful, which I could never understand. I said to Abramovich once, ‘That’s paint-stripper.’ The next week he sent me a case of Tignanello. A great drop, one of the best.

As for José’s gallop along the touchline at Old Trafford, I’ve done it myself. I think back to when we scored against Sheffield Wednesday and Brian Kidd was on the pitch, on his knees, with me rejoicing on the touchline. I admire people who show you their emotions. It shows you they care.

That Champions League victory over United launched José. Beating Celtic in a UEFA Cup final was an achievement, but defeating Manchester United at Old Trafford and then going on to win the European Cup was a fuller demonstration of his talent. I remember saying to him around 2008, ‘I don’t know when I’m going to retire. It’s difficult when you get older because you’re scared to retire.’ José said: ‘Don’t you retire, you’re keeping me going.’ He said he had other challenges, but definitely wanted to come back to England. He won the Champions League with Inter Milan and La Liga in Spain with Real Madrid before returning to Chelsea in June 2013.

Everyone I speak to tells me that José is exceptionally good with players. He’s meticulous in his planning, the detail. He’s a likeable person when you get to know him, and he can laugh at himself, turn a joke back on himself. I don’t know whether Wenger or Benítez had that capacity.

Watching José tackle the Real Madrid job after his appointment in 2010 was fascinating. It was the most interesting appointment I could remember in the game; the most intriguing match of styles, managerial and playing. Every coach who has worked there has had to adhere to their philosophy. The galáctico philosophy. When they appointed Mourinho, I’m sure they must have accepted that they would need to bend to his thinking if they were to win the European Cup.

It’s like any profession. You bring someone in and suddenly everything is altered, and the authors of that appointment say, ‘Just a minute, we didn’t know we were going to get this.’ There would have been a few fans sitting in the Bernabéu thinking: ‘I’m not happy with this. I didn’t pay for this. I’d rather lose 5–4 than 1–0.’

So the spectacle of José’s time in Madrid held me in its grip. It was the greatest challenge of his working life. He had proved the merits of his ways, at Porto, Chelsea and Inter Milan. He had won two European Cups with different clubs. Could he reshape Real Madrid in his own image, to his own thinking? From the beginning, there seemed little prospect of him abandoning his most sacred ideas in favour of all-out attack and celebrity exuberance. He knew that wasn’t the way to succeed in modern football. Barcelona would attack beautifully, but they would also hound the ball when possession was lost. They were a hard-working unit, a collective. In that spell when Real reached three Champions League finals in five years, they had the best players: Zidane, Figo, Roberto Carlos. Fernando Hierro, Iker Casillas in goal, Claude Makélélé sitting in the middle of the park to break everything up.

They stayed with the galáctico system after that, importing Dutch players en masse, and David Beckham, Van Nistelrooy, Robinho, but the European Cup eluded them after the Glasgow final of 2002. Mourinho proved he could make big teams win, but the question I wanted answering was whether he would be allowed to do it his way in Madrid.

José was a pragmatist, no question. The starting point in his philosophy is to make sure his team don’t lose. Against Barcelona in the previous season’s Champions League semi-final, he knew his Inter side were going to cede 65 per cent of possession. All teams knew that. Barcelona’s policy was to ensure they were always overloaded in the midfield area. If you played four there, they would field five, if you played six, they would up the ante to seven. By doing so they could rotate the ball, in and out to the back four. You would end up on their carousel, going round and round, and wind up dizzy. Occasionally you might fall on the ball. Watch a carousel and you will see what I mean. The eyes go woozy.

So José knew Inter would not see much of the ball against Barcelona, but he had weapons of his own, mainly concentration and positioning. Esteban Cambiasso, his central midfielder, was a vital component in that Inter team. If Messi appeared over here, so would Cambiasso. Should Messi pop up in another area, Cambiasso would be there as well. It sounds easy, but as part of a general team plan in which all the defensive duties would connect, it was marvellously effective. Later, I watched a Real Madrid game in which José made three substitutions in the last 15 minutes. They were all defensive in nature, to make sure he won the game.

But all this came much later than our battles in the middle of the decade, when Chelsea won their first League title for 50 years and retained it 12 months later, in the summer of 2006. If 2004–05 was a horrible season, with no trophies, the following year brought only the League Cup. A new team was growing, but I was not to know we could win three Premier League trophies in a row.

Our strategy was to rebuild for the eventual departures of Keane, Giggs, Scholes and Neville. Three of them stayed beyond that plan, while Keane had to go. The intention was to assemble a group of young players who could develop over a number of years, with the experience of Giggs and Scholes and Neville to assist that process. Now I can look back on that policy as an unqualified success.

Yes, we had a barren season in 2004–05, losing the FA Cup final to Arsenal in a penalty shoot-out, but I could see the promise, in that showpiece game, of Rooney and Ronaldo. They toasted Arsenal that day. We had 21 shots at goal. In the Champions League round of 16, we lost 1–0 home and away to Milan, with Hernán Crespo scoring both goals. Rebuilding held no terrors for me. It was second nature. A football club is like family. Sometimes people leave. In football, sometimes they have to, sometimes you want them to, sometimes there is no choice for either side, when age or injury intervene.

I did feel sentimental about great players leaving us. At the same time, my eye would always be on a player who was coming to an end. An internal voice would always ask, ‘When’s he going to leave, how long will he last?’ Experience taught me to stockpile young players in important positions.

So when, on 10 May 2005, we assembled a guard of honour for Chelsea, the new champions, at our ground, I had no intention of surrendering to Abramovich’s wealth in the months to come.

Psychologically that was a big moment for Chelsea. They had won the League for the first time in half a century and could see themselves from then on in another light. A lesson we took on board was that slow starts could no longer be tolerated if we were to face down Chelsea, our big new challengers. The following season we made a flying start, though the campaign fizzled out, the lowest point being the game against Lille in Paris, where a proportion of our supporters booed the young players in the warm-up in the wake of Keane’s outburst on MUTV about some of our squad not pulling their weight.

That was a killer. Roy had exacerbated the problem of our poor form by making targets of his team-mates. On the pitch we were in shocking form and the 1–0 defeat that night was my lowest point for many years.

In the same month that Roy Keane left the club, in November 2005, we lost George Best. He was a very nice bloke, George, a very gentle lad, a bit nervous, somehow. Nervous to talk to you. He had an insecurity about him that worried you. I remember sitting in a bar in Japan with him once – he was with a girlfriend – and he could hardly talk. He seemed gripped by shyness. George could have had a good life after football. He could have coached young players, but perhaps lacked the personality to be a tutor. A fact about George that few recognised is how intelligent he was. The funeral was huge and sad and wonderfully orchestrated by the city of Belfast. It had the feel and the grandeur of a state funeral. I remember looking at George’s father, a wee, humble man, and thinking: ‘He produced one of the greatest players of all time.’ A small man from Belfast, a quiet man. You could see where George got his reticence.

The football public in his country is basically working class, and for some reason they like people who are flawed. Best, Gascoigne, Jimmy Johnstone. They see reflections of themselves in these imperfect heroes. They understand the frailty. Jimmy was such a likeable lad you could never fail to be amused by his mischief.

Jock Stein would stare at his telephone every Friday night and his wife Jean would say, ‘What are you looking at the telephone for?’

‘It’s going to ring,’ Jock would say. ‘The phone’s going to ring.’

A typical call would start: ‘Lanarkshire police here, Mr Stein. We’ve got young Jimmy here.’

George Best, of course, was one of United’s great European Cup winners. But we were a long way off that pinnacle in this campaign. Wayne Rooney was sent off in a 0–0 draw at Villarreal in September 2005 for sarcastically clapping Kim Milton Nielsen, who had also dismissed David Beckham in the 1998 World Cup. Not my favourite referee. Nielsen was one of the most infuriating match officials. You were petrified when you saw his name on the list. On another occasion, Rooney swore at Graham Poll ten times. Poll, who could have sent him off, probably enjoyed having the TV cameras on him. But at least he had the common sense to handle Wayne as a human being and not be bothered by his effing and jeffing. In that respect, Rooney would have more respect for Poll than he would for Nielsen. That was the game in which Heinze ruptured his knee ligament after his agent had asked us for a transfer.

