Sir Alex Ferguson Tribute Thread

[#07]

It is impossible to identify what made Fergie such a gigantic force, but my memories of him provide a few clues by Gary Neville

 

[fishfingers15]

Gary Neville is so eloquent, and he always manages to bring something more valuable to the table than the often peddled stories.

 

[VP]

I think I might be speaking for many OOTers here, but the main reason, as much as I hate to admit it, I started supporting United was the success. We like to dress it up as liking the players or style of football but ultimately the reason most people, outside of Manchester, support United is the success. And without Sir Alex, there'd have been no success, no planning your weekend around the game, no waking up at 245AM catch a CL dead rubber , no 10k posts on an internet forum. There'd have been no United. The thought is genuinely frightening and Thank You doesn't even begin to cover it.

 

[fishfingers15]

I think the amount of coverage also plays a part. If I had coverage of all the teams equally, i may have well picked up some other team though. Success does play a huge part, mind you.

 

[duffer]

I think I might be speaking for many OOTers here, but the main reason, as much as I hate to admit it, I started supporting United was the success. We like to dress it up as liking the players or style of football but ultimately the reason most people, outside of Manchester, support United is the success. And without Sir Alex, there'd have been no success, no planning your weekend around the game, no waking up at 245AM catch a CL dead rubber , no 10k posts on an internet forum. There'd have been no United. The thought is genuinely frightening and Thank You doesn't even begin to cover it.

If there was no Fergie at United an awful lot of the fans you describe you be Liverpool supporters. Trophies be damned, the "OOT" fans should club together and build statues of the man in every town and city across the world for that alone!

 

[ArmchairCritic]

There’s an element of madness in him. Madness and cruelty, control freakery and rule by fear. Mark McGhee tells a story about the aftermath of an Aberdeen game with Forfar. Aberdeen reserves, that is. “In his (Ferguson’s) anger he kicked the laundry basket and these pants flew through the air and landed on another guy’s head like a hat. He didn’t move. Just sat there rigid. Fergie didn’t even notice until he had finished raging. Then he looked up at the boy and said, ‘And you can take those f*****g pants off your head. What the hell do you think you’re playing?’”

http://m.scotsman.com/sport/football/english/tom-english-sir-alex-ferguson-ruthless-genius-1-2924247

 

[LR7]

Article in the Guardian by David James. Great insight into United from the view of the opposition

Spoiler

Silence speaks volumes on how Sir Alex Ferguson ran Manchester United

Sir Alex Ferguson created a unique atmosphere during his time as manager of Manchester United. Photograph: Matthew Peters/Man Utd via Getty Images
Who is Sir Alex Ferguson? Despite the reams of newsprint and hours of TV and radio broadcasts dedicated to the Manchester United manager's retirement, none of it has given me any deeper insight into the personality of the man. We hear over and again the jaw-dropping statistics about the trophies won, and the cliches – the hairdryer, the horses, one of the greatest managers of all time – but who can tell us anything really personal about Ferguson? If there is anyone out there, they are keeping quiet.

I call it the Manchester United mafia, led by Sir Alex Fergu-don. In 25 years of professional football, a period in which I have played Ferguson's teams on many occasions, I have never exchanged more than a hello and a nod with the man. Whereas a manager like José Mourinho will give you the time of day, Ferguson is unapproachable.

If there is a code of silence, Ferguson's players are bound to it. Despite being friends with Rio Ferdinand and Wayne Rooney, among others, I have never – ever – heard them say anything about Ferguson. All those hours of sitting around at England camps or on bus rides, and not once did any United players ever reveal anything to me about their team-mates, their dressing room or their manager. In an industry renowned for its gossip I find that extraordinary.

On one occasion I remember sitting with Phil Neville for a chinwag and, like a typical footballer, ranting about a team-mate of mine who I found annoying at the time. When I'd finished I expected Phil to reciprocate. But there was not a word. "What an absolute prick!" I thought, red-faced after pouring my heart out only for him to remain tight-lipped. But later I concluded that his approach was an exemplary – and clever – way to carry yourself through a career in football.

All the United players were the same, no one would ever say a bad thing about their team-mates. Even when the media reported chaos in the United dressing room – from the infamous pizza throwing to Becks' cut above the eye after Ferguson kicked a boot at him – there were no comments from the United boys. There were plenty of questions, of course. But their answers were only ever vague, or meaningless.

