The Manchester United manager’s sympathy for his opposite number at Anfield does not extend to those in charge of BenÍtez’s clubJames Ducker in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
When Alex Ferguson took over at Old Trafford in November 1986, Liverpool were the class act on and off the pitch. The best-run club playing the best brand of football. They were something to aspire to
Even with the advent of the 1990s, when the success for Liverpool dried up, precipitating a period of sustained United dominance, the Merseyside club retained a way of doing things that singled them out as special. Professional, dignified and modest to the last. Ferguson prefers to call it “classy”.
Fast-forward two decades and the picture is different. After 12 months of turmoil, Liverpool have become a byword for infighting, back-stabbing, financial miscalculation and failed promises, the principles on which the club were founded in danger of becoming relics from a bygone age.
Ferguson shakes his head. The Al Faisaliah Hotel in Saudi Arabia’s affluent capital of Riyadh, where his team have been enjoying a short winter break, may not seem the ideal place for the United manager to deliver a damning indictment of Liverpool’s American regime, but even from 3,000 miles away the chaos that has engulfed Anfield is all too apparent to him.
Those thinking that Ferguson is taking perverse delight out of the mess Liverpool are in would be wrong. He is unlikely to shed a tear for his sworn rivals, but as he talked at length yesterday about the treatment of Rafael Benítez at the hands of Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr, the Liverpool co-owners, and the catastrophic effect that he believes the Spaniard’s seemingly inevitable departure as manager would have on the Merseyside club, he almost appeared sickened by the events.
Perhaps the apparent incompetence of the American invasion at Anfield is too close to home for his own comfort. It was, after all, United who were widely expected to suffer at the hands of American ownership, not Liverpool.
The Glazer family’s takeover at Old Trafford in 2005 has not been without its share of controversy, but while Benítez has been continually undermined by his bosses — not least when Hicks admitted this month that Jürgen Klinsmann, the former Germany coach, had been offered the chance to succeed the Spaniard as manager before Klinsmann agreed to take charge at Bayern Munich — Ferguson has been left alone, free to do his job with the minimum of interference. It is the way it should be at all the leading clubs, he believes.
“At big clubs, it’s absolutely paramount that the board show their class,” Ferguson said. “Obviously results do matter — they matter to myself and Arsène Wenger at Arsenal just as they do everyone else — but Arsène has always had great support from David Dein [the former Arsenal vice-chairman]. That club was probably run by two people.
“I’ve had great support, too, ever since I came here. So there’s a certain type of unity there. What happened with him [Klinsmann] was a badpiece of business on Liverpool’s part, there’s no doubt about that. That sort of thing can be very upsetting for a manager.
“As a manager, there are quite a few moments in every week when you are very much on your own. People don’t want to knock on your door because they think you’re busy all the time, but you can be sitting there twiddling your thumbs.
“You can fill your time by phoning other managers and things, but there is a lot of time spent on your own and in moments like that, Rafa must feel very alone.
“How you react depends on what kind of person you are and Rafa seems quite a stubborn character who can put aside emotion, whereas Martin Jol, for example, seemed to be more affected by it when a similar thing happened to him at Tottenham.
“I’ve been very fortunate at United because I have had good directors, people like [Sir] Bobby Charlton and Martin Edwards, who always supported me very well. Without question I was allowed to get on with my job. In the main, when I have wanted a player I’ve really always got them. There has never been a time I have been refused money.
“There are obviously times down the years when you sat down and talked about your financial position, but I have always been able to find a way around that. You should allow a manager to get on with his job.”
Ferguson is intrigued to discover what will become of Liverpool. Even if Gillett and Hicks secure the £350 million refinancing package that would allow them to repay money borrowed for their takeover and commence work on a 70,000-capacity stadium in Stanley Park, adjacent to Anfield, their long-term relationship appears untenable after a series of rifts and with Dubai International Capital, the private-equity arm of the Arab state, waiting in the wings, uncertainty continues to surround Liverpool’s future.
Protests from supporters campaigning against Hicks and Gillett’s involvement have also done little to quell this image of Liverpool as a club in crisis and Ferguson believes that, as long as it remains that way, players may be unwilling to move to Anfield.
“Twenty years ago Liverpool were a closely knit and well-run club,” he said. “The important thing is that big clubs should be seen to be big clubs. Most players want to play for Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal or Liverpool, but when they see a club that they think is topsy-turvy, with a divide between the directors and the manager, then they might think twice \. When the choice comes, they want to join a stable club.”
If there was a hint of mischievousness about those comments, few Liverpool supporters would challenge his belief that their team, 14 points adrift of United and Arsenal and ten behind Chelsea in the Barclays Premier League, are out of the title race. Nor that there could be a mass exodus of players were Benítez to leave, as appears increasingly likely the longer Gillett and Hicks remain in charge.
With Liverpool’s academy packed full of young foreign players handpicked by Benítez and a first team brimming with world-class Spaniards such as Fernando Torres, Xabi Alonso and José Manuel Reina, none of whom could resist the lure of working under the former Valencia manager, are any of them likely to hang around in the event that Benítez goes? Ferguson doubts it.
“One thing for sure is that Rafa has brought in a lot of his players because of Spanish connections,” Ferguson said. “Now if an English manager was to come into Liverpool, that connection is gone. What happens then? That’s definitely an issue.”
And the title race? It barely seems worth mentioning, given the more pressing problems facing Liverpool, but Ferguson is predicting another year of frustration on that front.
“I think Liverpool will be concentrating on trying to win the European Cup rather than the league,” he said. “I say that because there are three clubs ahead of them, rather than just one. It’s a long way to Arsenal, Chelsea and ourselves.
“If it was just one, you still couldn’t write off Liverpool, but it is very difficult to think that three teams could ever drop that number of points and be caught...
a good read i thought, even whisky nose cant believe whats going on at liverpool...
if we lose rafa in the summer god help us, we will be in a right state...
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