The Two Faces of Fergie

This Is The One - Alex Ferguson: The Uncut Story of a Football Genius
By Daniel Taylor (Aurum) £8.99 328p

For the most part, I have always thought of Alex Ferguson as a cantankerous, red faced, foul-mouthed bully who has based a large part of his success on intimidation and fear and reading this book does little to change my opinion. Of course he can be charming and humorous at times when one sees him in public, but only on his terms; only when things are going well at Manchester United and he is top of the pile, winning trophies and triumphantly looking down upon everyone else. When things at the ‘worlds biggest club’ are less rosy however, we get to see the darker side of Ferguson, the man who berates people in public, cranks the anti-media and anti-establishment paranoia up to absurd levels and uses techniques such as the infamous ‘hairdryer’ treatment on anyone who dares step out of line or raise any issue of contention surrounding the Red Devils.
There is no enigma lying at the heart of Ferguson, we all know exactly what makes him tick: winning and to paraphrase the man himself, knocking teams of their f***ing perch. What is fascinating though is how the most successful and long-serving manager at the highest level of the English game possesses some kind of split personality, from the street brawler brought up in working-class Glasgow, with the steely persona and caricature of steam blowing out of his ears, throwing tea-cups around the dressing room, to the man who is reportedly kind and warm to those who are close to him, someone who becomes a surrogate father figure to many of his players, and the generous spirit that gives up his time readily for charity work.

This contrast is captured perfectly in Daniel Taylor’s revealing and behind-the-scenes account of two very different seasons for the legendary football boss in 2005-06 and 2006-7.
The former was probably Ferguson’s least successful year at the club, if you discount his first few seasons after his arrival in 1986, and it is here, through the eyes of the Guardian’s Taylor and the Manchester football press pack, that we get to see the bus-pass eligible manager behaving at his worse, picking fights with anyone around and losing his cool at the slightest little thing. On certain occasions during pre-match press conferences, Ferguson would lose his temper so much with journalists about their questioning that he would swing his arm and smash their Dictaphones lined up on the table into a nearby wall; his rather extreme way of saying the interview was over. Another time he took exception to what one journalist had written that day, so made him leave the briefing and frog marched the bemused hack into the nearby toilets and told him to stay there until everyone else had finished their interviews. There are countless insights like this in the book of the shouting matches, bans, and general rollicking grown men doing their jobs faced every week from Ferguson (although Taylor must be a shrewd cookie as he never seemed to be on the end of any, but has plenty of stories about less fortunate journos). And the absurdity of the relationship between Ferguson and the press is highlighted best when he even ends up boycotting MUTV, the club’s own satellite channel which is known cynically as Pravda TV, because a presenter had the temerity to talk on air about the formation of the team.
Of course journalists are not whiter than white and Ferguson openly admits that he does not like what they do and what the modern media has become, but the relationship is still a two-way thing. He often complained about what they had written as being ‘shite’, but this would be on occasions when he left the press high and dry by holding an eighty second press conference or most bitterly of all, the day when Old Trafford legend Roy Keane abruptly left the club, the Manchester United boss met the media half an hour before the story broke and told them everything was fine with the Irishman.

From reading this account, Taylor’s position as the Guardian’s Manchester United correspondent is not an enviable one, nor it seems is any journalist’s role dealing with the club. The point can be argued that most managers in the pressure cooker that is the Premier League have their own particular faults and flaws, but nonetheless it is hard to imagine Arsene Wenger, Rafa Benitez or Mark Hughes behaving in such a way with people simply trying to do their jobs. Many Manchester United fans reading this book will also argue that they don’t care about how Ferguson behaves as long as the team is winning, and that fickleness is highlighted extensively in the first half of the book, when many supporters wanted shot of their greatest ever manager after a couple of quiet seasons on the trophy front.
This is a book of two halves, to twist the classic football cliché, and from Taylor’s writing during the following 2006-07 season we see the other side to Ferguson: joking, likeable, self-effacing and it is a relief because it breaks the routine of continuous rows and run-ins from the first half of the book, which nearly slips toward monotony. The reason why we see the flip side of Fergie’s personality, the softer touches so to speak, in the second part of the book is simple: his team are winning and on top again and that seems to make the Scot a whole lot easier to live with, although one wonders why he could not be like that most of the time. Nevertheless, we see Fergie doing what he does best in rising to the challenge of Chelsea, new kid on the block Jose Mourinho and their oil funded mega-millions. He shows his man-management skills once again in healing the Wayne Rooney and Ronaldo World Cup rift and also his ruthless streak in unceremoniously dumping his most prolific striker and Old Trafford hero Ruud Van Nistelrooy for the good of the team. Consequently Manchester United reclaimed the Premier League title, made the final of the FA Cup and semi-final of the Champions League; a vast improvement from the season before, which produced only the Carling Cup.

The Alex Ferguson we leave behind by the end of the book is a lot more mellow and magnanimous and Taylor puts forward the theory that someone very close to him, perhaps a family member, had a talk with him in the close-season between the two documented here, to explain that life is too short and everything does not have to be a battle or fight. This may be the case and it has paid further dividends most recently when Ferguson won the Premier League again and the Champions League for the second time. Like Taylor’s book, that season too will surely provide a roller coaster read, but pity the poor football journalists if the Scotsman starts to come under any pressure again.
Niall McGarrigle