Manchester United Blog

He swaggered into Old Trafford like someone who thought he had a God given right to be loved and hero worshipped, and he was right. He was an artist, a poet, an enigma, a philosopher, a genius. He could play football on the right, on the left, down the centre. Stick him in goal and he would probably save four penalties in a shoot out.

I used to watch him as a kid with my mouth wide open, I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing from this guy. Even now, twelve years after he retired, a clip will come on TV, an advertisement might appear with him in it or I see a clip from his movie “Looking For Eric” and I can still feel the excitement in my stomach, the butterflies that used to fill me with anticipation, it’s all brought back by just hearing Cantona’s voice, just seeing him is enough for me to have a head full of memories of him playing for United. He had such a presence on the field and in so many of our hearts.

After a nomadic career in France involving six clubs in eight years,Eric Cantona made a shock move to England, ‘L’Enfant Terrible’ signed for Leeds United in 1992 – and helped the Yorkshire club to the title Fergie then announced he had signed Cantona for £1.2 million and I was dumbstruck, what a bargain, maybe the best bargain in the history of football.

In five seasons at Old Trafford, Cantona won four Premiership winners’ medals and the FA Cup twice, scoring the winner in the 1996 final against Liverpool. His only season with no medals was in 1994-95, during much of which he was suspended after his most infamous act – a karate kick at a Crystal Palace supporter who taunted him as he left the field after being sent off.

True to form, the eccentric Cantona told a press conference afterwards: ‘When the seagulls follow the trawler, it’s because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea’ After being persuaded to carry on playing by Fergie who flew over to Paris to see Cantona, he led United to yet another title in 1996-97 before retiring abruptly aged just 30. His final match for United was against West Ham on May 11, 1997.

He lived football as it is supposed to be lived. Like a game you have to play honestly. The first thing is to work hard, without losing the notion of pleasure. That is what he did. More players need to do the same. There is the ‘football’ Manchester United and the ‘merchandising’ Manchester United, these two worlds coexist, but for Cantona Manchester United is the club, it is football. A culture of the “beau jeu”, a philosophy that has been existing for years.

Manchester United always show us how to win with class, with fire in their bellies, with attacking, fast football that sweeps sides aside with ease. Eric Cantona revived all of these things in Manchester United, and then some. He was so convinced of his own abilities and talents that he would score an outrageously difficult goal, then just stand there hands on hips and wait for the crowd to explode in ecstasy at his brilliance.

Even the other players would run up to him and stop, waiting for him to allow them to mob him, but only after he had milked the applause from the supporters.Twelve years on they still sing his name loud and clear from the terraces! He was the catalyst that finally dragged United over the finishing line in first place after a long 26 year wait for the title. Down the years there have been some truly great United players…

…I could list 50 of them right here, right now. But for me the best of the best is Eric Cantona, ‘L’Enfant Terrible, Le Roi du Monde’.

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Manchester United were ready to sack Eric Cantona following his infamous kung-fu kick in 1995 at Selhurst Park. Or rather, Martin Edwards got this idea into his head when he met up with FA Officials to discuss Eric's 'attack'. I think it might be a case of people getting ideas into their heads but who the hell was going to go and tell Sir Alex ? As things turned out no one did and we all know what happened concerning the event anyway, he got a 9 month ban.

In his book, 'FA Confidential', former FA chief executive David Davies says former United chairman Martin Edwards was prepared to ban Cantona for life after the incident at Selhurst Park. He wrote: "Tracing Martin to the Royal Lancaster Hotel, I found United's chairman talking tough. `We're thinking of an indefinite suspension for Eric,' Martin said. `Banning Eric altogether.' "

How Ferguson would have reacted to that will never be known, but Davies suggests the United manager played a big part in convincing his chairman to be more lenient with the club's prize asset at the time.

"Martin realised the seriousness of Eric's conduct but, when he returned to Manchester, he softened his stance," said Davies. "Eric will be banned until the end of the season," Martin announced. "Not indefinite. Not altogether."

