Cashing in on United template

WHEN we are asked to sum up what Alex has achieved at United, the simplest method is to travel back those 25 years and do as every student: ‘compare and contrast’.

When Fergie arrived in 1986, he found a club whose youth and reserve teams were in disarray, a scouting system suffering advanced dementia and an atmosphere soaked in alcohol fumes and ill-feeling.

We imagined Fergie sneaking round OT armed with a breathalyser and sharpened cups ‘n’ saucers to hurl at recidivist players — for the 1986 Fergie was one of that dreaded breed, Blazer Man; smart haircuts, proper attire and sober habits were now the order of the day. The Red Army was now being led by a puritanical Stalin, not a flamboyant Trotsky.

Now look at us as we revel in the benefits of that hardline ideology: virtually every aspect of the core Football Club is a model for the whole world.

Clubbing to death the 1988 runners-up side whilst sitting in football’s hottest seat took some balls: this was Joe Pesci in tartan.

Every seven years or so since, he has got the bat out again: blood, and finally silverware, inevitably follow.

Fittingly, then, there’s never been room in his public demeanour for objectivity, for mature consideration or for being a good loser — Don Fergie shoots from the hip, defends the indefensible and takes defeat as badly as McEnroe. ‘Vendetta’ could be his middle name. Is this what we want from a United manager? We expect the impossible from our leader, in many ways. We want a Busbyesque father-figure to respect, a street-fighting hardcase to empathise with and a football-loving connoisseur to tantalise all our senses.

Ferguson can play all these notes, if not necessarily in the right order. And he has therefore sometimes ended up looking like a bully, a coward, or a liar. But as we would always conclude; “he may be a bar steward — but he’s ‘our’ bar steward.”

So the padrone’s warriored his way to two Champions League titles, won the blessed Nineteen, and given my generation a lifetime’s worth of ecstatic climaxes: but he’s not unimpeachable.

We also recall the yellowish fence-sitting when Murdoch came prowling; the fishwife squabbling over horse-sperm; the dodgy son and the dodgier agents; the “marvellous Glazers”; and the “go watch Chelsea” — which some took to heart, except that they went to Gigg Lane instead.

So I can’t conclude any better than I did for his 65th birthday tribute: “So many wonderful games and triumphs yet, strangely, so little impact on the soul of the club. That may sound ludicrously, even scandalously, churlish. But think about it: most of us still believe what we did before Alex, and will continue to do so after him — namely that the United Religion is about what Matt Busby and his teams established as templates for playing and living. When Alex’s United emulated those ideals, we approved: when they didn’t, we censured. And long may it thus continue.”