It all contributed to that sense of separation: there were United players, and then there was the rest of us. And I have little doubt that it was Ferguson himself who encouraged that segregation. For it was Ferguson who was the first manager to ban opposition players from entering the home players' lounge for a drink after a game. Until then post-match mingling had been a tradition. But while Ferguson famously enjoys a glass of red with rival managers at Old Trafford, he was quick to ensure there was no such socialising among his players. At the time the football fraternity was horrified. There was this feeling of "Just who do you think you are?" Little did we know.

At England camps United players kept themselves apart. They had a competitive ethos so extreme it was unlike anything we had ever come across. While a simple training drill of piggy-in-the-middle was usually understood as an exercise in which you worked together against the man in the middle, for United players it was an opportunity to catch each other out. I had never seen it played that way before. To talk about one individual player being competitive is unremarkable, but to apply the same label to generation after generation of players from one specific club is unheard of.

Everyone keeps asking whether David Moyes can control the United dressing room, but United players police themselves. Ferguson created an environment in which players would control each other, so that he didn't have to. The presence of Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes was significant. Two players who had won more trophies than anyone else meant that there were authority figures in the team, whom younger players dared not question.

And wow, were they professional. While the likes of Rio and Wazza are very funny, very loud characters, they are very serious about what they do. I should know, I've been on the receiving end of one of Rio's tirades for some minuscule incident on the pitch. That's the norm at United, where anyone who steps out of line or makes an error can expect a verbal battering from their team-mates. United players just have that intensity about them. Sure, we are all professionals, but I have not heard other players sit at the back of the bus after a game and analyse the match in the way that Rio or Rooney do.

There is no doubt: Ferguson is revered as the supreme leader. A man whom the other football managers appear to be in awe of as they phone him up for advice, confiding in him their insecurities. Anyone who has tried to take him on in football has been crushed – from players who got too big for their boots only to be shipped out in the next transfer window, to managers who attempted to beat him at his specialist subject: mind games. As Kevin Keegan once found out to his cost, it took a brave man to think he could outfox Sir Alex.

No wonder then that even here in Iceland Ferguson is the talk of the town. Sitting with Hermann Hreidarsson and a group of fishermen before training on Friday morning, drinking coffee out of broken cups in their boat yard (you see how bizarre it is here), the conversation – in Icelandic – was peppered with references to United, Ferguson and Moyes. Just as I was giving up on trying to understand what was being said, Hermann turned to me, nodded and explained: "Moyes was here in Iceland for half a season, they say." Apparently he played for IBV for half a season when he was a youth player. I'll take that as a good omen. If I can emulate anything close to what Moyes has achieved, a manager deemed great enough to fill Ferguson's boots, I'll be a happy man.

Bolded parts in particular reverberated with me. Shows the depth of what Sir Alex has created here. It's unparalleled really and what sets us apart.

 

[LR7]

From newbie moneymay

 

[Nighteyes]

Will miss him, what a legend.

The silly part of me was hoping he'd come out and say bazinga!

 

[Ole's_toe_poke]

What a great interview with Shreeves.

 

[Suedesi]

What a great interview with Shreeves.

Link?

 

[Bread]

Anyone got a link to the sky sports closing montage yesterday?

 

[KingCantona87]

Possibly the best montage I've ever seen and boy I have seen quite a few. Such a beautiful tribute.

 

[Eyepopper]

It'd be twice as good if Connery could stop whistling.

 

[reelworld]

Link?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=wcXeT1pbjKY&feature=endscreen

 

[Plechazunga]

It is impossible to identify what made Fergie such a gigantic force, but my memories of him provide a few clues by Gary Neville

That is class from Sir Garfield

 

[Waltraute]

That is class from Sir Garfield

I know Gary Neville was quite a decent cricketer back in the day, but I still don't get the connection to Sir Garfield Sobers. Care to enlighten me?

Anyway, loving this thread and all the tributes & montages. The one man alive to actually live up to My Way and The Impossible Dream.

 

[#07]

I hope the mods will ignore me bumping a very old thread, but I'm a bit sick of the snide comments about Fergie and so I wanted the tribute thread to be high up the pages so people could remember who built our success over the past three decades.

Nowadays you'll read all sorts of garbage about Fergie. People claiming he got out cos he knew the game was up, people claiming he passed a poison chalice onto his successor, people claiming he didn't want Mourinho to succeed him because he didn't want to be outshone by his successor. It's all garbage. There's more sense in a pile of trash than in the people, even on these boards, taking these cheap shots at Fergie.

When Fergie goes to our matches and looks on in despair do people think he's faking the emotion? That he's expecting us to lose and is secretly happy that we're losing cos it makes him look an even better man manager? Do people really think Fergie wasn't thinking about the future when he bought Van Persie and that the Cantona-like effect he hoped it would have on the younger players was all a lie to cover up some short-term opportunism?