Meanwhile, after we had been knocked out of the Champions League with a 2–1 defeat at Benfica in December, the press were rolling out the sell-by-date theory. To be criticised for continual negligence in the job would have made sense to me, but the suggestion was that I had lost it because of my age, which was disgusting. As people grow older, they gain experience. There was a phase in football when top players were being hired as Premier League managers straight away with no apprenticeship. Managers with experience were tossed aside. Look at Bobby Robson, who was pushed out by Newcastle. Sam Allardyce, a proven manager, was given six months at the same club. Ridiculous. Having to face the press on a Friday was galling. None would ask me to my face: ‘Aren’t you past your sell-by date?’ But they would write it. They would use the power of the pen to destroy a manager.

Momentum had its own logic. Supporters would say: ‘What they’re reporting is right, you know, I’ve been saying that for years.’ I knew where we were going. I knew we needed a bit of time. Not too much, because at that time in my career I wouldn’t have been granted unlimited leeway. Had I not felt I was on the verge of building another good team, I would have walked of my own volition. I was confident in Rooney and Ronaldo. I was sure the scouting structure was strong. Players would be found to take us back to our natural level. Though we only won the League Cup, there were some good performances in 2006.

Our form recovered after the Benfica defeat, with wins against Wigan, Aston Villa, West Brom and Bolton, which left us nine points behind Chelsea in the League. Then Evra and Vidić joined. At the back, we practised defensive drills almost every week, especially with crosses: position, attacking the ball, movement of strikers against them, with the full-backs coming into it. We would start off at the centre circle, with two strikers and two sets of wide players, right and left. We’d start off by knocking the ball up to one of the strikers, who would have a shot. As soon as that happened, a second ball would be played out to the side position, from where they would cross, and then a third ball would come from the edge of the box back in again; so they had to react to the shot, the first cross and the ball coming into the box. Three tests in one.

The culture of our game has changed. How many centre-halves can you name who actually like defending? Vidić liked it. He loved the challenge of sticking his head in there. You could tell that the thrill of contesting those 50–50 balls animated him. Smalling is a bit like that: he enjoys defending. Vidić was a dour, uncompromising sod. He was a proud Serb. In 2009 he came to see me to say he might be getting called up.

‘What do you mean, called up?’ I said, alarmed.

‘Kosovo. I am going,’ he said. ‘It’s my duty.’

He had the eyes for it.

The search for new talent crossed continents and frontiers. Gérard Piqué was one we picked out at a youth tournament. The door to good young Barcelona players had been opened by Arsenal’s acquisition of Cesc Fàbregas, so we were sure of our ground in dealing with the Piqué family. Our problem was that the player’s grandfather had been a member of the Nou Camp ruling hierarchy. Gérard’s family were embedded in Barcelona’s history.

Equally they had changed the first-team coach several times, so there was flux. Piqué was a terrific player and I was deeply disappointed when he told us he wanted to move back to Spain. He was an exceptional passer of the ball and a great personality with a winning mentality. His family are all winners: they are successful people. That shone from his mother and father. Unfortunately, he didn’t want to wait for Ferdinand and Vidić to fall apart. That was my problem. Piqué and Evans would have made a fine partnership for the next ten years.

When we played Barcelona in the Champions League semi-final and drew 0–0, Gérard’s father came to see me in the team hotel – they were really lovely people – and explained that Barcelona would like to take his son back. His parents were also keen to see him come home. They missed him. And Gérard was missing first-team football and believed he could earn a starting place at Barcelona. It was all straightforward. The eventual fee was 8 million euros. He had cost us £180,000 on account of the FIFA regulations in place at the time.

The big clubs in Europe subsequently raised their barriers to stop English raids. They were never likely to allow the likes of Piqué and Fàbregas to leave the country year after year. At our end, spotting young talent in England, we would have paid £5 million for a first-team player. But why were we asked to pay £500,000 for one who subsequently failed to make the grade? Richard Eckersley was an interesting case: Burnley offered us £500,000 for him. We wanted £1 million. We’d spent 12 years developing the boy. The compensation should really kick in when the player makes the first team. I don’t think the selling club would complain, especially with a sell-on clause.

We are all subject to errors of judgment, and I made a few in those years, with Kléberson, Djemba-Djemba, and so on. I was castigated right to the end over Ralph Milne – and he cost me £170,000. I get pelters for that. The coaching staff would tease me: ‘We need another Ralphy Milne, boss.’ All my staff had been with me for 20 years plus. They don’t forget. William Prunier was another one I was mocked for. Even Patrice Evra, in that high-pitched way, said to me one day: ‘Boss, did you have William Prunier?’

Ryan Giggs’ face dropped as he waited for the response.

‘Aye, we had him on trial once,’ I snapped.

‘On trial?’ Evra squeaked back. He was not going to let it drop. ‘How long?’

‘Two games.’

‘A two-game trial?’

‘Yes, and it was a disaster!’

Patrice had found the target.

The first thing you do with a new player is help him settle: banking, housing, language, transport, and so on. There is a process. Language is always the biggest barrier. Valencia’s grasp of English, for example, was a problem. With Antonio it was purely a confidence issue. I can write and read in French, but I lack confidence speaking it. Antonio knew this. ‘How’s your French?’ he said one day. Point taken. But I did point out to him that had I been working in France, I would have made an effort to speak the language. Valencia was working in England, so the same applied to him.

As a player, though, he was as brave as hell. You couldn’t intimidate Valencia. He’s a boy from the favela. He’s obviously scrapped in his life. Tough as anything. In a 50–50, he would be right in there, arms across the opponent.

Another marquee signing in the summer of 2006 was Michael Carrick. We had admired Carrick for a while and David Gill was receiving feedback from Spurs that they might be willing to sell. ‘What value would you put on him?’ asked David.

‘If you got him for eight million you would be doing well,’ I said.

I’ll always remember the words David came back with: ‘Daniel Levy says you’ll have to go a bit north before they can accept it.’

We haggled for weeks. We had watched Michael playing against Arsenal at the end of the season and Martin told me, ‘He’s definitely a Manchester United player.’ He was the star man. I think the initial fee was £14 million, with clauses running to £18 million.

Michael was a natural passer of the ball at a time when Scholes was inching towards his mid-thirties. What impressed me about Carrick was that he was always looking to play that forward pass. His range was expansive and he could switch the play. The long passes were the ones I felt we could utilise with the players we had. After a couple of months we told him we couldn’t understand why he had not yet scored for us. In training he struck the ball well, but in games he was not a threat from shooting positions. We improved him in that department. We offered him more freedom and tried to release strengths he was perhaps unaware he had. Maybe he had been in a routine at Spurs, where he was the deeper midfield player and seldom found his way into the box. With us, he found new qualities in his game.

He’s a fine player, Michael. He was a shy boy who needed to be shaken at times. He doesn’t start seasons particularly well, for reasons we struggled to understand and which we talked to him about, but generally came right about the end of October. There is a casualness about him that causes people to misunderstand his value and his constitution.

As I left, Mourinho returned to Chelsea, who, in an earlier phase, were home to my favourite foreign player in the Premier League – outside United, of course. Gianfranco Zola was a marvel. I will always remember a goal he scored against us at Stamford Bridge when he drew his foot back to shoot and then paused before the execution. While Zola was devising his artistic finish, Big Pally came sliding in and carried on going while Zola dragged it back. Oh, the stick Pally got that day. Bryan Robson said: ‘Any chance of you staying on your feet?’ But I loved Zola, because he played with a smile.

thirteen

YOU’RE not the same on the battlefield as you are in church. Away from the game, Arsène Wenger is a cool customer. He’s good company and has a broad spread of conversational topics. We can talk about wine and other things in life. In UEFA gatherings he made it his business to help other managers. He is a conscientious member of our trade. But when it comes to his team – to match-day – he is a completely different animal.

I’ve always felt I could understand Arsène. I could identify with the sharp change in him when that whistle blew. There was a bit of that in me too. If we shared one characteristic it was an absolute hatred of losing. When I lost to Raith Rovers early in my career at St Mirren (they were booting lumps out of us), I refused to shake hands with Bertie Paton, the Raith Rovers manager, who was my great mate and accomplice on the pitch at Dunfermline. Well, Bertie ran after me to remonstrate. Oh, aye. Sometimes you need a wee lesson that you’re wrong, and I was wrong that day. It was a small reminder that life is bigger than the game. When you behave that way, it’s petty and lacks dignity.

