LARRY RYAN: How Fergie’s communications war never stopped
Incredibly, there were nothing of the sort and it was just goodbye. Stock market rules, maybe.
It had been business as usual right until the end. Fergie slipping a message inside a rant and dispatching the media on an errand. Deliver or don’t come back.
The media usually delivered. To officials, administrators, rival managers, international managers with designs on his players, rival players, his own players.
Three days earlier, he had railed at David Luiz’s part in Rafael’s sending-off.
“You see that a lot with European, foreign players and South Americans.”
We mightn’t know the correct postal address of that one until he takes the Scotland job next year. Fergie often played the long game.
If anything, he upped his rant-rate in his final season — a little something from all his specialities.
At the Emirates recently, Phil Dowd copped familiar chastisement for officials who didn’t meet Fergie’s standards in games United failed to win — concerns about their fitness. “I think the referee just couldn’t keep up.”
Alan Wiley, among others, will sympathise. Wiley will also recall another well-thumbed Fergie favourite — the dossier of persecution. In 2003, he awarded Chelsea a penalty and prompted a swift withdrawal from the memory banks. “This is the same referee, remember, who refused us a certain penalty against Manchester City last season.”
This year, after the draw with Tottenham, it was assistant referee Simon Beck afforded his own chapter. “That linesman never gave us a thing all day. We remember him well from his time at the Chelsea game when Didier Drogba was three yards offside...”
After that match, Ferguson also slammed the “idiots” who had been critical of David de Gea, shades of the ‘He’s a fucking great player’ rebuke for Juan Veron’s doubters in 2002. Those deliveries went in-house.
Ifs refs are constantly reminded he keeps score, January also brought the annual warning to powers-that-be that he is across all disciplinary decisions too. “You know the FA. You never know. It is one of these things. We are high profile.”
Ashley Williams was this season’s recipient of faux outrage – for attempting to kill Robin van Persie with a football. At his best, Fergie would expertly combine horror and a plea for fairness in one package, such as when Thierry Henry confronted referee Graham Poll. “Had it been a Manchester United player who did what Henry did it would have been Sing Sing for him.”
Over the years, Ferguson invariably spoke fondly of sharing expensive bottles with the usual cadre of counterparts who turn up at Old Trafford expecting nothing and depart empty-handed. But back in December, there was sharp threat of excommunication for Alan Pardew when he spoke out of turn. “He forgets the help I gave him, by the way.”
Sadly, Manchester City’s no-show in this season’s title race denied us a last edition of the mind games so beloved of Fergie’s favourite delivery boys.
Highlights? The one they say broke Keegan, of course. “I can’t understand the Leeds players. They raised their game because they were playing Manchester United. It was pathetic.”
The most effective? The decommissioning of Rafa’s famous list of facts with scornful sympathy. “I think he was an angry man. He must have been disturbed for some reason.”
As if any sane man would compile a dossier of grievances.
But it was all for the cause. Gary Neville hasn’t got much wrong this season, but maybe he understated it slightly when he told us yesterday that Fergie “… had that thing that he stepped into battle whenever there was a match.”
Because the communications war certainly didn’t finish on matchday. It never stopped. It was second nature.
