Football - Bloody Hell!: The Biography of Alex Ferguson by Patrick Barclay

Author:Patrick Barclay [Barclay, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Sports, Sports & Recreation, Soccer
ISBN: 9781407084718
Google: 5aNERulnsF0C
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-10-31T14:34:32+00:00

Welcome to Hell

For United – no matter what happened to Liverpool – things had to get better. And they did, but only after they had got worse. The season 1989/90 was to be Ferguson’s most hellish and yet there was a glimpse of heaven at the end, with his first trophy. It was a season that had everything, including the most bizarre pre-match entertainment, provided by one Michael Knighton.

The background was that Martin Edwards, having sunk himself £1 million into debt to buy a 50.2 per cent stake in United (his father had left him only 16 per cent), wanted to sell. He had earlier entertained advances from Robert Maxwell – the entrepreneur, media mogul and owner of Oxford United – whose crooked business dealings were later revealed. Edwards had become deeply unpopular with United’s fans in the process. But now United, as well as Edwards, needed money because of Hillsborough and the Taylor Report. The redevelopment of Old Trafford’s Stretford End, a project close to Edwards’s heart, would cost £10 million which the club did not have. Edwards had already told Ferguson he would sell to anyone who paid for the Stretford End and gave him a further £10 million for his shares.

And then Knighton appeared on the scene. An affable man, slightly chubbier than you would expect from a thirty-seven-year-old whom only injury, we gathered, had denied a career with Coventry City, he met Edwards in the summer of 1989 through an intermediary. Explaining that he had made a lot of money in property, he offered to meet Edwards’s twin terms. Edwards, unaware that football would boom so spectacularly that massively richer pickings could be made, thought his dreams had come true – and shook hands on the deal.

When his fellow directors found out, there was dismay – they suspected that Knighton, despite the Scottish castle in which he had entertained Edwards, might have difficulty raising the scale of resources required – and embarrassment, which went only too public on the first day of the new season.

An hour before the match between United and Arsenal, the new champions, Ferguson and George Graham were having a cup of tea when the kit man, Norman Davies, said Knighton had asked for a United strip to wear. Ferguson laughed and agreed but joked that the team had already been picked.

Soon Davies reappeared and what he said caused Ferguson to turn on a television monitor that showed the pitch. There was Knighton, introducing himself to the fans who thought he was buying their club by trotting out to the centre circle in his strip and juggling the ball all the way to the goal at the Stretford End, where he whacked it into the empty net. ‘I was starting to have a terrible gut feeling,’ said Ferguson, ‘about my new chairman.’ It was magnificent showmanship nonetheless, and the 4-1 victory over Graham’s champions that followed only enhanced the fans’ good humour.

One of the goals came from the newcomer Neil Webb, from Nottingham Forest.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.