By the end, Arsène and I were on very friendly terms. We had survived together and respected each other’s efforts to play good football. But we had conflicts down the years. The opening shot was him complaining about me complaining about the fixture list. A complaint about a complaint. So I fired back with a crafted put-down: ‘He’s just arrived from Japan, what does he know about it?’ Which was true.

For the next two years, it was Arsène complaining about congestion in our fixture list. A foreign coach who comes in and thinks he can play 55 games a season in our League without adjusting is kidding himself. It’s a gruelling, energy-sapping League. That’s why, in the modern game, you have to change the team to spread the load. Arsène learned to adapt to that culture. He overcame the early shock of playing Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday.

The first time his Arsenal side played us at Old Trafford, he came into my office. Our relationship was fine at first. The problems started when he lost a game with one of his good Arsenal sides. He found it hard to accept fault in his team and looked to blame the opponent. He would often do it by concentrating on physical challenges. It was hard for him to accept that opponents might adopt a robust approach against his men. His interpretation of physical challenges extended sometimes to the very act of tackling. He would fix in his mind the idea that no one should actually be tackling his boys.

I watched his best Arsenal teams, though, and was thrilled. I always liked watching Arsène’s sides. Playing against them presented special challenges that I burned many hours thinking about. I always felt I had to examine everything Arsenal did because they presented so many threats across the park. Chelsea presented a different set of problems. There we would be facing experienced players, who knew every trick in the book. Arsenal, on the other hand, played the right way.

They had one of the worst disciplinary records in football in Arsène’s early years, but you could never say they were dirty players or a dirty team. Steve Bould and Tony Adams would kick the life out of you – everyone knew that. They would come through the back of you all the time. But in essence, his teams were never filthy. Volatile and macho would be a more accurate term. They were a combative bunch. Bould and Adams, I’ve mentioned. Then they bought Patrick Vieira, a big competitor who could mix it, get about people. And Nigel Winterburn was a bit of a nark; always chipping away. Ian Wright, their leading striker in those early days, also had a nasty streak.

In 2010, Arsène delivered a surprising criticism of Paul Scholes, telling reporters he had a ‘dark side’. There was no reason for him to pronounce on one of my players. We were not due to play Arsenal that week, and there had been no friction between us. At that time Paul Scholes had won ten Premier League titles and a European Cup, and there was Arsène discussing his ‘dark side’. Baffling.

Players surprise you. They can surprise you in the level of performance they rise to and the levels to which they sink. Arsène struggled to accept that as a contributing factor in a defeat. Football brings out the best and the worst in people because the emotional stakes are so high. In a high-stakes game, a player can lose his nerve for a minute and he can lose his temper too. And you’re left regretting it. Arsenal had a lot of those moments, but Arsène struggled to believe that internal failings and weaknesses can sometimes cause you to lose. The explanation is sometimes within.

I’m not saying managers see everything, but we see most things, so Arsène’s stock defence after a game of, ‘I didn’t see it’ was not one I used. My preferred line was: ‘I’ll need to look at it again.’ It was the same basic message, but this one bought you time. By the next day, or soon after, it’s likely to be old news. Something else will have happened in the great churn of events to move the attention away from you.

I was sent off eight times in my career – and the last one was the most stupid, because I was the manager. An opponent had been kicking lumps out of one of our players and I said to my right-hand man Davie Provan, ‘I’m going to go on and do that guy.’ Davie said, ‘Don’t be so stupid, sit still.’

‘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 visualise 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.

‘He’s good, but I don’t think he has any chance of making it. Too small,’ said Jim Ryan, who was watching with me. It became a stock phrase at the club. Scholesy: too small.

As his time with us rolled on, Paul Scholes encountered problems with his asthma. He didn’t play in the youth team the year they won the FA Youth Cup. Beckham joined the team only in the later rounds because he had grown gangly and weak. Simon Davies, who played for Wales, was the captain. Robbie Savage was also in the side. The majority of them went on to be internationals. Another, Ben Thornley, would have earned a cap, but for major knee trouble.

As a young forward, in the hole, Scholes would be guaranteed 15 goals a season. When he developed into a central midfield player, he had the brain for the passing game and a talent for orchestration. He must have been a natural. I loved watching teams trying to mark him out of the game. He would take them into positions they didn’t want to go to, and with a single touch would turn the ball round the corner, or feint away and hit the reverse pass. Opponents would spend a minute tracking him and then be made to appear inconsequential and sometimes even foolish. They would end up galloping back to their own box. He would destroy a marker that way.

Paul endured several disappointments with long-term injuries but would always come back better. He was a superior player after his eye problem and after his knee injury. He would return re-energised.

In his early thirties, he was prone to occasional bouts of frustration as the competition for midfield places intensified. I had Darren Fletcher and Michael Carrick to consider in the two central positions. I confess, I made an error here. Taking people for granted is not a mistake you are necessarily aware of at the time, and it is hard to correct until you are confronted by the effect on the victim. My attitude was that in times of need I could always go back to Scholesy. He was a loyal servant, always ready and willing to step in. Carrick and Fletcher would be my new first-choice pairing and Scholes would be the ageing support. It was in my mind for too long that Paul was coming to the end of his career.

In the 2009 Champions League final in Rome, which we lost to Barcelona, I sent Paul on in the second half. Anderson had made only three passes in the first half. Scholes made 25 in the last 20 minutes of the game. You think you know everything in this game. You don’t. Taking people for granted and thinking you can always go back to them as they approach the end is wrong. You forget how good they are.

At the end, consequently, I used him a lot more and rested him at the right times. People would ask me to pick my best Man United team. I would find it incredibly difficult. You couldn’t leave out Scholes and you couldn’t leave out Bryan Robson. They would both give you at least ten goals a season. But then that raises the question: how can you leave out Keane? You would have to play the three of them. But if you do that, who do you play with Cantona, who was always better playing with another forward? Try picking one striker from McClair, Hughes, Solskjaer, Van Nistelrooy, Sheringham, Yorke, Cole, Rooney and Van Persie. You couldn’t disregard Giggs. So it always felt like an impossible task to select a best XI, yet you would have to say Cantona, Giggs, Scholes, Robson and Cristiano Ronaldo could never be left out of a Man United side.

Scholes was probably the best English midfielder since Bobby Charlton. Since I have been in England, Paul Gascoigne was the best of those who could lift you from your seat. In his last few years, Paul Scholes elevated himself above Gascoigne. One, for longevity, and two, for improving himself in his thirties.

He was such a brilliant long passer that he could choose a hair on the head of any team-mate answering the call of nature at our training ground. Gary Neville once thought he had found refuge in a bush, but Scholesy found him from 40 yards. He inflicted a similar long-range missile strike, once, on Peter Schmeichel, and was chased round the training ground for his impertinence. Scholesy would have made a first-class sniper.

As a player myself, I never possessed the innate ability of a Cantona or a Paul Scholes: eyes in the back of the head. But I could see it in others because I watched so many games. I knew how important those players were to a team.

Scholes, Cantona, Verón. Beckham had good vision too. He was not the sort who could thread great passes through, but he could see the other side of the pitch all right. Laurent Blanc had good vision. Teddy Sheringham and Dwight Yorke could see what was happening all around them. But of the players in the top echelon, Scholes was the best of that type. When we were winning easily, Scholes would sometimes try something daft, and I would say, ‘Look, he’s getting bored now.’

Ryan Giggs was the biggest noise from that generation. He was the one most likely to be identified as a wonder boy. Awarding him a first-team debut at 16 landed us with a problem we had not expected: the Giggs phenomenon.

An Italian agent phoned me when Ryan was a kid and asked, ‘What do your sons do?’ I said: ‘Mark’s doing a degree, Jason’s going into television, Darren is an apprentice here.’ He said: ‘Sell me Giggs and I can make them rich.’ Naturally I declined the offer.

The George Best comparison stuck to him immediately and was impossible to dislodge. Everyone wanted a piece of him. But Giggs was smart. ‘See the manager,’ he would say to anyone seeking an interview or a tie-up. He didn’t want to grant interviews and found a way to transfer the blame for the refusal on to me. He was clever.

Bryan Robson approached Ryan one day to recommend Harry Swales as an agent. He had checked it with me first. Bryan was coming to the end and was sure Harry was the right man for Giggs. He was right. Harry is fantastic. Got engaged at 81 to a Swiss lady he met on the platform of a railway station. She was lost. He is a former sergeant-major with a handlebar moustache. He looked after Ryan really well. Ryan has a strong mother, too, and his grandparents were very, very good people.

