The big interview: Sir Alex Ferguson

The ghosts. Patrick Vieira running over the seventh green. Thierry Henry lurking among the trees that run along the right-hand side of the dog-leg ninth. Arsène Wenger smirking beside you on the tee at the 18th. Arsenal. This is May 4, 2003, the last day they will haunt Ferguson. “We won the Premier League three years in a row (from 1998-99 to 2000-01) and the last two of those weren’t that exciting. But last year? You can’t beat that,” the manager smiled. “Coming down to the second-last game of the season. I was out golfing and every shot you play you see a red and white jersey in front of you, know what I mean?” That afternoon Arsenal lost to Leeds and United won the championship. To paraphrase the song Ferguson’s players sang in celebration, he’s got his trophy back.

And now? “You’ve seen him,” said Peter Kenyon, the Old Trafford chief executive. “Alex is as good as he’s been in five years. The demeanour, the body language, the hunger, the commitment — it’s all there.”

Ferguson arrived upon an interesting word as he sought to explain the difference 12 months has made to him and his team: “We re-invented ourselves by winning the League. We got back to where we were.”

A SOFTLY-LIT hotel suite, the beginning of August. Ferguson is on duty. He is sitting at a polished oak desk in a private room at the Barclay Inter-Continental in New York. The Waldorf Astoria lies across East 48th Street; Grand Central Station, the Chrysler building and the shopping mecca of Fifth Avenue are nearby. This is Midtown, Manhattan, and Ferguson, with his febrile mind, is invigorated.

The Barclay is one of New York’s grand hotels, where self-assured nonchalance is the thing and you are considered loud if you raise an eyebrow, let alone your voice. Yet on Monday, when the United team arrived and walked through the plush, sleek lobby, the iciness was broken. Guests laid down their espressos and dry martinis to go and have their photograph taken with Ruud van Nistelrooy — even a group of players from the Italian side Roma.

Van Nistelrooy’s 80 goals in two seasons at Old Trafford have made him, in lieu of David Beckham, Manchester United’s new face. He has scored on this tour of the US — a swivel-volley against Juventus especially — goals that came straight from the gods. If only everything in life was as reliable as Van Nistelrooy.

“We don’t have another Ruud,” Ferguson said frankly, “and I haven’t been looking for one in the transfer market. I don’t know where you could get another one anyway. There’s nobody in the game who can play directly up as a striker, alone, and score a volume of goals like he does. Well, maybe Ronaldo. Ronaldo can do it if he wants.”

Ferguson is fitting in this interview between bits of work. He is insatiable, overseeing every last detail of what his players are up to with his usual forensic eye. Tomorrow the squad is going for dinner with their counterparts from Juventus at Le Cirque. “Do you want the lads to wear their club blazers?” asks Diana Law, United’s press officer. “Aye,” says Ferguson. “But find out what the Juventus boys are wearing first.”

The interview cannot begin until he snaps shut his mobile phone, on which he has been in earnest conversation. Transfer business? Probably. United are still looking to make two more big signings before the window closes on August 31, but their manager is giving little away. One, he concedes, will be a defender. The other, though he will not say as much, is likely to be a penetrative, attacking player.

Just as there is only one Van Nistelrooy, there is nobody like Ronaldinho, Ferguson believes. Though the manager feels he has done excellent business in securing Tim Howard, Eric Djemba-Djemba and Kleberson (though that transfer is not yet formalised), all young international players who will add depth and potential to his squad, he is conscious that Beckham has gone, Juan Veron could follow, and there has been no marquee signing.

“We want to win the Champions League again and that’s where Ronaldinho came into the equation. I felt if we’d got him we’d have had a big chance in Europe,” Ferguson said. “Without him we can’t really do anything different (in style of play) to be honest with you. I think he’ll be a great player.”

Until now, United have denied playing a good hand badly in the card game to win the Brazilian. But, reflecting, Ferguson was willing to admit a mistake.

Ronaldinho was so much “the one” in his mind that he was willing to keep the door open for him further on into the summer than may have been prudent; now, just four weeks from deadline day, United are playing transfer catch-up.

“In my experience it is the ones who have really wanted to come to Manchester United who have done well — look at Ruud. It’s when players start prevaricating that we walk away. We stretched it too far for Ronaldinho. We waited too long. The problem was the boy was in Brazil, you see, so we kept waiting for him to come back.

“The Confederations Cup didn’t help because he was playing until the end of June, then he went to Brazil. It went on and on. It was just too long, you know. We never even got the chance to sit down properly with the boy. You never got to know whether he wanted to come or not. We could never establish that.