Sir Alex Ferguson is the greatest football manager of all time. He found a drinking club and restored it to being a football club. He nurtured some of, if not the greatest players, in the history of the English game. He rebuilt teams time and time again and kept the wheels from falling off when we could have easily fallen away. He opened up European Cup football to English clubs after the 5 year suspension left us light years behind the continent in terms of teams, talent and tactics. Sir Alex Ferguson got good players to feel, believe and play like great players.

Sir Alex Ferguson made Man Utd into a title winning machine and he loves this club. He left everything ready for the man who followed him to carry on his legacy. Its a joke to say otherwise!

 

[Arruda]

Do people question his love or best intentions though? I think it's other things being questioned, namely his clairvoyance in his later years at the helm.

 

[Siorac]

Do people question his love or best intentions though? I think it's other things being questioned, namely his clairvoyance in his later years at the helm.

There were posts saying that he quit because he saw the decline coming and that he didn't want Mourinho to eclipse him so he chose Moyes.

And I mean genuine, serious posts. I can see why people - those not supporting United - might not like Fergie but I'd never have thought that even the most deluded Liverpool fan would seriously believe he's cynical enough to use the death of his wife's sister as an excuse to get away from Manchester United...

 

[Arruda]

There were posts saying that he quit because he saw the decline coming and that he didn't want Mourinho to eclipse him so he chose Moyes.

And I mean genuine, serious posts. I can see why people - those not supporting United - might not like Fergie but I'd never have thought that even the most deluded Liverpool fan would seriously believe he's cynical enough to use the death of his wife's sister as an excuse to get away from Manchester United...

Spastic posts appear in any thread in any subject. It should come as no surprise, even more so if they come from opposition fans, as these will be biased by their understandable dislike of SAF.

I just think that the majority of posts criticizing Ferguson aren't doubting his love and best intentions, which seems to be the suggestion of the bumping post. Most of these posts aren't that much different than what has been seen over and over in the matchday and midfield threads through the past 3 seasons or so.

 

[Moriarty]

Nowadays you'll read all sorts of garbage about Fergie. People claiming he got out cos he knew the game was up, people claiming he passed a poison chalice onto his successor, people claiming he didn't want Mourinho to succeed him because he didn't want to be outshone by his successor. It's all garbage. There's more sense in a pile of trash than in the people, even on these boards, taking these cheap shots at Fergie.

Not just on forums. All kinds of people are coming out of the woodwork to take a jab at Fergie. They'd never have done it when he was in charge but since he's retired, all manner of "experts" are having a go. If anyone was acutely aware of the shambles that followed Busby's retirement, it was Fergie. He's a clever student of history and he made sure, when he left, that the man coming in had the best possible tools to do the job. The United job circa 1972 was a poisoned chalice, but not today. Fergie did not rebuild United in order for it to fail the moment he left the manager's chair. He had his faults like anyone else, but selling his successor down the river isn't one of them.

 

[Siorac]

Spastic posts should come as no surprise, they appear in any thread in any subject. It should come as no surprise, even more so if they come from opposition fans, as these will be biased by their understandable dislike of SAF.

I just think that the majority of posts criticizing Ferguson aren't doubting his love and best intentions, which seems to be the suggestion of the bumping post. Most of these posts aren't that much different than what has been seen over and over in the matchday and midfield threads through the past 3 seasons or so.

Yes, I don't really give a damn about what rival fans say about Fergie's motivations and such. When it comes to United fans, however, they should accept the reason he gave for his retirement as it's not something that he would lie about.

And there are quite a few posters who suggested that Fergie knew he was leaving a big mess for Moyes. I have no problem with those who say that Fergie overrated this squad, considered it better than it actually was. Criticising him for ignoring the midfield for years is also entirely valid and justified in my opinion. But those who say that he KNEW he was leaving a "poisoned chalice" do doubt his good intentions, they don't simply say that he made mistakes. To me, that's a significant difference.

 

[Amir]

Yes, I don't really give a damn about what rival fans say about Fergie's motivations and such. When it comes to United fans, however, they should accept the reason he gave for his retirement as it's not something that he would lie about.

I find it disgusting that people think a family man like Fergie would use the death of his sister in law like that.

 

[Adebesi]

Clearly SAF wanted Moyes to succeed and did everything he could to ensure a smooth transition. And clearly the club owes him a very great debt for all the success we enjoyed during his tenure and nothing that happens now will change that.