To stretch his first-team career to two decades, Ryan had to develop a meticulous fitness programme. Yoga, and his preparation routines, were at the root of his longevity. Ryan was religious about yoga. Twice a week after training, an expert would come in to guide him through the exercises. That became vital to him. In the days when he was susceptible to hamstring injuries, we were never sure how much we could play him. His hamstrings were a constant concern. We would leave him out of games to have him ready for others. By the end, only his age would prompt us to give him a rest. He would play 35 games a season because his fitness was fantastic.

Ryan’s intelligence helped him make the sacrifices in his social life. He is a reserved kind of guy but, of all that bunch, he was the one they looked up to. He was the king, the man. There was a brief period when he and Paul Ince would wear daft suits but it soon passed. Ryan still has the suit that caused me to blurt, ‘What the hell is that?’

Incey was a fan of flash dressing and he and Giggs were good pals. They were a duo. But Ryan has led a highly professional life. He is revered around the club, where everyone defers and looks up to him.

When his pace deteriorated we played him more in the centre of the park. We no longer expected him to flash round the outside of defenders the way he did as a boy. Not many people noticed that even in his later incarnation he retained his change of pace, which is sometimes more important than raw speed. His balance, too, was unaffected.

In the autumn of 2010 he was brought down by West Ham’s Jonathan Spector in the penalty box, and I seized my chance to set a quiz question. How many penalties had Ryan Giggs won in his Manchester United career? Answer: five. Because he always stays on his feet. He stumbles but never goes down. I would ask him, after a heavy foul in the box, why he had declined to go down, which he would have been entitled to do, and he would look at me as if I had horns. He would wear that vacant look. ‘I don’t go down,’ he would say.

Ryan is a calm boy, very even-tempered in adversity. Strange to say, he was never a great substitute until his later years. He was always better starting a game. But he played a great role as a sub in the 2008 Champions League final in Moscow, and against Wigan when we won the League, coming on to score our second goal. He removed the doubt we had about him being a good impact player and was an amazing asset to have off the bench.

Giggs turned his back on the fame and the branding; he lacked the temperament for that level of exposure. His personality was more introverted. To lead that life, you need great energy to be trotting all over the world and putting your face in front of a camera. It also requires a certain vanity: the belief that this is what you were made for. You read about actors always knowing they wanted to be on the stage or in films. I never had that magnetic attraction to fame.

My hope was that players who had grown up with us would carry things on at Carrington and maintain the continuity, much as Uli Hoeness and Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, say, had at Bayern Munich. They understand how the club functions and the standard of player needed to keep the show rolling along. Whether that leads in the end to management cannot be known, because it depends how the coaching side develops. But Giggs and Scholes are both intelligent men who understand United’s soul and were great players themselves, so all the right stuff was there.

Ryan could definitely be a manager because he’s so wise and players invariably respect him. His relative quietness would not be a barrier. There are plenty of non-vocal managers. But your character must be strong. To deal with a club like Manchester United, your personality has to be bigger than those of the players. Or, you have to believe it is, to control the whole picture. You have big players, wealthy players, world-famous players, and you have to rule over them, stay on top of them. There is only one boss of Manchester United, and that’s the manager. Ryan would need to cultivate that side of himself. But so did I, from 32 years of age.

At school we would be asked: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I would say: ‘A footballer.’ ‘Fireman’ was a more popular answer. To say ‘footballer’ implied no urge to be known across the world, merely to earn a living by playing the game. Giggs would have been that type.

You can be destined by your nature to chase a certain ending, and David Beckham always had that air of knowing where he was going. He was comfortable with that lifestyle and keen to attain that status. None of the others would have even dreamed about worldwide recognition. It was not part of them. Imagine Gary Neville with fashion photographers: ‘Can you bloody hurry up?’

They were all lucky to have the protection of really good families. The Nevilles are really solid people. The same was true for all of them. It was a blessing, for them and for us. They know the value of a good upbringing: keeping your feet on the ground; manners; respect for older generations. If I had called someone from an older generation by their first name, my dad would have clipped me on the ear. ‘Mister, to you,’ he would have said.

All that has disappeared now. All my players would call me ‘gaffer’ or ‘boss’. Lee Sharpe came in one day and asked, ‘How you doing, Alex?’ I said: ‘Were you at school with me?’

Even better, a young Irish boy, Paddy Lee, saw me moving up the stairs of The Cliff, as he was coming down, with Bryan Robson behind me, and said, ‘All right, Alex?’

I said: ‘Were you at school with me?’

‘No,’ he said, perturbed.

‘Well don’t call me Alex!’

I get the giggles now recalling these moments. Behind the fierce response I would be laughing inside. Wee Paddy Lee was terrific at animal impressions. Every Christmas he would do ducks, cows, birds, lions, tigers – everything. Even ostriches. The players would be rolling about. Paddy went to Middlesbrough for a year but didn’t quite make it.

Wee George Switzer was another. Typical Salford boy. In the training ground canteen he was brilliant at barking things out and disguising where it had come from, so the victim would scan the room trying to spot the perpetrator.

‘Hi boss!’ Or ‘Archie!’ to Archie Knox. For a long time it was impossible to nail the culprit. There were no clues in the sea of faces at mealtimes.

But one day I caught him. ‘All right, son?’ I said. ‘You do that again and you’ll run round the pitch till you’re dizzy.’

‘Sorry, boss,’ Switz stuttered.

Despite the image of me as someone who wanted obedience at all times, I loved people with a bit of devil in them. It was refreshing. You need self-confidence, a bit of nerve. If you’re surrounded by people who are scared to express themselves in life, they will be equally frightened when it really matters, on the pitch, in games. Those lads from the 1992 class were never scared of anything. They were mighty allies.

fifteen

FROM adversity, the really illustrious clubs return to their cycle of winning. Maybe I was lucky to have joined United in a troubled phase of their history. The League title had not been won for 19 years and I inherited a culture of low expectation. We had become a Cup team, and the fans anticipated a good run in the knock-out competitions more than in League action, where their hopes were kept in check.

My predecessors Dave Sexton, Tommy Docherty and Ron Atkinson were successful men, but in their years there was no consistent or sustained challenge for the championship. The same was true of Liverpool in the years when United were on top from 1993 onwards, but I could always feel their breath on my neck from 25 miles away.

When a club of Liverpool’s history and tradition pull off a treble of cup wins, as they did in 2001, with the FA, League and UEFA trophies under Gérard Houllier, you are bound to feel a tremor of dread. My thought that year was: ‘Oh, no, not them. Anybody but them.’ With their background, their heritage and their fanatical support, as well as their terrific home record, Liverpool were implacable opponents, even in their fallow years.

I liked and respected Gérard Houllier, the Frenchman who took sole charge when the joint-manager experiment with Roy Evans was ended by the Anfield board. Steven Gerrard was starting to emerge as a youthful force in midfield, and they could summon two sensational goal-scorers in Michael Owen and Robbie Fowler.

The big cultural change was investing power in someone from outside the Liverpool religion. The succession of internal appointments from Shanks to Bob Paisley to Joe Fagan to Kenny Dalglish to Graeme Souness to Roy Evans maintained consistency of purpose. Towards the end of Kenny’s first spell in charge, you could sense a shift. The team had grown old and Liverpool were starting to make unusual purchases: Jimmy Carter, David Speedie. These were untypical Liverpool signings. Graeme Souness made the right move but too quickly, breaking up an ageing team too fast. One mistake was to discard one of the best young players, Steve Staunton. Graeme would admit that himself. There was no need to let Staunton go. Graeme is a good guy but he’s impetuous. He can’t get there quickly enough. And his impetuosity cost him in that period.

A virtue of dealing with Liverpool back then was that they would all come into my office mob-handed after the game. I inherited the tradition of every member of our staff going in to see them at Anfield and each one on their side reciprocating at Old Trafford. The Liverpool boot-room men had far more experience in that regard than me, but I learned quickly. Win, lose or draw, there would be a full turn-out and a rapport between the two managerial clans. Because there was such a divide between the two cities and such competitive tension on the field, it was even more important to retain our dignity, whatever the result. It was vital, too, that we concealed our weak points, and Liverpool were equally guarded in that respect.

Gérard had been a visiting trainee teacher in Liverpool during his course at Lille University, and had examined the club with an academic’s eye. He was not entering Anfield blind to its traditions. He understood the ethos, the expectations. He was a clever man; affable, too. After he was rushed to hospital following a serious heart attack, I said to him, ‘Why don’t you just step upstairs?’

