The old maestro and the young pretender are about to cross
swords again. Whenever Sir Alex Ferguson and Gordon Strachan are
due to face each other across dugouts, there is always relish in
the media, partly due to some famous narking between the two which
broke out in the past. Strachan this week was keen that we should
move on from this, but football is all about the drama and the
personalities involved, and so the Ferguson-Strachan plot has
remained irresistible.
Strachan and Celtic have plenty to worry about ahead of tomorrow
night’s Champions League encounter at Old Trafford. For one thing,
just getting a team on the park with two strikers will be a start.
The Scottish champions are riven by injuries, and the truth is,
there is potential for Strachan’s team to be humiliated in
Manchester.
But it is the unspoken tension between Ferguson and Strachan,
and the natural clash of their two prickly personalities, which
will be equally enjoyable to watch over the next 48 hours. “Look,
it’s boring, it’s tedious, and we’ve both moved on from that,”
Strachan protested last week when asked about the bad blood between
the two.
Tedious? I’m afraid not. On the contrary, these types of spat
are the stuff of fascination in sport. It stems back years, to when
Ferguson was a fiery, sometimes malevolent dictator in his role as
manager of Aberdeen in the 1980s, and Strachan was his little
genius-midfielder, loving his football and respecting his manager,
but with the faintest whiff of a human rights infringement in his
nostrils.
These were the days before the Bosman ruling, when footballers
were still treated like fatstock by their clubs, to be shunted
around when and where a manager or club chairman decreed. Back then
the tension between Strachan and Ferguson simply grew and grew, as
both recognised the worth of the other, almost to a point of
resentment.
Then in 1985, while agitating to leave Aberdeen much to
Ferguson’s fury, Strachan got involved in a daft episode when, via
a foreign agent, he promised his services to Cologne the following
season. With hindsight, and in a peculiar way, this was only a
foretaste of how it would be for footballers of the future, but at
the time none of that assuaged Ferguson, despite the political
radical that he claimed to be back in 1985. On the contrary, he
went berserk at Strachan.
When their paths diverged and then met again at Manchester
United three years later, another incident took place, with
Ferguson again accusing Strachan of being slippery and downright
devious while negotiating a transfer away from Manchester United
to, of all clubs, Lens in France. It was a second piece of Strachan
skul-duggery which fixed in Ferguson’s mind his distrust of his
former protégé, and which later became the origin of the following
barbed comments in his autobiography.
“I always knew there was a cunning streak in Strachan,” Ferguson
wrote. “But I never imagined he could pull such a stroke on me
[negotiating behind Ferguson’s back] after everything I had done
for him. I decided that this man could not be trusted an inch. He
could break his word without a qualm, it was sickening. I would
never be able to have full trust in Strachan again and I wouldn’t
want to expose my back to him in a hurry.”
It wouldn’t do to blithely take these words of Ferguson as
gospel – they were evidently written with a certain emotional
indignation, and Strachan has offered his counter to Ferguson’s
version of events in his own autobiography. Nonetheless, when you
read these withering words of Ferguson, it is faintly comical to
imagine the pair, as Strachan claims they do, sitting down today
and chuckling over cups of tea together. Yes, the past is in the
past, but the football community doesn’t forget.
Ferguson is proud of all his former pupils who drifted into
management – Strachan, Alex McLeish, Willie Miller, Mark McGhee,
Mark Hughes, Steve Bruce, Eric Black and others – but the Celtic
manager remains the one with an asterisk beside his name in the
Manchester United manager’s mind. Deep down, Ferguson would be
quite happy if his side gave Celtic a mauling tomorrow evening, if
only to reassert his superiority over his former upstart. There
remains, too, a sense of grievance in Ferguson about Celtic’s 1-0
win the last time the sides met – however improbable that victory
was on the night – thanks to Shunsuke Nakamura’s goal back in
November 2006.
We will all enjoy Old Trafford tomorrow evening, and not just
for the football. There will be far more going on than that.
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