The grumpy Glaswegian who has built a career on confrontation was at it again this week.
Facing journalists at a press conference in the build-up to Saturday’s Champions League final against Barcelona at Wembley, Sir Alex Ferguson took exception to a straightforward question from an Associated Press reporter who asked ‘how important’ Ryan Giggs — United hero and (we are now permitted to know) love rat — was for the game.
Turning to United’s press officer, the wonderfully named Karen Shotbolt, Ferguson muttered a comment sotto voce which was picked up by television microphones: ‘We’ll get him . . . ban him on Friday’ [from the pre-match press conference].
It was Ferguson all over, great football manager and small-town martinet; Arthur Scargill in a tracksuit. This is my world, and don’t forget it. The rest of youse just live in it, so be thankful.
Before we bury Ferguson, who is now 69 but still going strong, it is necessary to praise him. It isn’t difficult to laud the football man. Even if he had never left Aberdeen, where he turned a provincial club into the best team north of the border, he would be acclaimed as a superb manager.
With the Reds of Old Trafford, however, he has achieved greatness: 12 Premier League titles, five FA Cups, and two victories in the Champions League.
In his recruitment of top-class players, and the sympathetic handling of younger ones, he has shown himself to be a master of the sport. After 25 years in Manchester he continues to send out teams which maintain the club’s reputation for adventurous football.
United may not have the lustre of Real Madrid or Milan, whose record in European competition is far superior, but they are unquestionably the most famous club in this country, followed by millions beyond their native parish.
This week those supporters will flood into London from all corners of the globe, to see if Ferguson’s latest team can overcome the ball-players of Barcelona, led by Lionel Messi, the dazzling inside forward from Argentina.
Most neutrals may well hope they cannot. Over the years the irascible Jock, who seems to live in a state of permanent anger, has made sure of that.
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Throughout his life this highly intelligent, unusually driven man has observed one golden rule: Fergie Contra Mundum — me against the world. It is as if he has gone out of his way to make others dislike him.
Along with his great success as a manager has come the incessant belittling of referees, the bullying of journalists, and his utter disdain for the football authorities, and indeed all those who see the world in a different light.
Even now that he is a knight of the realm he behaves like a lout, lighting up the night sky with his glowing conk, effing and blinding at those who stand in his way.
The knighthood, incidentally, was bestowed on him at the urging of that thoroughly nice chap, Alastair Campbell. Rarely in the affairs of men have two people so richly deserved one another.
Yet, for all his success on the field, Ferguson has failed in the thing that matters most. All great sporting personalities serve not only their team. They serve the game itself. If they are very great — Jack Nicklaus, say, Rod Laver, or Sir Garry Sobers — they come to represent that game. They are not necessarily role models, but they are figureheads.
Stan Cullis, who built Wolverhampton Wanderers back in the Fifties, represented English football. So did Bill Nicholson, the manager of Tottenham Hotspur’s Double-winning side of 1961.
There is room in the pantheon for Sir Matt Busby and Bill Shankly, who did more than anybody to make Manchester United and Liverpool the famous clubs they are.
Brian Clough, who led Derby County and Nottingham Forest from second division obscurity to the championship, and who then took Forest to supremacy in Europe not once but twice, is also a true great. He may, as some have alleged, have taken backhanders for player transfers, but his teams never cheated.
Along with his great success as a manager has come the belittling of referees, the bullying of journalists, and his utter disdain for the football authorities.
Clough, it should be noted, loathed Ferguson. He liked to laugh, while Ferguson sees jokes strictly by appointment — in other words, he does not appreciate people laughing at him one little bit.
Not for Clough, nor for those other great men, the sniping at referees and those who try, in their imperfect way, to administer the game. None of them were angels, yet they tried to honour football’s best traditions.
Myopic Fergie, unchallenged at Old Trafford, where he is surrounded by yes-men, sees only his own club. The bigger picture is beyond his imagination.
Even within his fiefdom he behaves like a tartar.
For a man from Govan, who considers himself to be a proud son of the Labour movement, Ferguson’s management style owes more to the iron fist of the old-fashioned mill-owner. Busby, his great predecessor, also did things his own way. He just accomplished them with rather more style.
As Sir Bobby Charlton told Jeff Powell in yesterday’s Mail, he was a man ‘none of us ever dared let down for fear of incurring his disfavour’.
Nowhere is Ferguson’s bullying manner more apparent than in his treatment of the BBC, which was declared non grata in 2004 after a programme investigated the activities of Jason Ferguson, the manager’s son, and acting as a football agent.
What a pity Ferguson has chosen not to honour the game that has given him such a grand living. Whereas other managers make themselves available for interview after games, Ferguson Snr still refuses to speak to the BBC, even though he was happy to promote his autobiography on Five Live.
Yet his antipathy to the Corporation predates the investigation into his son’s business activities. After a clash with John Motson, the mild-mannered commentator, some years before, Des Lynam, the then presenter of Match Of The Day, urged the show’s editors to run the Ferguson interview without interruption, with the Scot’s swear words and all.
Perhaps, if Lynam’s editors had shown greater courage that evening, television viewers would have been granted a more realistic portrait of the master manager.
To some extent we get the figureheads we deserve: the question is whether the age we live in has coarsened their characters, or the other way around.
A new biography of Jack Hobbs, the first professional cricketer to be knighted, quotes John Arlott, that great broadcaster, who said that Hobbs ‘wore his knighthood with the dignity of a prince’. Could we say the same of Sir Alex?
It can be done. Bobby Charlton also wears his honour with dignity. The most famous player ever to have represented Manchester United, Charlton has never done anything to sully the game, or his club. He is admired, loved even, the world over, four decades after he retired. Having survived the Munich air crash in 1958, he knows there is much more to life than winning on the football field.
Instead of reaching out to the world outside Old Trafford, he has opted instead to pile the sandbags high and declare: what we have, we hold.
He even defended Wayne Rooney, the foul-mouthed striker, after he swore into the television cameras recently.
When the United fans sing ‘we do what we want’, they are taking their cue from a manager who spies enemies wherever he looks.
Flame-nosed Fergie is a giant of football. By any standards he has achieved greatness.
But as a human being, he has let the side down. Which is why so many Englishmen, the most fair-minded of judges, will be cheering lustily for Barcelona on Saturday.
Come on, you wondrous Catalans. Get him!
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