‘I can’t do that,’ Gérard replied. ‘I like working.’ He was a football man. Heart trouble could not break his addiction.

Expectation always bears down on Liverpool managers and I think that brand of pressure pierced Kenny’s defences in the end. At the time he abandoned the role of iconic player and moved into the dug-out, he possessed no managerial background. The same disparity undermined John Greig at Rangers. Possibly the greatest Rangers player of all time, John inherited a disintegrating team that could not be restored to an even keel. The emergence of Aberdeen and Dundee United was no help. Playing in the glamour role up front as one of Liverpool’s finest players and then graduating to manager almost the next day was very difficult for Kenny. I remember him coming to see me in the Scotland camp and asking for advice about a job he had been offered in management. It was only later I realised he had been talking about the big one.

‘Is it a good club?’ I had asked him.

‘Aye, it’s a good club,’ he said.

So I told him: if it was a good club, with good history, some financial leeway, and a chairman who understands the game, he would have a chance. If only two of those variables could be ticked off, he was in for a battle.

Without my intensive education at Aberdeen, I would have been poorly qualified to take over at Manchester United. I started at East Stirling without a penny. I enjoyed that, with 11 or 12 players. Then I went to St Mirren without a dime. I freed 17 players in my first season: they weren’t good enough. They had 35 before I started swinging my machete. There, I would order the pies and the cleaning materials and the programmes. It was a full education.

When Gérard started importing large numbers of foreign players, I thought the treble-winning season offered proof that the policy might restore the club to its pomp. The likes of Vladimír Šmicer, Sami Hyypiä and Dietmar Hamann had established a strong platform on which Houllier could build. Any Cup treble has to be taken seriously. You might say fortune smiled on them in the FA Cup final against Arsenal, because Arsène Wenger’s team battered them in that match before Michael Owen won it with the second of his two goals. It wasn’t the individuals that worried me around that time so much as the name: Liverpool. The history. I knew that if this upsurge continued they would become our biggest rivals again, ahead of Arsenal and Chelsea.

A year after that Cup treble, they finished runners-up, but then fell away to fifth after Gérard brought in El Hadji Diouf, Salif Diao and Bruno Cheyrou, from which many commentators drew a line of cause and effect. Cheyrou was one we looked at when he was at Lille. He had no pace but a nice left foot. A strong lad, but not quick. Diouf had a good World Cup with Senegal and made a name for himself. You could understand Gérard’s antennae twitching. I was always wary of buying players on the back of good tournament performances. I did it at the 1996 European Championship, which prompted me to move for Jordi Cruyff and Karel Poborský. Both had excellent runs in that tournament, but I didn’t receive the kind of value their countries did that summer. They weren’t bad buys, but sometimes players get themselves motivated and prepared for World Cups and European Championships and after that there can be a levelling off.

With Diouf there was a talent but it needed nurturing. He was a persistent thorn in your flesh, and not always in a nice way. He’d be silly on the pitch, but he had a right competitive edge about him, and he had ability. Joining an august club like Liverpool was not compatible with his rebellious side because he found it hard to conform to the discipline you need to be successful. Gérard soon found that out. With the number of high-intensity games you are going to play against Arsenal and Chelsea, you need players of a good temperament. And, in my opinion, Diouf had a dodgy one. Cheyrou just never made it. He didn’t have the pace to play in the Premier League.

The Spice Boy culture was another dragon Gérard had to slay. I would hear stories of Liverpool players nipping across to Dublin for recreation. I felt that Stan Collymore’s arrival was hardly conducive to stability. I nearly bought Collymore myself because there was an incredible talent. But when I watched him play for Liverpool, there was no great urgency about him, and I began to think what a lucky guy I had been for not buying him. I can only assume he would have been the same at United. Instead I took Andy Cole, who was always brave as a lion and always gave his best.

Before the upswing under Houllier, Liverpool had fallen into the trap that had caught United years before. They would buy players to fit a jigsaw. If you look at Man United from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, they were buying players such as Garry Birtles, Arthur Graham from Leeds United, Peter Davenport, Terry Gibson, Alan Brazil: there seemed to be a desperation. If someone scored against United they would be signed: it was that kind of short-term thinking. Liverpool acquired the same habit. Ronny Rosenthal, David Speedie, Jimmy Carter. A succession of players arrived who weren’t readily identifiable as Liverpool players. Collymore, Phil Babb, Neil Ruddock, Mark Wright, Julian Dicks.

Gérard bought a wide mix of players to Anfield: Milan Baroš, Luis García, Šmicer and Hamann, who did a fine job for him. I could see a pattern emerging in Gérard’s recruiting. Under Benítez I could observe no such strategy. Players came and went. There was a time when I looked at his first XI and felt they were the most unimaginative Liverpool side I ever went up against. In one game against us, he played Javier Mascherano in central midfield and had his back four, as usual, but played Steven Gerrard wide left, with Alberto Aquilani off the front. He took Dirk Kuyt off and put Ryan Babel on the left, moving Gerrard to the right. The three played in a pack through the middle. Babel was on as an outside-left but not once did he work the touchline. I can’t know what his orders were, but on the bench I remember saying it was a good time to bring him on, wide left, against Gary Neville. I told Scholes: warn Gary to concentrate. But Liverpool played with hardly any width at all.

Apparently Benítez came to our training ground as a guest of Steve McClaren, but I don’t remember meeting him. We received lots of visits from overseas coaches and it was hard to keep track of them all. We had people from China and Malta and groups of three and four from Scandinavian countries. There was also a steady flow of other sportsmen: the Australia cricket team, NBA players, Michael Johnson, Usain Bolt. Johnson, who runs a spring training programme in Texas, impressed me with his knowledge.

Soon after Benítez arrived, I attended a Liverpool game and he and his wife invited me in for a drink. So far, so good. But our relationship frayed. The mistake he made was to turn our rivalry personal. Once you made it personal, you had no chance, because I could wait. I had success on my side. Benítez was striving for trophies while also taking me on. That was unwise.

On the day he produced his famous list of ‘facts’ detailing my influence over referees, we received a tip-off that Liverpool would stage-manage a question that would enable Benítez to go on the attack. That’s not unusual in football. I had been known to plant a question myself. Put it this way, our press office had warned me, ‘We think Benítez is going to have a go at you today.’

‘What about?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, but we’ve been tipped off,’ they said.

So, on television, Benítez puts his glasses on and produces this sheet of paper.

Facts.

The facts were all wrong.

First, he said I intimidate referees. The FA were scared of me, according to Rafa, even though I had just been fined £10,000 by the FA two weeks previously, and I was failing to support the Respect campaign. The Respect initiative had started that season, yet Rafa was going on about my criticism of Martin Atkinson in a Cup tie the previous year, before the new guidelines had come into place. So he was wrong in the first two things he said. The media loved it, even though the facts were inaccurate. They were hoping it would start a war, that I would launch a rocket back.

In fact, all I said in reply was that Rafa was obviously ‘bitter’ about something and that I was at a loss to explain what that might be. That was me saying to him: look, you’re a silly man. You should never make it personal. That was the first time he tried those tactics, and each subsequent attack bore the same personal edge.

My inquiries told me that he had been irritated by me questioning whether Liverpool would be able to handle the title run in, whether they would buckle under the pressure. Had I been the Liverpool manager, I would have taken that as a compliment. Instead Benítez interpreted it as an insult. If I, as Manchester United manager, was talking about Liverpool and dropping in remarks to make them wobble, my Anfield counterpart ought to know they’d got me worried.

When Kenny was in charge at Blackburn, and they were out in front in the title race, I piped up: ‘Well, we’re hoping for a Devon Loch now.’ That stuck. Devon Loch popped up in every newspaper article. And Blackburn started to drop points. We ought to have won the League that year but Rovers held on. There is no doubt we made it harder for them by raising the spectre of the Queen Mother’s horse performing the splits on the Aintree run-in.

The advance publicity had been that Benítez was a control freak, which turned out to be correct, to a point that made no sense. He displayed no interest in forming friendships with other managers: a dangerous policy, because there would have been plenty from lesser clubs who would have loved to share a drink and learn from him.

In the 2009–10 season he did come in for a glass at Anfield, but looked uncomfortable, and, after a short while, said he needed to go, and that was that. To Sammy Lee, his assistant, I said: ‘At least that’s a start.’

