Michael Walker talks to Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson as he prepares for his 400th Premiership match
Alex Ferguson leant across the table, dug his elbows into the wood and fixed a steely stare into the distance. "When you are building a football club," he said, "you never know where you are going. It's a journey that never finishes." Even at Manchester United, even for Ferguson, the daily job still involves learning, losing, winning and getting by.
Some think Ferguson should be beyond this point. Twenty-eight years and four months since he became manager of East Stirling at £40 a week Ferguson's managerial odyssey has acquired epic proportions. The milestones stretch behind him as they would a serial marathon runner and today at Charlton Athletic he reaches another: his 400th Premiership match in charge of Manchester United.
In terms of Ferguson's silver-strewn achievements it hardly represents the largest landmark but it is worthy of recognition. Yet, when Ferguson walks into the Valley this afternoon, it will not be to gongs and applause but to the echo of scepticism. United are a force on the wane is the charge. Arsenal have galloped on. Ferguson has lost it. The United empire in which Ferguson was both architect and foreman - but not accountant - is approaching its final days.
Where once there was simply quiet at Old Trafford, now there is disquiet. Arsenal won the league there in May and finished 10 points ahead of third-placed United. Arsenal's lead is now six points and United have already lost twice, to Bolton and Leeds. Ferguson has said that no team can challenge if they lose more than six games in a season. Alan Hansen, who once said that you do not win anything with kids, has described Ferguson's current position as "the greatest challenge of his career".
Ferguson does not seem like a man in a corner. "I don't get paid to panic," Ferguson said. "We have had plenty of stuttering starts." Neither the topics of Juan Sebastian Veron nor Diego Forlan could stir Ferguson into a crimson caricature of his legendary wrath. But Hansen's analysis did.
"My greatest challenge is not what's happening at the moment," Ferguson countered, "my greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their fucking perch. And you can print that."
It is easy to forget that, when Ferguson picked his side for his and their first-ever Premiership match back in August 1992, Manchester United were still 25 years without the title. Liverpool were no longer the dominant force but they had been and for Ferguson they remained the benchmark. And just imagine the reaction now if United started a season as they did in 1992: lost 2-1 at Sheffield United to two goals from Brian Deane; lost 3-0 at home to Everton; drew 1-1 at home to Ipswich.
Yet United recovered and won the first of seven Premiership titles the following April. Had Alan Shearer joined from Southampton, Ferguson thinks it would have been eight. As he pointed out, team-building can be as much about whom you cannot sign as whom you can. Moreover, Ferguson believes that it might have been nine if United had beaten Liverpool at Old Trafford this January. United lost 1-0 in the 85th minute, their one defeat sandwiched by 12 victories.
"I think we may have just won the league actually, if we'd won that Liverpool game," Ferguson said. "We battered them." But Liverpool won. Later, so did Arsenal, as did Bayer Leverkusen in the European Cup semi-finals. Throw in the unconvincing beginning to this season and, as far as Ferguson and the critics go, it's bring 'em on.
If United have slipped, today at Charlton will offer a barometer of how far. A fortnight ago Arsenal cruised to a 3-0 win there.
"How I portray my team against Arsenal is irrelevant," Ferguson said when offered the comparison. "It's the points, the points make the difference and you can't dispute that. You can't put up an argument against results."
But there have been arguments, just as always.
"The difference between then (1992) and now would be that I hadn't won the Premier division," Ferguson said, "so me handling today as opposed to then is entirely different. For example, I don't read the newspapers at all. Ever. If we lose a game, what's the point? You work it out for yourself. So I'm in control of that part. I know it's not nice reading and there's nothing I can do about that. But I can do something about my team. So my focus and concentration intensifies on my team.
"But there's more personal criticism now. At present it's personal. I'm not getting paranoid about that but I think it happens and not just to me. It happens to other people too. I think managers have always been under fire. Quite rightly you don't sack players, they have to be developed through confidence. Managers are not unbreakable but everyone expects them to have skin like a rhinoceros, which is not the case. Everyone responds to being encouraged, managers are no different."
Ferguson felt that after the defeat at Leeds, with some justification.
"We lost 1-0 to their only strike on target in 90 minutes. Last year we went there and scored four goals and this time we played as well. So it can be hard to measure results and performance."
That lunchtime game was then overtaken by David Beckham's elbow on Lee Bowyer and that offered Ferguson another example of the scale of United.
"When wee things happen here they tend to be magnified, overblown," he said. "So I have to have a perspective which has a fairness about it. I've got to ignore the hullabaloo. Like the David Beckham incident. I spoke to the boy and he didn't know what I was talking about. He genuinely didn't know. I said, 'I've just watched the video there and it seems as if you struck the lad with the elbow.' He said: 'Not me, no.' So he watched it on Saturday night and then he said, 'I don't know how that happened.' So you hold your hands up. But it's a difficult one, because it's not like him to do that.
"Even Roy (Keane), Roy has never done anything like the (Jason) McAteer one. And it was just like a wee schoolboy dig."
Surely not?
"Well, it wasn't 'take that, ya bastard.' It was just stupid but Roy knows that. It was petty."
That Keane is missed by United is the understatement of the year. In 1992 Ferguson said he had "six absolute warriors, combustible - Schmeichel, Bruce, Ince, Robson, Hughes and Cantona". But now all are to be found in one mind and body, Keane's. The Cork man defines United's personality still, Ferguson nodded, and without Keane and Gary Neville and Paul Scholes there has been a lack of physical force.
Ferguson is as aware as anyone of this but saying so in public is another matter. His priority has been to see that confidence is not eroded.
"My thinking over the past few weeks was to operate on those players suffering with injury and get it over with. Take the poison now and hopefully stabilise the club, keep in the frame and then around December time pick it up.
Ferguson is contracted until June 2005, by which time his 500th Premiership match will have come and gone and he will be 63 years old. Then, for once, Ferguson will concentrate solely on his tomorrow.
"That's something that doesn't concern me," he said of the succession. "The important thing is to maintain a successful club and let the future look after itself. And it will. "There have been cultural changes in that we've got a Brazilian youth coach, we've got a Dutch schoolboy coach, a Portuguese coach with me, and that's to deal with the different cultures within the club. It'll carry on, we've got good staff here and the structure here is about winning things. We address the future well here."
Guardian Service