A wise choice I feel. I can't see Martin Edwards being too keen on being on the receiving end of a blast from Fergie !! Imagine what Manchester United fans would have missed too. In my opinion he is the greatest player ever to pull on a United shirt since the days of the Busby Babes, there's no question about that !

ALEX FERGUSON has told Wayne Rooney he will have to accept being on the bench at times for Manchester United this season.

Since signing for Manchester United four years ago, Rooney has been a certain starter for all their major games, in fact he has averaged 43 games per season since his arrival. However, following the signing of Dimitar Berbatov, boss Fergie has four fit main attackers to call upon for the first time this decade and he will be rotating them for the big clashes to ensure they stay fresh for the full season.

Which means that Rooney will sometimes find himself where he likes it least — on the bench.

Ferguson said: “They all know it has to happen. I understand that some players want to play every week — Eric Cantona was like that — but it cannot happen.
For too long I’ve been operating with two strikers, which is ridiculous for a club of this size. To achieve what we want to achieve we need four strikers of the quality we had in 1999 with Dwight Yorke, Andy Cole, Teddy Sheringham and Ole Solskjaer. Whoever plays will not be down to performance. It will just be about keeping them fresh.

“For example, in 1999 Yorke and Cole had a great partnership so they were always in front. Yet it would be Solskjaer and Sheringham scoring the goals at the right time because I could freshen things up.”

It is clear Rooney’s absence, maybe even from today’s line-up against Bolton, is not a reflection on his play — although he is still to get off the mark this season.

Fergie said: “Maybe Wayne has not been getting a lot of chances at the moment.”

Ferguson reckons Berbatov’s arrival from Tottenham will assist Rooney in that.

He said: “Berbatov will bring good composure, experience and presence. There is no doubt in my mind he will improve us. He is someone who has good decision- making and timing which will improve things for us.”

Elsewhere in the squad, Ryan Giggs continues to be as important to Ferguson as he was 17 years ago when the Welsh winger first became a regular in United’s starting line-up.

Yet Giggs has a new role in the side these days.

Fergie explained: “I see his role now as a central player.

“He is nearly 35 and those days of trampling up and down that touchline are behind him now.

“We have to respect the job he has done over so many years — no one can come near him in terms of his ability in that position.

“He is an incredible human being and a one-off.

“But I need to manage him correctly now and there is no doubt he can have an impact for us as a central player.”

I am searching for abstract ways of expressing reality, abstract forms that will
enlighten my own mystery.

I didn't study; I live.

I prefer to play and lose rather than win, because I know in advance I'm going to win.

I stopped playing football because I'd done as much as I could. I needed something which was
going to excite me as much as football had excited me.

I try to find different ways of expressing myself. Without that I will die.

I'm proud of what I achieved there, but a life built on memories is not much of a life.

If you have only one passion in life - football - and you pursue it to the exclusion
of everything else, it becomes very dangerous. When you stop doing this activity
it is as though you are dying. The death of that activity is a death in itself.

In football you have an adversary; in cinema that adversary is yourself.

My best moment? I have a lot of good moments but the one I prefer it when I
kicked the hooligan.

Often there are players who have only football as a way of expressing themselves and never
develop other interests. And when they no longer play football, they no longer do anything;
they no longer exist, or rather they have the sensation of no longer existing.

Sometimes in life one experiences an emotion which is so strong that it is difficult
to think, or to reason.

Sometimes you get submerged by emotion. I think it's very important to express it - which
doesn't necessarily mean hitting someone.

The pressure people put on themselves and the rivalry between the teams is
much more marked. And I think that's a good thing. As long as that rivalry
remains within the spirit of competition, it con only spur everyone on.

Every One Of Us

.........should realise how lucky we have been to see the greatest manager ever to
walk the planet, manage the club we all follow - Manchester United..