On the day Roberto Martínez, manager of Wigan Athletic, was quoted as saying I had ‘friends’ who did my bidding in relation to Benítez (big Sam Allardyce was one he was referring to), Roberto phoned me and put a call into the LMA to ask whether he should make a statement correcting the story. Roberto told me he had no connection with Benítez, who had not helped him in any way. I think Martínez had spoken to a Spanish paper about the way Benítez saw us, his rivals in England, but was not endorsing that view himself. He was merely the messenger. You would think Benítez and Martínez would have struck up an affinity, being the only Spanish managers in England.

Benítez would complain about having no money to spend, but from the day he landed, he doled out more than me. Far more. It amazed me that he used to walk into press conferences and say he had no money to spend. He was given plenty. It was the quality of his buys that let him down. If you set aside Torres and Reina, few of his acquisitions were of true Liverpool standard. There were serviceable players – Mascherano and Kuyt, hard-working players – but not real Liverpool quality. There was no Souness or Dalglish or Ronnie Whelan or Jimmy Case.

Benítez did score two great successes in the transfer market: Pepe Reina, the goalkeeper, and Fernando Torres, their striker. Torres was a very, very talented individual. We watched him many times and tried to sign him when he was 16. We expressed our interest two years before he joined Liverpool, but we always felt that our contact with him would end only in him receiving an improved contract at Atlético Madrid. We watched him in many youth tournaments and always fancied him. He was ingrained in the fabric at Atlético, so I was surprised Liverpool were able to prise him away. Benítez’s Spanish connections must have helped.

Torres was blessed with great cunning: a shrewdness that was borderline Machiavellian. He had a touch of evil, though not in a physical sense, and he had that total change of pace. In a 45-yard sprint he was no faster than several Liverpool players, but he had that change of pace, which can be lethal. His stride was deceptively long. Without warning he would accelerate and slice across you. Conversely, I’m not sure he was at his best when things were going against him because his reactions could become petty. Perhaps he was spoilt at Atlético Madrid, where he was the golden boy for so long. He was captain there at 21.

He had a fine physique: a striker’s height and frame. And he was Liverpool’s best centre-forward since Owen or Fowler. Another star, of course, was Steven Gerrard, who didn’t always play well against Man United, but was capable of winning matches by himself. We made a show for him in the transfer market, as did Chelsea, because the vibe was that he wanted to move from Anfield, but there seemed to be some restraining influence from people outside the club and it reached a dead end.

His move to Chelsea seemed all set up. A question kept nagging at me: why did Benítez not trust Gerrard as a central midfield player? The one thing we could be sure of in my later years against Liverpool was that if their two central midfielders won it off you they would not do much with it. If Gerrard was in there and he won it against you, you knew he had the legs and the ambition to go right forward and hurt you. I could never understand why Liverpool so often neglected to play him centre-mid. In 2008–09, when they finished second with 86 points, they had Alonso to make the passes and Gerrard further up the pitch behind Torres.

Another of our advantages was that they stopped producing homegrown talents. Michael Owen was probably the last. If Michael had joined us at 12 years old, he would have been one of the great strikers. In the year he played in the Malaysian youth finals we had Ronnie Wallwork and John Curtis there on England duty. When they returned I gave them a month off – sent them on holiday. Michael Owen was straight into the Liverpool first team, with no rest and no technical development. Michael improved as a footballer in the two years he had with us. He was terrific in the dressing room and was a nice boy.

I think that lack of rest and technical development in his early years counted against him. By the time Houllier inherited him, he was already formed and was the icon of the team. There was no opportunity by then to take him aside and work on him from a technical point of view. I made a mistake with Michael in the sense that I should have signed him earlier. There would have been no chance of him coming straight to Man United from Liverpool, but we should have stepped in when he left Real Madrid for Newcastle. He’s a fine young man.

Of the other Liverpool players who gave us trouble, Dirk Kuyt was as honest a player as you could meet. I’m sure he was 6 feet 2 inches when he arrived and ended up 5 feet 8 inches because he ran his legs into stumps. I’ve never known a forward player work so hard at defending. Benítez picked him every game. But then, if something happens in the opposition penalty box, will he be sharp enough or is he exhausted from all the scuffling?

Despite my reservations about him as a person and a manager, Benítez persuaded his players to work their socks off for him, so there must be some inspirational quality there: fear, or respect, or skill on his part. You never saw his teams throw in the towel, and he deserves credit for that.

Why did he not do as well as he might have at Anfield, from my perspective? Benítez had more regard for defending and destroying a game than winning it. You can’t be totally successful these days with that approach.

José Mourinho was far more astute in his handling of players. And he has personality. If you saw José and Rafa standing together on the touchline, you knew you could pick the winner. You always had to respect a Liverpool side. The same goes for some of the work Benítez put in, because they were a very hard side to beat, and because he won a European Cup there. There were plus points. He got lucky, but so did I, sometimes.

His mode on the touchline was to constantly move his players around the pitch, but I doubt whether they were always watching him or acting on those instructions. No one could have understood all those gesticulations. On the other hand, with Mourinho, in a Chelsea–Inter match, I noticed the players sprinted over to him, as if to say, ‘What, boss?’ They were attentive to his wishes.

You need a strong manager. That’s vital. And Benítez is strong. He has great faith in himself and he’s sufficiently stubborn to ignore his critics. He does that time and again. But he did win a European Cup, against AC Milan in Istanbul in 2005, which offered him some protection against those who dismissed his methods.

When Milan led 3–0 at half-time in that game, so the story goes, some of the Milan players were already celebrating, pulling on commemorative T-shirts and jigging about. I was told Paolo Maldini and Gennaro ‘Rino’ Gattuso were going crackers, urging their team-mates not to presume the game was over.

Liverpool won the Cup that night with a marvellous show of defiance.

After a brief spell in charge at Anfield, Roy Hodgson gave way to Kenny again and Liverpool embarked on another phase of major rebuilding. Yet few of the signings made in Kenny’s time haunted me at night. We looked at Jordan Henderson a lot and Steve Bruce was unfailingly enthusiastic about him. Against that we noticed that Henderson runs from his knees, with a straight back, while the modern footballer runs from his hips. We thought his gait might cause him problems later in his career.

Stewart Downing cost Liverpool £20 million. He had a talent but he was not the bravest or the quickest. He was a good crosser and striker of the ball. But £20 million? Andy Carroll, who also joined for £35 million, was in our northeast school of excellence, along with Downing and James Morrison, who went on to play for Middlesbrough, West Brom and Scotland. The FA closed it down after complaints from Sunderland and Newcastle. This was at the time academies started. The Carroll signing was a reaction to the Torres windfall of £50 million. Andy’s problem was his mobility, his speed across the ground. Unless the ball is going to be in the box the whole time, it’s very difficult to play the way Andy Carroll does because defenders push out so well these days. You look for movement in the modern striker. Suárez was not quick on his feet but has a fast brain.

The boys Kenny brought in from the youth set-up did well. Jay Spearing, especially, was terrific. As a boy Spearing was a centre-back, with John Flanagan at full-back, and Spearing was easily the best of them: feisty, quick, a leader. You could see he had something. He was all right in the centre of midfield, but it was hard to visualise his long-term future. His physique perhaps counted against him.

Kenny won the League Cup, of course, and reached the final of the FA Cup, but when I heard that he and his assistant Steve Clarke had been summoned to Boston to meet the club’s owners, I feared the worst for them. I don’t think the protest T-shirts and defending Suárez in the Patrice Evra saga helped Kenny. As a manager your head can go in the sand a bit, especially with a great player. If it had been a reserve player rather than Suárez, would Kenny have gone to such lengths to defend him?

The New York Times and Boston Globe editorials about the subsequent Evra–Suárez non-handshake showed the way the debate was going. Kenny’s problem, I feel, was that too many young people in the club idolised him. Peter Robinson, the club’s chief executive in the glory years, would have stopped the situation escalating to the degree it did. The club has to take precedence over any individual.

The next man in, Brendan Rodgers, was only 39. I was surprised they gave it to such a young coach. A mistake I felt John Henry made in Brendan’s first weeks in charge in June 2012 was to sanction a fly-on-the wall documentary designed to reveal the intimacies of life at Liverpool. To put that spotlight on such a young guy was hard and it came across badly. It made no great impact in America, so I could not work out what the point of it was. My understanding is that the players were told they were obliged to give the interviews we saw on our screens.

