The Manchester United manager tries to play down the rivalry with Liverpool, but he isn't convincing anyone. Daniel Taylorreports
THE PECULIAR thing is that whenever Alex Ferguson is asked about Manchester United winning an 18th league title he insists it would not make it any more special to draw level with Liverpool. There are Mancunians and Liverpudlians thinking of little else right now. But Ferguson was at it again yesterday, putting on his poker face and arguing that it didn’t really make any difference. “That’s not actually my target,” he has insisted all season.
On the basis that Ferguson is unlikely to agree to being strapped to a polygraph, we shall probably have to take him at his word. We also know that, deep down, United’s manager has a begrudging respect for Liverpool. He admires their history and tradition. He likes the way their crowd appreciate opposition teams that play good football. He can laugh about the time he went to one match at Anfield as a spectator. “You Manc bastard, come to see the champions?” were the first words he heard when he got out of his car.
Yet Ferguson has so much personal history with Liverpool it is difficult to imagine that a man so ferociously partisan and competitive has not felt the first rush of malicious pleasure about inflicting more of the misery on them that they once inflicted on United.
Ferguson has been on top for so long now he has banished many of the old insecurities. But he also acknowledged yesterday he had not forgotten the various agonies to which Liverpool subjected him in his formative years at Old Trafford. He remembers their power, the way referees caved in when the Kop howled for a penalty and the way, as he once put it, “a lot of managers leave Anfield choking on their own sick”.
Back then, Ferguson was the guy complaining, a la Benitez, that it was one rule for the club at the top and one for the rest. Liverpool, in short, had everything he wanted. As Ferguson said yesterday: “The 1980s belonged to Liverpool, without question.”
Turning that around took time. So long, indeed, there were periods when fans would demand Ferguson’s sacking. The Old Trafford crowd were as sick of Liverpool’s success as they were United’s failures. And so was Ferguson. It had made him a 24/7 obsessive. “It isn’t just a job to me,” he once said. “It’s a mission. I am deadly serious about it – some people would say too serious . . . we will get there. Believe me. And when it happens life will change for Liverpool – dramatically.”
But it was not a quick process. Ferguson grimaced yesterday as he thought back to the 1991-’92 season when United, without a league title since 1967, won eight of their opening 10 games and, until Easter, it finally looked as if it could be their season. On the final, decisive afternoon they went to Anfield and Ian Rush, who had never scored against them in 24 attempts, broke his duck with both goals in a 2-0 win. Leeds finished as champions and Ferguson returned to Manchester to contemplate a shocking statistic: Manchester United had gone 25 years without a title.
Ferguson remembers it “like a death in the family”. But he was clever. He realised the agonies of that day could be exploited and urged his players never to forget the way the Liverpool crowd had treated them. Outside the stadium supporters asked for Ryan Giggs and Paul Ince’s autographs and then tore them up in their faces. “It was purgatory,” Gary Pallister, United’s former centre-half, remembers. “Alex wanted us to remember it, to imprint it indelibly on our memories so we would make damned sure we never experienced it again.”
Ferguson has had his revenge, of course. Since United ended their wait in 1993 the title has returned to Old Trafford like a homing pigeon, only very occasionally going astray. “It was a great Liverpool team when I arrived in England,” he says. “We had a job to do and this club went about it the right way. We worked our socks off, everyone did, all the departments, scouting, youth programme, and bit by bit we got where we are.”
Question Ferguson about the significance of equalling Liverpool’s record and he will point out that he does not want to say anything that could seem presumptuous or overly confident. But he understands the question. “They have always been our main rival. It’s always been our derby. Geographically, historically, the two cities, the two most successful clubs in Britain. When they get together you expect sparks to fly.”
And Ferguson, when everything is said and done, loves to see Liverpool hanging on United’s coat-tails. In September 2002, he was interviewed by the Guardian after United had lost two of their opening six league games and Alan Hansen had described Ferguson’s position as “the greatest challenge of his career”.
Ferguson has always resented the fact there are so many ex-Liverpool players on the Match of the Day sofa. “My greatest challenge is not what’s happening at the moment,” he said, “my greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their f**king perch.”
That quote will be around for as long as there are football pitches, even if it was a classic case of Ferguson trying to rewrite history. Liverpool’s decline can actually be traced to the end of 1990, their last title-winning year, and it was another three years before United finally won the league. Yet Ferguson delivered his line with the dramatic effect of Robert de Niro. “And you can print that,” he added. Point made.
Guardian Service