“The frustration we had was with his brother (Roberto Assis, Ronaldinho’s agent). I did meet the player and he was fine, he was cheery enough, but he doesn’t speak English and most of the dialogue was through his brother and an interpreter. In the end we gave Paris St-Germain a deadline and then withdrew. So Ronaldinho was left with Barcelona. He rejected us only in the sense that he didn’t come out and say, ‘I want to join Man U’. ”

Experience is telling Ferguson that, for all he considered Ronaldinho a unique opportunity to enhance his team, there are others. Even if he does not land that big signing this summer, United can improve, and in the sphere of attacking: “Who’s to say what will happen now? Ryan Giggs is coming into his mature years; Paul Scholes’s form last season — 20 goals and I played him everywhere — was superb; Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s improvement and development as a footballer is exciting. Am I surprised Ronaldinho turned us down? No. Other players have done it. Alan Shearer did it twice. It’s interesting if you look down the years at what has transpired.

“We didn’t get Gazza. He chose to sign for Tottenham. But Paul Ince came and did a great job for us. We made an inquiry about Stan Collymore but got no farther so instead we bought Andy Cole. When we missed out on Shearer, we got Eric Cantona. And who’s to say what would have happened if Shearer had come instead of Eric? “In terms of bringing charisma to the club, Eric had an impact that Shearer could never have matched. Yet, in the long term, Shearer could have won us the European Cup. I think he was the missing ingredient for us in Europe, different to the players we had at the time. Shearer was a fantastic player. But Cantona was unbelievable for us.”

Ferguson also took a long sniff of the air when others were hunting Harry Kewell and Damien Duff. Missing out on those two, however, does not nag him in the same way as the what-might-have- beens regarding Ronaldinho. United never made formal offers for Kewell or Duff and there were different reasons in each case. With Kewell there was a sense they were dealing with a cold, even strange personality. With Duff there was an agent who made the wrong impression and, said Ferguson:

“I wasn’t interested at the price. Duff’s only 23 and he’s an excellent footballer. But £17m? A lot of money. A lot of money.”

So how about the players United have signed? Howard made a confident debut in New Jersey’s Giants Stadium against Juventus, demonstrating great alertness, strong hands and prodigious kicking ability as he went about his work.

“I’m confident about Howard. He’s quick. He’s courageous. He’s got good reflexes, good spring and agility. He’s an American athlete. I think all Americans are winners and he’s come out of a good club environment, where he had a terrific apprenticeship under Tony Meola.

“In the case of Djemba-Djemba, he’s a player who I think could do a particular type of job for us as a defensive midfielder. He’s very, very good at that and he might surprise people with how good he is at passing the ball forward from defensive positions. He can spring our attacks from there.

“Kleberson, I think will be a terrific player. He’s very versatile. He can play a number of positions, on the right or in the centre of midfield.”

Giving United more options has been the object of Ferguson’s summer. The great are never afraid to borrow from others, make competitors’ good ideas their own. For two seasons Ferguson has envied the depth of Arsenal’s squad and the number of multi-faceted players within it, which offers Wenger variations in his team’s play. Ferguson has been moving away from his old two wingers, two strikers formula towards something less predictable and more fluid, and this summer’s signings will allow him to take this process further.

Like last season, Van Nistelrooy will be a lone striker, supported by one of Giggs or Scholes, with the other taking up a position on the left. Scholes can also play one of the central midfield positions, although Roy Keane and Nicky Butt will start as first choices and Quinton Fortune, Phil Neville, Djemba-Djemba and Kleberson provide the back-up options.

“If you look throughout the squad the one area where we’re probably short is in the back four positions, because of Wes Brown’s injury,” said Ferguson. “I don’t really have a lot of alternatives there. I could put Keane in there. I could use Phil Neville. I could possibly put Kleberson back, and Djemba-Djemba played at right-back a couple of times for Nantes.

“But to start with, the back four will pick itself: Gary Neville, Rio Ferdinand, Mikael Silvestre and John O’Shea.

“We’re trying to give ourselves options and we’ve bought young players to shore us up in certain positions. Maybe in one sense, with bringing in Djemba-Djemba and Kleberson, I’ve overstaffed myself a bit in centre midfield.”

The latter will alter if Veron departs. “We had an offer from Chelsea and have put it to the lad because the feeling we got was they (Chelsea) had been talking to him. I put it to him to see if he wanted to go and he never gave me an answer.”

Aren’t we forgetting something? Or rather somebody? Look at many of the teamsheets Ferguson submitted in the Premiership last season and you will see in the starting XI a D Beckham. Yet, like another red leader used to do, Ferguson is applying the airbrush to history: “A couple of players have gone, Laurent Blanc, David May — and we’ve brought in three. We’ve really got the same squad that won the championship last season.”

BECKHAM left for Real Madrid on July 2. Four weeks gone, already forgotten. Ferguson may not reveal his side of the story regarding the sale of the England captain until he comes to update his autobiography. Is losing Beckham going to affect the set-up of his side? “No. The team picks itself. Solskjaer will play wide right, as he did in every big game last season.”

He lets that sentence, and what it says about how Beckham had slipped in his pecking order, hang. Solskjaer, the most diffident of footballers, who went with Keane to see Bob Dylan in concert when United had a night off in Los Angeles last week, could not be more different to the man he is replacing. He is a team man, always willing, if it will help the greater whole, to play a supporting role.