Brendan certainly gave youth a chance, which was admirable. And he achieved a reasonable response from his squad. I think he knew there had been some sub-standard buys. Henderson and Downing were among those who would need to prove their credentials. In general you have to give players you might not rate a chance.

Our rivalry with Liverpool was so intense. Always. Underpinning the animosity, though, was mutual respect. I was proud of my club the day we marked the publication of the Hillsborough report in 2012: a momentous week for Liverpool and those who had fought for justice. Whatever Liverpool asked for in terms of commemoration, we agreed to, and our hosts made plain their appreciation for our efforts.

I told my players that day – no provocative goal celebrations, and if you foul a Liverpool player, pick him up. Mark Halsey, the referee, struck the right note with his marshalling of the game. Before the kick-off, Bobby Charlton emerged with a wreath which he presented to Ian Rush, who laid it at the Hillsborough Memorial by the Shankly Gates. The wreath was composed of 96 roses, one for each Liverpool supporter who died at Hillsborough. Originally, Liverpool wanted me and Ian Rush to perform that ceremony, but I thought Bobby was a more appropriate choice. The day went well, despite some minor slanging at the end by a tiny minority.

For Liverpool to return to the level of us and Manchester City was clearly going to require huge investment. The stadium was another inhibiting factor. The club’s American owners elected to refurbish Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, rather than build a new arena. To construct a major stadium these days is perhaps a £700 million enterprise. Anfield has not moved on. Even the dressing rooms are the same as 20 years ago. At the same time, my reading of their squad was that they needed eight players to come up to title-winning standard. And if you have made mistakes in the transfer market, you often end up giving those players away for very little.

While Brendan Rodgers went about his work, Rafa Benítez and I had not seen the last of one another. He returned to English football as Chelsea’s interim manager when Roberto Di Matteo, who had won the Champions League in May, was sacked in the autumn of 2012. In a United press conference soon after Benítez’s unveiling, I made the point that he was fortunate to inherit ready-made sides.

I felt his record needed placing in context. He won the Spanish League with 51 goals, in 2001–02, which suggested he was a skilled pragmatist. But I found Liverpool hard to watch when he was manager there. I found them dull. It was a surprise to me that Chelsea called him. When Benítez placed his record alongside Di Matteo’s, it would have been two League titles with Valencia, a European Cup and an FA Cup with Liverpool. In six months, Di Matteo had won the FA Cup and the European Cup.

They were comparable records. Yet Rafa had landed on his feet again.

sixteen

FROM the moment Manchester United became a Plc in 1990, I was certain the club would be bought and taken into private ownership. Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB were the largest of the private bidders before Malcolm Glazer first took a stake in 2003. With our history and our aura, we were too big a prize to be ignored by individual investors. The only surprise to me, when the Glazer family moved in to take control, was that there had not been a host of wealthy suitors.

Once the Glazers had seized their opportunity, Andy Walsh of the United supporters’ group called me to say: ‘You have to resign.’ Andy’s a nice lad but there was no temptation for me to agree to that request. I was the manager, not a director. Nor was I one of the shareholders who had sold the club. The takeover was not down to me in any way.

‘We’ll all be behind you,’ Andy said. My reply was: ‘But what do you think would happen to all my staff?’ The moment I left, most of my assistants would have been out as well. Some had been with me for 20 years. The impact made on others when a manager changes his position is sometimes lost on those outside the circle.

It was a worrying time, I admit. One of my concerns was how much money we might have to invest in the team. But I had to be confident both in my own ability to spot good players and the structure of the organisation. The Glazers were buying a good solid club and they understood that from the start.

My first contact was a phone call from the father, Malcolm. Two weeks later his sons Joel and Avi came over to set out their position. They told me there would be no changes to the way the football side was run. In their view, the club was in good hands. I was a successful manager. They had no concerns. They were totally behind me. All the things I wanted to hear from them, I heard that day. I know there is always an element of window dressing. People tell you everything is fine, then make a million alterations. People lose their jobs; there are cutbacks because debts need to be repaid. But United stayed solid under the new ownership, irrespective of the borrowings people talked about and the interest payments incurred.

Over the years, several supporter groups challenged me to define my stance in relation to the club’s debts and my answer was always: ‘I’m the manager. I’m working for a club owned by people in America.’ That was my standpoint. I never thought it sensible to upset the management side of the club by adding to the debate on models of ownership. If the Glazers had taken a more confrontational path, then it might have been different – if, for example, they had instructed me to get rid of one of my coaches. Any changes that might have undermined my ability to run the club would have altered the whole dynamic, but there was never that kind of pressure. So do you throw down your tools because some supporters want you to walk away from a lifetime’s work?

When I first joined United, there was a group of supporters known as the Second Board. They would meet in the Grill Room and decide what they thought was wrong with Manchester United. Back then, when my position was more fragile, I was more attuned to the damage that might be done to my position should they turn against me. Other United managers before me had felt the same way. In my playing days at Rangers, a group of powerful fans travelled with the first team and were influential lobbyists. At United there was a larger array of supporters’ voices. In disgust at the Glazer takeover, some handed in their season tickets and started FC United of Manchester.

There is a price to pay when you support a football club, and the price is that you can’t win every game. You are not going to be a manager for a lifetime. United are lucky to have had two for half a century. With losing and winning games, the emotions rise and fall. Football naturally generates dissent. I remember us losing a game at Rangers and the supporters throwing bricks through the windows.

There was no reason, beyond my age, for the Glazers to consider a change of manager in the summer of 2005. I never considered that possibility, never felt under threat.

The tens of millions of pounds paid out in interest to service the loans did arouse protective feelings towards the club. I understood that, but at no stage did it translate into pressure to sell a player or excessive caution on the purchasing front. One of their strengths was their commercial department in London, which brought in dozens of sponsorships globally. We had Turkish airlines, telephone companies in Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Thailand, beer companies in the Far East. That sucked in tens of millions and helped service the debt. On the football side we generated huge earnings. The 76,000 crowds helped a great deal.

So at no stage was I held back by the Glazer ownership. Often we would lose interest in a player because the transfer fee or wage demands had become silly. Those decisions were taken by me and David Gill. There was no edict from above to spend only in line with the club’s debts.

Instead our galaxy went on expanding. From 2007 more foreign talent poured into Carrington from South America, Portugal and Bulgaria. No imported player in those years attracted more attention than Carlos Tévez, who was at the heart of a major controversy over the relegation of Sheffield United from the Premier League and was to end up in opposition to us at Manchester City, staring down from that provocative billboard in his sky-blue shirt, underneath the message: ‘Welcome to Manchester.’

The tale begins when Tévez was at West Ham and David Gill was receiving calls from his agent, Kia Joorabchian, saying the boy would love to play for Man United. We had heard that kind of story many times. It was almost routine for agents to call saying their client had a special feeling for our crest. My advice was that we should not involve ourselves in any complicated dealings with the Tévez camp. David agreed. It was clear that a consortium of people owned the player. But, to David, I also remarked: ‘He does make an impact in games with his energy and he has a decent scoring record. It would depend what the deal was.’

David told me he could acquire Tévez on loan for two years, for a fee. That was the way it turned out and Carlos did well for us in his first season. He scored a lot of important goals, against Lyon, Blackburn, Tottenham and Chelsea. There was a real enthusiasm and energy about him. He wasn’t blessed with great pace and wasn’t a great trainer. He would always like a wee break, saying his calf was sore. In the context of the way we prepared, that sometimes annoyed us. We wanted to see a genuine desire to train all the time. Top players have that. But Tévez compensated quite well with his enthusiasm in games.

In the 2008 European Cup final in Moscow, he played and scored in the penalty shoot-out against Chelsea. He was our first taker. In the game itself, I took Rooney off and left Tévez on because he was playing better than Wayne. What planted a doubt in my mind was that in his second season I signed Dimitar Berbatov, and the emphasis was on Berbatov and Rooney as our forward partnership.

Watching Dimitar at Tottenham, I felt he would make a difference because he had a certain composure and awareness that we lacked among our group of strikers. He displayed the ability of Cantona or Teddy Sheringham: not lightning quick, but he could lift his head and make a creative pass. I thought he could bring us up a level and extend our range of talents.

