Full article from 2008
To those who witnessed it, it must have looked more like an audience than a meeting of managerial minds. Many years later, Sir Alex Ferguson recalled behaving like a groupie on the evening that he was welcomed to Anfield by Bill Shankly. The great man shook Ferguson by the hand and showered him with compliments before warning him that his Aberdeen side had no chance against “our great team” in their forthcoming European Cup tie.
It was October 1980. Shankly still stalked the corridors of Anfield like a friendly ghost, six years into his retirement but less than 12 months away from the heart attack that would kill him.
Ferguson regarded the former Liverpool manager, along with Jock Stein and Matt Busby, as a deity, which made his anguish all the greater when, over the weeks that followed, Shankly’s prediction was proved right, with Aberdeen beaten 1-0 at Pittodrie before being taught a few embarrassing lessons back on Merseyside, losing 4-0 to a team who, under Bob Paisley, were on course for a third European Cup in five seasons.
For Ferguson, it was the start of an intriguing relationship with a club that he has, over the best part of three decades, regarded variously with degrees of profound respect, bitter envy, sneering disdain and, only occasionally, outright hostility
It is a relationship that changed as the balance of power switched from Anfield to Old Trafford in the early 1990s and has been tested at regular intervals ever since. But, as Manchester United look to close in on the Merseyside club’s proud record of 18 league titles by beating Rafael Benítez’s team at lunchtime, Ferguson’s famous line about “knocking Liverpool off their f***ing perch” has never seemed so apposite.
First things first, at risk of debunking a myth or two, the “perch” quote did not appear for the first time until a newspaper interview Ferguson gave in 2002. His most famous soundbite about Liverpool in his early years at United came on Easter Monday in 1988 when, after a pulsating 3-3 draw at Anfield in which Colin Gibson, the United full back, was sent off, he complained about opposing managers who “have to leave here choking on their own vomit — biting on their tongue, afraid to tell the truth”.
The truth, he claimed, was that referees were provoked and intimidated at Anfield — a rant not unlike that for which Benítez, talking about United 21 years later, has been widely lampooned. Kenny Dalglish, then the Liverpool manager, was not impressed, telling the press that they would get more sense out of his six-week-old daughter, Lauren.
Ferguson, in truth, had more pressing concerns back then, but a look through the archives this week revealed this gem from August 1988 as he tried to quell the first murmurs of discontent on the Old Trafford terraces. “This isn’t just a job to me,” he said. “It’s a mission. I am deadly serious about it. Some people would reckon too serious. We will get there, believe me. And when it happens, life will change for Liverpool and everyone else — dramatically.”
Life changed all right, even if it took another five seasons — including the misery of 1992, when a painful defeat at a gloating Anfield ensured that the title would go to Leeds United — before Ferguson brought the title back to Old Trafford in 1993, at the end of the inaugural season of the Premier League era.
It was the first time in 26 years that United had been crowned champions of England. Liverpool were off their perch, although, as Ferguson appeared to acknowledge for once yesterday, the Merseyside club’s decline began a couple of years earlier, hastened by Dalglish’s departure in 1991 and the turbulent reign of Graeme Souness. United effectively stepped into a vacuum, after title wins by Arsenal and Leeds, but, champions again in 1994, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000 and 2001, they quickly went about establishing their own golden era.
It seems incredible that, over the course of the Premier League era, or indeed the football lifetime of Ryan Giggs, United have gone from seven league titles to, seemingly, the threshold of their eighteenth, a magical number that would bring them level with Liverpool, who have not won it since 1990. Ferguson, having once said that he would “love to get to that position before I leave”, has suddenly stopped talking about the significance of No 18, partly out of caution, but above all out of confidence that it is only a matter of time before the record is broken.
Not so the United supporters, who are desperate to see their rivals overhauled by the end of next season, or indeed Liverpool’s, for whom the record, along with that of five European Cups (to United’s three), has been a constant source of pride throughout the Ferguson years.
The Scot said yesterday that he could understand why Wayne Rooney used the word “hate” in connection with Liverpool this week, even if the manager would have preferred his former Everton forward to use the word “dislike”. Gary Neville wrote in a column in The Times ten years ago that he “grew up hating them — I just don’t like the club, never have and never will”.
But such hatred for Liverpool has never been evident in Ferguson; for everything he has disliked about them over the years (interfering owners, the vainglorious “Spice Boy” era, the post-United Paul Ince, attritional football at times under Benítez and Gérard Houllier), there has been much he has admired (Steven Gerrard, the Anfield atmosphere on European nights, success in Europe under Houllier and Benítez and the continuity that was the cornerstone of the club until they were bought by Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jr a couple of years ago).
Benítez? Ferguson can live with him. Wildly different characters, they have never been close and, after their very public spat a couple of months ago, compounded by the United manager’s Freudian slip yesterday, they never will be.
But Ferguson took the unusual step of writing to the Liverpool manager to congratulate him on winning the Champions League in 2005, praising his tactics, and also spoke up on the Spaniard’s behalf when political turmoil at Anfield threatened to cut short his tenure last season. Look deep enough and you will find some respect there, even if more recently their relationship has assumed an adversarial nature, with barbs flying back and forth.
Another little-known fact is that, a decade ago, while on a sabbatical after a spell in charge of Extremadura, Benítez spent a week in Manchester as a guest of Steve McClaren, Ferguson’s assistant at the time, studying United’s coaching set-up at close quarters.
Ferguson is like that. He always has time for a young manager, just as Shankly, Stein and, later at Old Trafford, Busby had time for him. He is the same age now as Shankly was when they met in 1980. Had Shankly had any inkling of the misery that Ferguson would go on to inflict on his beloved Liverpool, he might have regarded the young Glaswegian with outright suspicion, perhaps even telling him that management was not for him and that maybe he should consider the priesthood.
On reflection, though, Shankly would probably have looked at him as one of his own, a builder of a football dynasty that seems destined to thrive long after Ferguson has gone.
