Sir Alex Ferguson fell out with his late father at the start of
his career in professional football. They didn’t speak for months
after Alex Snr took umbrage at his teenage son’s headstrong
impatience to make the grade with Queen’s Park in Glasgow.
The rift was soon healed, of course, but now, at the other end
of his remarkable 50-year career in the game, Ferguson wishes only
for one last chance to impress a man whom he dubbed — with or
without irony — ‘Old Thunder Face’.
Asked this week about the opportunity to win his third Champions
League final in Rome against Barcelona on Wednesday, Manchester
United’s manager eschewed the opportunity to make comparisons
between himself and Bob Paisley, the great Liverpool manager of the
1970s.
Instead, Ferguson said only: ‘I just wish my father was alive.
He would’ve loved to have seen me achieve that.’
Such is Ferguson’s regrettable mistrust of the modern media, it
is rare that, at 67, he offers any great insight into what drives
him.
Nevertheless, even Ferguson is not immune to the flushes of
sentiment prompted by moments of supreme achievement. And briefly
this week he allowed himself to look back and acknowledge the debt
he owes to his late parents, Alex and Lizzie.
‘I think you have the personality you are born with but then
that personality grows up,’ said Ferguson. ‘You have your own
personality. It’s difficult to say what you are getting, it is
something you are born with. It’s in your genes.
‘My father was very quiet. My mother was the one with the real
determination. My father was a hard-working man, who just read
books. He was always reading.’
In his autobiography, Ferguson thanked his father for passing on
‘his intelligence’, as well as acknowledging the ‘temper and
stubbornness’ that came as part of the deal.
This intelligence, he conceded, has been allowed to develop over
the course of his 23 years at Old Trafford. Only on the securing of
the club’s first Premier League title in 1993, however, did
Ferguson feel the confidence to really benefit from it.
‘Yes, I have changed,’ he acknowledged. ‘Maturity brings a
different type of person. How would I put it?
‘Well, I’m far more intelligent than when I first started. The
best way to sum it up is that now I am in control. When I first
came, I was never in control.
‘You can’t be in control when you are not winning. It’s only
when you have success that you can get that control. That applies
to every coach who goes into a football club. He will never have
control until he is successful. If you don’t have success, then for
control you may as well go to Mars.
‘I first got control when I won the Premier League for the first
time. I’d achieved what I set out to achieve.
‘I felt also at the time it would open the door and that we
would leap forward in every department of the club because that was
the millstone round everyone’s neck. We hadn’t won it in 26 years
and it was a burden, absolutely no doubt.
‘The previous year we’d lost it to Leeds, when we had to play
four games in six days. That cost us when we should have won
it.
‘But the funny thing about adversity is that some people thrive
on it. This club thrives on it and we showed it that year.’
Like many men of reasonable intellect, Ferguson has a long
memory. He doesn’t forget. One of the reasons — some imagined and
some real — for his dislike of the media is the manner in which the
majority, this correspondent included, wrote him off when his team
finished bottom of their Champions League qualifying group in the
miserable winter of 2005.
Ferguson has not forgotten, and why should he?
Asked again about comparisons with the greats such as Paisley,
he said: ‘It’s one of those things that I don’t pay much attention
to.
‘Whenever there is a bit of success it leads to more
expectation, and then you’re into that kick in the teeth, when you
see another headline that reads: “Ferguson is finished”.
‘Next it will be that my shelf-life is gone, it’s time to get
the bathchair out for me at Torquay beach.
‘That’s why I don’t pay too much attention to it because I know
what the flipside is.
‘If you have a couple of bad results, you see what’s happened to
Arsene Wenger. I find that incredible. It’s unfortunate that we’re
in that culture where if you’re not winning every game then,
swoosh, you are gone.’
In common with other great leaders, Ferguson remains fuelled by
— among other things — a desire to please some people and prove
others wrong. He continues to believe that the world is against
him, that the dice are loaded.
If he wins another European Cup, though, he will surely cement
his position as British football’s greatest post-war manager.
Paisley won his first in the same Rome stadium, against Borussia
Moenchengladbach in 1977, and the Eternal City would be the perfect
place for Ferguson to lift his third.
Were he alive, Paisley — himself an expert at regenerating his
teams — would have been impressed. Ferguson, though, would have
preferred the opportunity to seek approval from much closer to
home.