Room on the perch only for Alex now

ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE PROFILE OF ALEX FERGUSON:"ROARING, SMARTING, bellowing, stabbing fingers, hugging, enjoying his food, mean and unforgiving, vindictive, generous, ebullient, vain, suddenly depressed, then roguish, then overbearing, suddenly modest again, only to bellow once more."

When the subject is the character of Alex Ferguson – as it must be on an expectant sporting morning such as this – Norman Mailer’s machine-gun description of the American president Lyndon Baines Johnson comes around again. As a man keenly interested in American history – Ferguson has just been reading Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln – the 67-year-old Scot is aware of the multi-faceted, sometimes contradictory nature of powerful men.

Ferguson would acknowledge, possibly after a fight, that there is within Mailer’s words on Johnson something of the essence of Ferguson himself. Some of that is contradiction; there is also the relentlessness.

“I’m always looking. That’s the way I am. I’m never really happy.”

Ferguson said this back in September 2002 upstairs above the foyer at Manchester United’s Carrington training ground on the city’s southern outskirts.

There was no self-pity involved, Ferguson was expressing a trait of his when analysing players. “If a player is 5ft 10in,” he explained, “I think he should be 5ft 11in. It’s a detail that forces you to think.”

But it felt like an anecdotal encapsulation of his talent, and its unremitting nature. Ferguson does not receive enough credit for thought. He gets plenty for motivation, decision-making and energy; he gets plenty of stick for cussedness, bias, being domineering. But he cannot have done what he has done, been where he has been, without thought.

If he questions everything, it is possible that is because, despite all the glory, he has been questioned so often himself.

Ferguson’s first job in management was in 1974 at East Stirling.

At Aberdeen four years later he became part of the landscape, first in Scotland, then in Britain and then in Europe. Aberdeen beat Real Madrid in 1983 to win the Cup Winners’ Cup. It is worth thinking about. Ferguson then went to Manchester United and the rest is history, or his story.

Over the course of those 35 years there have been many moments of assessment and today, with United on the brink of equalling Liverpool’s record of 18 English league titles, brings another.

On the afternoon in November 1986 that Ferguson succeeded Ron Atkinson at Old Trafford, Liverpool had 16 league titles and would win two more in the next four seasons. United had seven, the last of which had come in 1967.

The geography of north-west England dictated that those figures hurt and embarrassed United. Ferguson took them as a personal affront so though he said he is never really happy, there will be satisfaction derived should the Premier League be clinched this lunchtime against Arsenal.

While Arsene Wenger became a bitter rival of Ferguson’s over the past 13 years, much of the acid is said to have neutralised. Wenger yesterday referred glowingly to Ferguson’s “hunger”. With Liverpool, however, and with Rafael Benitez, the same cannot be said.

FERGUSON ADMIRES Liverpool as a club but he does not like it. What grates in particular are the number of former Liverpool players who have become media pundits.

Of these, fellow Scot Alan Hansen would appear to be chief irritant. That day in 2002, having moved from the pressroom downstairs a week earlier for the first part of an interview that went on too long, Ferguson also made his celebrated “perch” remark about Liverpool.

Having been generous with his time, and courteous, the mood changed when Hansen’s description arose of United’s then-situation being the greatest challenge of Ferguson’s career. United had won two, lost two and drawn two of the first six games of season 2002-’03.

Hansen was not alone in posing questions. The previous season United had finished 10 points adrift of champions Arsenal and three off second-place Liverpool. Sven-Goran Eriksson was said to be the next United manager, the signings of Juan Sebastian Veron and Diego Forlan were being questioned loudly, there was no end to the end-of-empire speculation. Ferguson could hear it all.

Given that he can be an intimidating presence in a stadium of 70,000 people – “Ferguson could have changed the mood of the Last Supper”, James Lawton wrote recently – putting all this to him one-on-one felt a risky policy. He was not amused.

“My greatest challenge is not what’s happening at the moment,” he began, the scarlet starting to flow, “my greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their f***ing perch.”

The interview could have gone on for another year without that answer being beaten, but Ferguson immediately added: “And you can print that.”

HIS ANNOYANCE then was that all the chatter was premature and lacked context. Roy Keane, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville were injured. When they returned, sure enough the league title was won back. Liverpool finished fifth.