So Berbatov’s arrival relegated Tévez to more of a backup role. And around December in his second season, we started to feel he wasn’t doing especially well. The reason, I think, was that he’s the type of animal that needs to play all the time. If you’re not training intensively, which he wasn’t, you need to play regularly. During that winter, David Gill asked, ‘What do you want to do?’ I felt we ought to wait until later in the season to make a decision. ‘They want one now,’ David said.

I replied, ‘Just tell them I’m trying to get him more games so we can assess it properly, because Berbatov is in the team a lot.’

Tévez did influence plenty of outcomes in the second half of the 2008–09 campaign, especially against Spurs at home, when we were 2–0 down, and I sent him on to shake things up. He chased absolutely everything. He brought huge enthusiasm to the cause and was the one responsible for us winning that match 5–2. His impact changed the course of events.

The 2009 Champions League semi-final pitted us against Arsenal and I was playing a three of Ronaldo, Rooney and Park. That was my chosen group for the final and apparently Tévez was not impressed. We made a mess of the final in Rome against Barcelona. We chose a bad hotel. It was a shambles. We have to hold our hands up about our poor planning.

Anyway, I brought Tévez on at half-time and just felt he was playing for himself a bit. From what I could gather, he had already made his mind up before joining City. After the game in Rome he said to me: ‘You never showed any great desire to sign me permanently.’ I explained that I had to see how the season played out and that he hadn’t played enough games for me to be sure. David offered the £25 million fee for him, but from what I can gather it was as if he were talking to the wall. That led us to think he had already elected to move across town.

The rumour, not confirmed, was that our Manchester rivals had paid £47 million. Tévez spoke to Chelsea at some point, too, and I think his advisers played one against the other. The word was that Chelsea offered £35 million but that City outbid them. To me these were incredible sums. I wouldn’t have paid that kind of money, fine player though he was. To me he was an impact maker. It was a mistake on my part, in the sense that Berbatov was a player I fancied strongly and I wanted to see him succeed. But he is also the sort who wants to be assured he is a great player. The conundrum with him and Tévez was always there.

There was no disciplinary problem with Tévez of the sort Roberto Mancini encountered when the boy declined to warm up for City, apparently, in a Champions League game in Germany, but there was a major hoo-ha over his supposed role in Sheffield United’s demotion to the Championship in 2007. Tévez’s goals had been saving West Ham from relegation when they came to our ground at the end of that season. They were fined for breaching third-party ownership rules with Tévez, but no points were deducted by the Premier League. Inevitably Tévez scored against us for West Ham, which helped send Sheffield United down, and Neil Warnock, their manager, tried to load the blame on us for playing a supposedly weakened team against the Hammers.

We had a Cup final the week after that West Ham game. Our squad was one of the strongest in the League and I had been changing the team all season according to circumstance. If you watch that match, we had two or three penalties turned down and their goalkeeper had a fantastic game. They broke away and Tévez scored. West Ham were never in the game. We battered them. I brought on Ronaldo, Rooney and Giggs in the second half but still we couldn’t knock them over.

Meanwhile Mr Warnock accuses us of throwing the game away. In their last game they faced Wigan at home and all they needed was a draw. In early January, Warnock had let David Unsworth go on a free transfer to Wigan, and Unsworth takes the penalty kick that knocks Sheffield United out of the Premier League. Could anyone with an open mind not say: I made a mess of that, there? Has he ever looked at himself in the mirror and said, ‘All we needed was a draw at home and we weren’t good enough to take a point off Wigan?’ The accusation was ridiculous.

In January 2007 we acquired a real aristocrat – for a two-month spell, at any rate. Louis Saha had returned at the start of the season full of promise but picked up another injury. In October Jim Lawlor, United’s chief scout, pointed out to us that it was a waste for Henrik Larsson to be playing in Sweden when he still had so much to offer on a bigger stage. Helsingborgs, where Henrik was playing, would not sell him, but I asked Jim to ask their chairman what they would think about him coming on loan in January. Henrik pushed the boat in that direction with his employers.

On arrival at United, he seemed a bit of a cult figure with our players. They would say his name in awed tones. For a man of 35 years of age, his receptiveness to information on the coaching side was amazing. At every session he was rapt. He wanted to listen to Carlos, the tactics lectures; he was into every nuance of what we did.

In training he was superb: his movement, his positional play. His three goals for us were no measure of his contribution. In his last game in our colours at Middlesbrough, we were winning 2–1 and Henrik went back to play in midfield and ran his balls off. On his return to the dressing room, all the players stood up and applauded him, and the staff joined in. It takes some player to make that kind of impact in two months. Cult status can vanish in two minutes if a player isn’t doing his job, yet Henrik retained that aura in his time with us. He looked a natural Man United player, with his movement and courage. He also had a great spring for a little lad.

I could have signed him earlier. I was ready to make the bid when he was at Celtic but Dermot Desmond, Celtic’s majority shareholder, rang me and said, ‘You’ve let me down, Alex, you’ve got tons of players, we need him.’

A month after Henrik went back to Sweden, we registered one of our greatest European victories: the 7–1 win over Roma on 10 April, our highest Champions League score. There were two goals each for Michael Carrick and Ronaldo, one from Rooney, Alan Smith and even Patrice Evra, who scored for the first time in Europe.

Top games of football are generally won by eight players. Three players can be carried if they’re having an off night and work their socks off, or are playing a purely tactical role for the team in order to secure the result. But half a dozen times in your career you achieve perfection where all 11 are on song.

Everything we did that night came off. For the second goal we produced a six-man move of one-touch passing. Alan Smith scored from a Ryan Giggs pass between the two centre-backs. First time – bang, in the net. Brilliant goal. So you have these moments when you say: we could not have improved on that.

I remember taking a team to Nottingham Forest in 1999 and winning 8–1. It could have been 20. Roma were a bloody good side too. They had Daniele De Rossi, Cristian Chivu and Francesco Totti, and we absolutely slaughtered them. We had been beaten 2–1 in Rome, where Scholes had been sent off for a suicidal tackle right on the touchline. The boy was practically off the pitch when Paul arrived with his challenge. So we were under some pressure in the return leg. Until the goals started flying in.

Wimbledon away in the FA Cup in February 1994 was another classic. In a 3–0 win we scored one goal with 38 passes. People talk of the best Man United goal being Ryan Giggs’ in that FA Cup semi-final against Arsenal, or Rooney’s overhead kick against Manchester City, but for me that goal at Wimbledon was sublime. Every player in the team touched the ball. In the first minute of the game, Vinnie Jones tried to do Cantona. Crack. Down went Eric. All our players ran towards Jones, but Cantona said, ‘Leave him alone,’ because he was a fellow ex-Leeds player, and may have felt a kinship. Then he patted Jones on the back as if to say, ‘You can kick me if you like but you won’t stop me.’ Cantona was marvellous that day and scored our first goal with a beautiful volley that he teed up for himself with his right foot.

People always said Wimbledon couldn’t play. That’s not true. The quality of the service to their front players was high, especially the crosses. Their set-piece delivery was terrific. They were not devoid of talent. What they did was use those talents as a weapon against weaker people. If you didn’t head the ball, you were dead. If you couldn’t handle set pieces you were dead. If you wanted to get into a 50–50 with them – no chance. They were hard to play against. So that 3–0 win in their ground was special to us.

Two big wins over Arsenal also stand out. In a 6–2 win at Highbury in the League Cup in 1990, Lee Sharpe scored a hat-trick. On another occasion, in February 2001, we beat them 6–1 at Old Trafford. An Irish family had bought an auction prize to see us play at Liverpool in December 2000, but were fog-bound and unable to travel. We lost 1–0 to Liverpool in a horrible game. They rang me and asked, ‘What are we going to do?’ I told them, ‘We’ve got Arsenal at home soon.’ And they saw a 6–1 massacre. What a difference. It was 5–1 at half-time. Yorkie tore them apart.

Despite our 7–1 win over Roma, our Champions League campaign was ended by a 3–0 defeat in Milan on 2 May. We had been forced to field a full team on the previous Saturday in order to beat Everton 4–2 at Goodison Park, while Milan had rested nine players for their game against us, which was on the Tuesday. We were simply not as well prepared as our Italian opponents. We conceded twice in 15 minutes, it bucketed with rain, and we just couldn’t break out of our own half. We simply weren’t ready for it. Winning on the Saturday had been a mammoth task because we had been 2–0 down against Everton, yet we won the game to move five points clear in the League.

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 stripes.

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-lysis 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.

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.