Every Single One Of Us .....

This is a tribute to Sir Alex Ferguson, taken

from another site, I thought it was absolutely

brilliant and have reproduced it here.

It was written by Morris Sheftel:

Football's inexorable treadmill leaves little

time for respite or reflection. During a summer

dominated by Euro2008, the shameless duplic-

ities of Calderon, Blatter and Platini, and the

greed of perfidious Ronaldo - to say nothing of

the onrush of the Olympics and the start of yet

another football season - there has been little

enough in celebration of Manchester United's

outstanding double of League and European

Cup championships last May, nor of the place

in football history that must surely be accorded the club's manager, Sir Alex Ferguson.

In statistical terms, Ferguson's career is, quite simply, incredible and would

be so even if it were fiction. The end of last season brought him a tenth English

league championship in 21 seasons as United's manager. No other manager in

English history even comes close: Bob Paisley won six with Liverpool, Matt

Busby five with United and Herbert Chapman four with Arsenal and Hudd-

ersfield in the 1930s. If we look outside England, Rinus Michels won five

league championships (4 with Ajax and one with Barcelona) whilst Fabio Capello

won seven (4 at AC Milan, 2 at Real Madrid and another at Roma; another two

at Juventus were subsequently set aside because of match-fixing). Only in

Scotland is Ferguson's achievement matched: Jock Stein, his friend and mentor,

led Celtic to 11 Scottish titles.

In all, United won 702 (58%) of the 1210 league games played under Ferguson

to the end of May. That surpasses even the record of Matt Busby: 576 (50%)

wins out of 1141 games. And Ferguson's teams lost only 18% of their competitive

games, compared with 26% under Busby. Since the inception of the Premier

League, Ferguson's record has been even more remarkable.

In the 16 years of the Premiership, United have totalled 155 more league points

than Arsenal, their nearest chall-engers, 221 more than Chelsea and 244 more

than Liverpool. That's nearly 10 points a season better than Arsenal on average,

nearly 14 points better than Chelsea and more than 16 points better than Liver-

pool - astonishing margins. In the process, United also played the more attractive

football consistently, averaging 1.97 goals per game (compared with 1.69 for

Arsenal, 1.58 for Chelsea, and 1.6 for Liverpool) and defended better (conceding

0.87 goals per game compared with 0.88, 0.98 and 0.98 respectively for their

main rivals).

If all that were not enough, Ferguson has also brought United two European

Cups, a European Cup-Winners Cup, five FA Cups (a record for a manager) and

two League Cups, 20 major trophies in all. Against that, Michels won a total of 14,

Paisley 13, Capello 9, Busby 7 and Chapman 6. But there's more. Before joining

United in 1986, Ferguson led Aberdeen to 3 league championships, 4 FA Cups,

one League Cup and a European Cup-Winners Cup in Scotland.

There's also the matter of two European Super Cups (one with each club) and

an Intercontinental Cup (United beating Scolari's Palmeiras in 1999 to become,

so far, the only English winners of that trophy). That's 32 overall, ahead even

of Stein's 29 in Scotland (and achieved in a much tougher competitive environ-

ment). Along the way, there have been three English League and FA Cup

doubles (the first to do it twice and then three times), and one League and

European Cup double. Above all, in 1999 Ferguson led United to the treble of

League championship, FA Cup and European Cup, the single greatest achieve-

ment by any club in English football history and something unmatched in Europe's

main leagues (England, Italy, Spain, Germany and France).

You could not make it up. However much partisanship might colour our percep-

tions of the relative merits of the great managers, indisputably Ferguson stands

pre-eminent in the history of English and European football.

Yet statistics do not give us the full substance of the man. It is all too easy to forget,

given the global monster that United now is, that Ferguson took over something

of an empty shell in 1986, a club living on (fading) memories of the Busby era, as

much about tabloid notoriety as football achievement. With a ferocity that many

found difficult to live with, he removed the drinking culture that he found, got rid

of some outstanding players who had lost their way, confined the media to the

fringes of the club's business, resurrected the club's youth development system,

built a professional training and coaching system still unsurpassed in England,

and demanded and got (as the price of being at the club) a unity of purpose and

clarity of focus that turned talented players into winners. (What might a team

including Robson, Muhren, Strachan, Whiteside, Stapleton and McGrath have

won with Ferguson driving it, instead of the nothing that it did in fact win?)

Perhaps his greatest achievement has been that he has managed to blend the

demands of a more tactical and defensive modern game with the attacking verve

and individual swagger established by Busby as the United way of playing, a way

that made a provincial club the best supported team in the world. It was a chall-

enge that defeated previous United managers (including even Busby in his late

years) but Ferguson's teams have managed to provide plenty of scope for indiv-

idual expression within the framework of team organization. Thus, players like

Cantona, Giggs, Rooney, Ronaldo, Scholes, Sharpe, Yorke, Cole, Beckham, And-

erson and others have developed into artists who could stretch the imagination

of those lucky enough to watch them while they still played winning football.

These skills have been paraded through four successful United teams built by

Ferguson. If the first (1990-2) was something of a transitional side, the other

three - 1993-4, 1999-2001 and 2006-8 - have all been great ones. The treble in

1999 must rank that side as the greatest of them, indeed as the greatest in English

club history, not only for the magnitude of the success but also for the flair and

style with which it was done. It exemplified what all Ferguson's teams are about -

skill and flair embedded in a high level of organization and a ferocious team spirit.

All this marks out Ferguson as something more than a successful coach and places

him in the ranks of those great managers who can 'build a club', as the saying goes,

men like Michels, Stein, Shankly, Clough, Nicholson, Wenger. In this company,

Busby stands supreme: we cannot begin to imagine what it took to turn a bankrupt,

provincial club without a stadium into one renowned throughout the world, to change

the ethos of football in favour of youth and flair, to drag English football into Europe,

to resurrect the club after the Munich air crash (by contrast, Torino have never

recovered fully after losing their great team in a 1949 air crash) and to win the

European Cup just a decade after Munich. Yet Ferguson, too, belongs here, adapting

the Busby legacy to new realities and taking the club to new heights.

It is only in his relations with the media that Ferguson can be considered less than

successful. If it is true he has had to deal with a more unscrupulous and contemptible

press than any that Busby, Shankly or Stein faced, it is also true that his constant

conflicts with them have done neither himself nor his club any favours. It has enc-

ouraged a sustained campaign against the club by the London media so that United's

enormous contribution to the community and to Unicef and other charities gets a

Chinese-government type media blackout. And it has led to a media caricature of

Ferguson with little basis in reality but with a life of its own. The ranting bully terror-

izing his players does not square with their fierce loyalty to him or with their unshake-

able will to win games from seemingly hopeless positions or with the flair and joy they

so often bring to their play. Nor does it square with the esteem in which he is held

throughout football, or with the appreciation by other managers of the support and

generosity he accords them or, for that matter, with the help and friendship he has

extended to individual journalists facing crises in their lives. The wealth and fame he

has achieved in football, and the political and business circles to which he has access

as a result, have not altered his friendships, most of which go back to his youth, or

his focus on family ties or his social values. Perhaps that is a truer reflection of the

nature of the beast than the media picture, and perhaps once he's retired and

no longer threatens them, they will finally give him his full due.