“Ole’s adapted to the right because he reads the game so well. I think he’s one of the most intelligent players in the game. He’s a student. He reads the game, sizes it up really well. Talks the game well. He’ll make a great coach if he wants to do that.

“And he’s at an age where he’s grown strong. Although he’s 30 years of age, funnily enough he’s probably just reached maturity now.”

A SMALL town in the American South, the middle of June. Van Nistelrooy is off duty. It is a Tuesday and he and Arnold Bruggink, his close friend and former PSV Eindhoven teammate, have just arrived in Asheville, North Carolina, having driven down from Charlesville on the famous Blue Ridge Parkway. They have been in the car for eight hours straight. “I needed to get out and do something,” Van Nistelrooy said. “We found this place where you could play indoor football, so we just started kicking a ball around and having some fun.”

The guy on the front desk at the venue, the SunCom centre, had looked curiously at the pair, nagged by a sense that the taller of his visitors was somebody he should recognise.

“Where are you from?” he asked Van Nistelrooy.

“The Netherlands.”

“Ah, okay, what’s your name?” “Do you need my name for me to play here? Do I have to show you ID?” “No, no, you can play.”

Some minutes later, the nickel dropped. Soon the front-desk guy, then the rest of the SunCom’s staff, had come into the hall to watch Van Nistelrooy play. Word spread, people came off the street, and in no time there were 200 people around the side of the pitch. An under-18 girls team, Asheville Splash, arrived and asked to play and soon Van Nistelrooy and Bruggink were in the thick of a seven-a-side game. The girls were good. Van Nistelrooy was on the losing side. “Play on,” he laughed when time was up. They did, until his team had won.

This was the third consecutive summer Van Nistelrooy had visited America. His past three visits have been “fantastic” — this tour, the trip in June, and a holiday the year before. But his first time in the country was traumatic. In summer 2000, after rupturing his knee in what should have been his final training session for PSV before moving to United, he travelled to Denver for surgery to try to save his career: “There was a time when I thought it was over, but even when I was in Denver, Alex Ferguson let me know he still wanted me, and that was my inspiration.”

At 61, Ferguson can still connect in the most powerful way with the young men he manages. “He looks nothing like a man who might be retiring, there’s no age issue with him,” said Kenyon, who signalled his hope that Ferguson might stay beyond the end of his current contract in 2005. “We’ve been doing things on the youth side and in terms of forging feeder alliances with other clubs that were in the pipeline but we had to put them on hold while it looked like Alex might retire. The energy he’s bringing to moving things forward in those areas is really exciting.”

In training, too, though he is currently working without an assistant, the manager has suffused his charges with pep and vim. “The players have done great in the work we’ve asked of them,” said Ferguson of United’s time in America.

“There’s been an effect carried over from winning the League. The experience underlined to them what winning means. Losing the League the year before was probably something waiting to happen because the manner in which they’d won the previous two titles was so easy. Now they understand the difference again between winning and losing.”

Even without Beckham and Ronaldinho, bookmakers have United as overwhelming favourites for the Premiership.

Ferguson still believes the main challenge will come from Highbury. Arsenal “have the experience”.

Newcastle are a danger but are probably still a young team for the future. Liverpool “could cast a net over all of us” because they do not have the added burden of playing in the Champions League. As for Chelsea, “you can buy the title if you’ve got good judgment, though the situation I see there is they’ve bought young players and maybe they need experience and time. I don’t think they’ll do it this year but the long term looks good.

“I always say to myself, ‘Why do they want to sell him?’ when clubs make players available. Geremi? You have to ask why Real Madrid were so keen to get rid of him. They sent him on loan for a year. They were negotiating a fee with Middlesbrough. They were trying to sell him and nobody else was coming in.

“In the cases of Glen Johnson and Duff it’s more straightforward — their clubs wanted the money. With Johnson, West Ham were skint and anybody who came in with that sort of money would have got any of their players, whether it was Jermain Defoe, Michael Carrick or Joe Cole — £6m was a lot for a 19-year-old boy (Johnson), but you can see a future for him. He’ll probably be in the England set-up soon.”

What about the challenge in Europe? Real Madrid, will they be better with Beckham? “Ahm no getting intae that.”

Okay, let’s try another route. Beckham has gone to the Bernabeu expecting to play in central midfield, so won’t this unbalance the team by leaving it with only one man (Claude Makelele) to protect the back four? “Not according to Carlos (Queiroz, the new Real manager).”

So what will be the difference with Real this season? “Carlos will have them fitter.”

It is eight in the evening. You would have to get Ferguson up at 3am to have any chance of catching him out.

But telling the story about seeing red and white jerseys on the golf course makes Ferguson laugh. The intensity of his mood is broken. For the first time in the conversation there is levity. Ferguson, in his sports jacket, flannels and crisp white shirt, has a dinner put on by United’s sponsors, Budweiser, to attend. Off he goes, down the stairs, across the plush, sleek lobby, and out into the New York night. The city that never sleeps. The man who will not rest.