United did the double last year !! Champions of England and Champions of Europe but no one
seems to have celebrated it or even recognised the fact they did it. Probably because we have
had to put up with the precocious antics of Ronaldo, then listen to the idiot Sepp Blatter declare
all players are becoming slaves, albeit on £100,000 per week !! Then we had Euro 2008
followed by The Beijing Olympics and voila, here we are, another season begins.

I hear a lot of people putting Sir Fergie down, pushing aside his records and all he has achieved
with United. I think it's an English thing. They gave Capello 28 minutes into his first game with
England before booing them !! They love failure for some reason they even court it. They expect
to fail, then they fail, then they get bitter because they failed. In the same vein, they wont
recognise anything Fergie does until he is long gone !!

This is sad, a great shame. The simple truth is, no matter who believes it, Sir Alex Chapman
Ferguson CBE, is the greatest football coach/manager to ever walk this planet it's as simple as
that and there is no argument possible to even contest it !

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
Huddersfield 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 taken off him
because he CHEATED !!!

Only in Scotland is Ferguson's achievement matched: Jock Stein, his friend and mentor, led
Celtic to 11 Scottish titles. All due respect to Scotland and their FA, but it's not quite as
competitive up there so I personally think Fergies achievements are a lot better.

In all, United have won 702 (58%) of the 1210 league games played under Ferguson to the end
of May 2008. 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, beyond belief in fact.

In the 16 years of the Premiership, United have totalled 155 more league points than Arsenal,
their nearest challengers, 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 Liverpool - 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 became, so far, the only English winners of that trophy). That's 32
major trophies overall, ahead even of Stein's 29 in Scotland (and as I said achieved in a much
tougher competitive environment). 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 achievement 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 perceptions 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, 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.

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 challenge that defeated previous United managers (including even Busby in his late
years) but Ferguson's teams have managed to provide plenty of scope for individual expression
within the framework of team organization.

Thus, players like Cantona, Giggs, Rooney, Ronaldo, Scholes, Sharpe, Yorke, Cole, Beckham,
Anderson 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 makes Fergie 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 idea 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 Fergie 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 encouraged 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 !!! It has also led to a media caricature
of Fergie with little basis in reality but with a life of its own.

The ranting bully terrorizing his players does not square with their fierce loyalty to him
or with their unshakeable 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 MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, ONCE HE'S RETIRED AND NO LONGER
THREATENS THEM THEY WILL FINALLY GIVE HIM HIS FULL DUE !!!

I love to follow United transfer battles but this one even outshone the Tevez
Affair !! Well we got him, and I am so happy now !!

Berbatov will be the best signing since Cantona, maybe even better than the
king himself. From the minute the transfer window opened exactly 62 days
went by until it closed, and Fergie got the papers registered with 40 minutes
of the window remaining - Pheww.

For Fergie though Berbatov’s arrival was a matter of extreme urgency. While
United were always confident City would be seen off, Ferguson knew he needed
another senior striker. He has won the last two Premier League titles, and the
Champions League whilst being one man down in the striker department. We
all knew this time around, there would be no surprise signing such as Henrik
Larsson to help us out, or an unexpected seam of goals from Ole Gunnar
Solskjaer, or, due to his current injury, 42 from Cristiano Ronaldo.

Campbell might have impressed in pre-season but Ferguson realised it was too
much to expect the youngster to hold down a regular place should either Wayne
Rooney or Carlos Tevez be ruled out for an extended period. Even though other
targets such as Michael Owen, Thierry Henry and David Villa were mentioned,
Berbatov was the man Ferguson kept returning to.

At 27, Berbatov is slightly older than most of United’s recent major purchases
but Ferguson feels his silky touch - which the Scot first experienced when Bayer
Leverkusen faced the Reds in the Champions League five years ago. Fergie
believes Berbatov has the quality to score goals himself and create chances for
others. Some may question the player’s temperament in light of his recent
behaviour but that's just nonsense, Fergie has worked with plenty of highly-
strung individuals, including Eric Cantona, and got the best out of them. He will
expect to do the same with Berbatov, starting when United travel to Anfield to
face Liverpool on September 13.

What do you make of the move?

Have your say.