Everything Sir Alex Ferguson says and does is for a reason.
To suggest otherwise is not to know the great man at all. The legendary Scot is conniving, disingenuous, manipulative, and quite often shameless. Now, as in his glory days as the greatest manager of them all, Fergie uses words with the clinical accuracy of a professional sniper. He is never merely making conversation and certainly not inclined to be off-hand.
Each book he has scribed has rewritten history to suit his agenda at that particular time; every grudge and falling out has manifested itself in expert digs and ridiculous statements that are afforded extra weight purely because they come from the Grand of Old Knight of Govan. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he’d grown old and magnanimous.
Manchester United is of course Ferguson’s specialist subject. He certainly won’t be enjoying the sorry legacy that remains in his wake. Having witnessed (and taken full advantage of) Liverpool’s dramatic fall from grace in the early nineties, he wouldn’t have wanted a legacy of similarly jarring shiteness to befall the club he moulded into his own ruthless image.
In recent weeks, Sir Alex has had an awful lot to say about United and various noted individuals mooted as potential future managers of the club. He has broken his relative silence by waxing lyrical about Ryan Giggs’ sparkling coaching prospects, Mauricio Pochettino as “best manager in the Premier League”, and even suggested Louis van Gaal needs more time – with a straight face too.
Yet this scattergun kindness is as telling for whom he leaves out as much as those he so generously praises. The Old Trafford faithful and United press gang can’t stop chattering about the unemployed Jose Mourinho, and yet he isn’t afforded a mention by Fergie. It’s almost as if the wily old fox is desperately talking up every possible option apart from the Portuguese.
Ferguson has of course praised Mourinho in the past when they were well-matched peers, and there were even rumours that Fergie spoke to Jose about replacing him in 2013. Indeed many United fans bicker with Chelsea counterparts about how the Iberian was desperate to join United at the time, until David Moyes was ordained by kingmaker Fergie as his eventual replacement.
But that’s the thing – Ferguson didn’t go for the obvious candidate in Mourinho. Instead he preferred Fergie-Lite, in some ill-conceived romantic notion that another craggy-faced Glaswegian could succeed in a job that he clearly wasn’t qualified for. Any meeting with Mourinho can be seen in retrospect as merely a dickteasing exercise to string him along.
Every murmur and inside report from Old Trafford points to the potential appointment of Mourinho as Van Gaal’s replacement having two key opponents – Sir Bobby Charlton and Fergie. If anything, the latter’s public praise of Giggs, Pochettino, Van Gaal and even Gary Neville back up these rumours. His comparative radio silence on Mourinho is deafening.
But perhaps we should expect that to change in the next week or so. Fergie is many things but he’s not stupid. If, as rumoured, United are merely waiting for the FA Cup final to come and go before finally ditching Van Gaal, there is only one remaining candidate. It may not be the one that Ferguson wants, but he’ll make sure you think it is. We await the white puff of smoke that is Fergie being nice about Jose.
