Managing My Life by Ferguson Alex

Author:Ferguson, Alex
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-44709-100
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2011-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

15

FEW HIGHS AND A

TERRIBLE LOW

BIG miseries can make your everyday worries seem almost comforting. After Bermuda, it was a relief to be back among the less weighty dramas of the 1987–88 football season, in which we maintained the reasonable league form that would eventually leave us a distant second to Liverpool but found our best hope of silverware crushed in a controversial ending to an FA Cup fifth-round tie at Highbury. We had a chance to equalise with a last-minute penalty but, just as Brian McClair was taking the kick, Nigel Winterburn engaged in some antics to put him off. I was, however, more angry at Bobby Robson and England for arranging a friendly match in Israel three days before our big Cup engagement in London. Sod’s law took a hand and Bryan Robson received a calf injury at England training which ruled him out of the game against Arsenal that just about held the key to our season. Why do international managers infuriate and alienate those of us in charge of clubs by complicating our lives with such unnecessary demands on players? I was disappointed that Bobby Robson of all people failed to be more considerate. He is a real football man and should have known better.

Brian McClair was far too intelligent to let that penalty incident be anything more than a temporary annoyance. He was my second signing for United, in July 1987, and one I had plenty of reason to celebrate for a decade afterwards. My first buy for the club was Viv Anderson, whose resolute professionalism at right-back and bubbly, contagious enthusiasm in the dressing-room were worth a lot more than the £250,000 we paid Arsenal. Viv, a man I am always happy to see, was prevented by injury from being as valuable to us as he should have been. One of McClair’s many assets was that he was hardly ever injured and I never had a doubt that the £850,000 it cost to bring him from Celtic was money well spent. He was strongly built, had terrific stamina and had proved in Scotland that he was a scorer of goals. He never stopped moving on the field and he read the play so well that he constantly put himself in good positions. His qualities as a footballer were the kind that helped other players around him to thrive. Over his years at Old Trafford, I asked Brian to handle a wide variety of functions in the team. The tendency to exploit his versatility, and to pick him or leave him out on the basis of what was required on a given day, was not always fair to him but you could count on Brian to be there with one hundred per cent commitment. His contribution was sometimes undervalued by people on the sidelines but never by me, and he knew that. When major success came to Manchester United in the Nineties, nobody deserved it more than the good soldier McClair.

While I was preparing to recruit

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