Two years on, back at Carrington, this time in his upstairs office the week before Christmas with Ruud van Nistelrooy knocking timidly on the door, the topic once again was the challenge facing United.

This time it was called Roman Abramovich, not Liverpool or Arsenal. “Without doubt Chelsea are the new force,” Ferguson said.

He refused to criticise the wealth advantage Abramovich gave and has given Chelsea, but Ferguson mentioned it, mentioned that it might not be everything when it comes to team-building, a favourite Ferguson subject. “All I’m saying is that sometimes money can muddy the waters.”

It was hard not to smirk. Chelsea’s skyscraper financial strength – “the bottomless pot” – was being twirled into a possible problem for Jose Mourinho. This was months after Chelsea had simply out-muscled United economically over Arjen Robben.

Peter Kenyon had left his post at Old Trafford for the same executive office at Stamford Bridge, taking with him Ferguson’s knowledge and preferences. In some form, United had put out feelers to Steven Gerrard that summer of 2004. “We just can’t get Gerrard, the boy won’t come here,” Ferguson said. Soon Chelsea would do the same.

Chelsea won the league that season, 19 points ahead of United. They won it again the next season and suddenly Ferguson had one title in five years. At that time, there was also the Rock of Gibraltar fallout in the air.

Malcolm Glazer’s had become a name known and widely despised in Manchester. Ferguson’s authority was again in question.

But what Ferguson does is answer. It is, for example, just two years this month since United were beaten 3-0 by AC Milan in the second leg of the European Cup semi-final. To witness Ferguson at San Siro that night, in the windowless pressroom of an ageing stadium, was to see a man with the air sucked out of him. Milan’s experience was simply too much for a United defence missing Rio Ferdinand and Patrice Evra. Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney could make no impact. But Ferguson referred to their 1985 birthdates, the message was that their time would come. It had a Wenger ring to it.

The time of Ronaldo and Rooney had started to come already. Three days later, United travelled to neighbours City and won 1-0. It would lead to a first title in four seasons and a new team was on the move. They followed up again last season with Ronaldo’s 31 goals and, more thrillingly for Ferguson, a second European Cup triumph, against Chelsea, of the bottomless pot.

And here we are again. United are a solitary point away from an 11th Premier League title under Ferguson. The third in a row. In 11 days Barcelona will be met in Rome in another European Cup final. It is some response.

Returning to an earlier meeting, in 1999 for The Irish Times, after the staggering European Cup final victory in Barcelona, but before the knighthood, Ferguson had talked of responding, learning, thinking, throughout his career. His office, United’s training ground, was at The Cliff in Salford then. This was Matt Busby’s old room. Aidan O’Brien rang in with a bulletin from the gallops.

FERGUSON’S autobiography had come out, all 250,000 words of it. A two-word phrase on page 163 stood out: ‘creative aggression’.

“Yeah, that sums me up,” he said. Keane’s future was in doubt and there was a suggestion that Ferguson might resign over it. “That’s not my job,” he replied, “my job is to regenerate, if I can.”

He said then, and he has said it since in different ways: “People quite often think of managers as unbreakable, but they’re not, they’re just as vulnerable as everyone else.”

The implication was that Ferguson had manufactured some of his famous ferocity, not found it in his upbringing in Govan or in his journey through an unforgiving profession such as professional football.

Early on in his managerial career, he explained: “I said to myself that if I’m going to survive, I’m going to have to be quite firm. In other words I would not change my principles and if you don’t like it – goodbye.

“I’ve tried to keep these disciplines, although you do mellow. My half-time team-talks, if they weren’t doing well, were always quite volatile. I probably made a conscious decision to make sure I was hard enough to survive, to make sure players didn’t ride roughshod over me. I became obsessional more or less but you get to a peak where the obsession is no use. It’s energy using up energy. When you mature you start observing more, that’s when you become a better manager.

“Yeah, at times I was ]. But it suited the environment I was in, at St Mirren and Aberdeen. Coming to Man United I carried on a bit of Aberdeen for a spell. But then I needed to start thinking – this was different, this was expectation, this was big league, this is the biggest.”