Ferguson simply a born winner
Michael Owen, who, it transpires, has the best spelling and punctuation in the Manchester United team, could hardly contain his excitement at finally landing the Premier League medal he must have suspected would always elude him.
Owen’s childish enthusiasm was such that you had to be happy for him, even if he scored only one goal in the course of winning this medal, and even if the photos he posted reminded you of the fan, Karl Power, who dressed up as a player and managed to sneak undetected into the United team photo ahead of their Champions League game at Leverkusen in 2002.
Wayne Rooney’s feed was more memorable. He kicked things off with a photo entitled “Champions”, featuring Rooney in the kind of grim-faced pose footballers usually adopt in ads for their sponsors, bare-chested, with “19” crudely scrawled into his chest-hair. “A scouser knocks Liverpool of there perch. Haha. An evertoniian aswell. Yes. People. U can’t imagine how happy I am tonight. Believe,” gurgled Rooney. As the night wore on he periodically posted further updates, culminating in the deathless “Utd til I die. Everton til I die. Believe. Come together. The beatles. Leg.”
Rooney doubtless spent much of Sunday in the grip of a poisonous hangover but his post-binge fear was vastly preferable to the sober misery endured by the players of Chelsea and Arsenal, who had to do laps of honour to almost-empty stadiums after disappointing results in their final home games.
Chelsea’s lap of honour was enlivened by the cutesy antics of Branislav Ivanovic’s tiny son, who gamely dribbled a ball half his height the length of the pitch before slotting into an empty net to raucous acclaim from the fans who’d stayed behind after full-time. Chelsea’s players were lucky Ivanovic Jnr was there to distract attention from what could otherwise have been a pretty excruciating experience. Their counterparts at Arsenal, led by the stony-faced Cesc Fabregas, were not so lucky.
It’s a big summer for both clubs. Chelsea seem likely to start their summer rebuilding by sacking Carlo Ancelotti and appointing a new manager. It’s unclear how a new voice in the dugout can turn a side that looks stale and one-paced back into contenders. Yet Ancelotti, for all that he remains popular with the press, has plainly failed to get the best out of Fernando Torres and seems to have fallen out with the other January signing, David Luiz. Having spent £70m on those two alone, Roman Abramovich is entitled to feel frustrated that his coach doesn’t work well with them.
The questions at Arsenal run a little deeper. They don’t have Chelsea’s problem of aging players. Rather, here is a very talented team that seems to have quit on its stool. They have won only three of 14 matches since losing the Carling Cup final to Birmingham. That miserable run has revealed flaws in their mental and technical make-up that have made a mockery of everything Arsene Wenger has been claiming about them for the last couple of years.
It is almost as though Arsenal’s players have stopped listening to Wenger, as though nothing he tries can shock them back to their senses. His suffering means little to a group of rich young men who already have it made and have forgotten the debt they owe to the manager who showed too much faith in them.
If Wenger, after 15 years at Arsenal, appears to have lost his hold over his players, how has Ferguson avoided the same fate? He too is dealing with ego-driven young millionaires, yet after 25 years, he seems more in control than ever.
Perhaps the key difference between Ferguson and Wenger is that Ferguson is not ideological. He is focused only on winning and he is not especially bothered about the manner of it. He claims in his autobiography that his cardinal value is loyalty, but he shows none towards players whose standards have slipped, even if, like Nani and Berbatov, they have recently been in good form. He waxes lyrical about United’s tradition of attacking play while plotting a route to the Champions League final built on cut-throat defence. He maintains that youth development is the life-blood of United, yet he will not think twice about stifling a gifted young player if he believes an expensive signing will do a better job. Ferguson is not arrogant enough to think he can impose some kind of philosophical consistency on the fog of war. He doesn’t agonise over the means, he is only interested in the ends.
Wenger has allowed himself to become so obsessed with style that he has forgotten the ultimate purpose of his work is simply to win. He has overcomplicated the issue with a series of self-imposed “philosophical” — read ideological — principles. Ferguson wants his team to win. Wenger wants his team to play a certain type of football, with a certain type of player, of a certain age and temperament. In the end, they’ve both got what they were aiming for.