But SAF has to take some responsibility for this whatever way you look at it, really. If you believe the squad is good enough (I think it is, to be in the leading pack, that is, not necessarily to be leading) and Moyes is struggling to get the most out of them because he is out of his depth, then SAF has to take some responsibility given he hand-picked his successor. If you think Moyes inherited a shit squad then obviously SAF is culpable there.

I actually think the truth is neither of these, it is that we are witnessing, in effect, a hangover from the 27 years of stability he gave us. SAF was so ingrained in the fabric of the club it was impossible to remove him from the equation without a horribly rocky transition. In this scenario you cant really blame SAF any more than you can blame beer when you have a hangover, you just have to accept that there is always a price.

For me the most tangible tribute I can pay to SAF is to continue to support his chosen successor, just as he called on fans to do. Even though deep in my heart I have grave reservations. We just have to trust that SAF knew what he was doing, that he knew this was one of the biggest decisions he will have made in all his time as manager of Manchester United and therefore he will have given it all due consideration.

 

[#07]

Just seen the old man on Sky Sports News saying United always come good in the second half of the season and we can do anything. Hearing it, even I believe now. His powers of inspiration are hypnotic I swear. You only have to hear Sir Alex say something with determination and confidence to trust it will happen.

 

[DevilRed]

Just seen the old man on Sky Sports News saying United always come good in the second half of the season and we can do anything. Hearing it, even I believe now. His powers of inspiration are hypnotic I swear. You only have to hear Sir Alex say something with determination and confidence to trust it will happen.

Couldn't agree more. I think Moyes needs to stop with his pessimistic doomsday press conferences and at least try to exude the same type of confidence and assurance.

 

[amolbhatia50k]

Couldn't agree more. I think Moyes needs to stop with his pessimistic doomsday press conferences and at least try to exude the same type of confidence and assurance.

He'll exude confidence and assurance once he is able to give the same to his players to play quality football and win games. (Which I'm not sure he actually will)

He isn't exactly going to give commanding press conferences and interviews when we keep losing on a weekly basis.

 

[DevilRed]

He'll exude confidence and assurance once he is able to give the same to his players to play quality football and win games. (Which I'm not sure he actually will)

He isn't exactly going to give commanding press conferences and interviews when we keep losing on a weekly basis.

I just wish he'd stop with the "we're going to get punched in the nose/mouth a few more times" press conferences. Its so defeatist.

 

[SATA]

And the funny thing was when he was asked about who will make the top 4, he included Everton, Spurs and of course United but not a single mention at all of the scouse

 

[amolbhatia50k]

I just wish he'd stop with the "we're going to get punched in the nose/mouth a few more times" press conferences. Its so defeatist.

Oh yeah I agree with that. He has come out with some absolutely daft statements like that one which are completely unnecessary. I just mean that his general demeanour isn't going to be commanding until he sorts our football out.

 

[Ole's_toe_poke]

And the funny thing was when he was asked about who will make the top 4, he included Everton, Spurs and of course United but not a single mention at all of the scouse

He does know that top 4 means only 4 clubs make it right?

 

[SATA]

He does know that top 4 means only 4 clubs make it right?

Yeah obviously he meant one out of Everton, Spurs and United. The top 3 he thinks is settled as it is

 

[#07]

And the funny thing was when he was asked about who will make the top 4, he included Everton, Spurs and of course United but not a single mention at all of the scouse

I know. Loved that!

BBC Sport ~ Man Utd have chance of winning Premier League - Ferguson

 

[Anderson's Cat]

And the funny thing was when he was asked about who will make the top 4, he included Everton, Spurs and of course United but not a single mention at all of the scouse

Haha... even in retirement he's driving the scousers mad!! Getting under their skin is what he does best

 

[Giggsforever]

The six that can win is Spurs, Everton, United, Chelsea, Arsenal and us. One team is missing, well they will never win, but still Got to love the guy

 

[December_16]

The six that can win is Spurs, Everton, United, Chelsea, Arsenal and us. One team is missing, well they will never win, but still Got to love the guy

Are you a City fan ?

 

[Giggsforever]

Are you a City fan ?

Hehe, maybe I am deep inside, I'm so confused

*City

 

[SirFergie]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...erguson-against-Old-Trafford-appearances.html

Spouting again?

 

[Sky1981]

I find it sad that there are people who wants him exiled, blaming him for our shit squad, and even to the extent saying that he quit to jump from a sinking ship...

Ans this is to the man who has given 26 years of great service to us...

Football fans...