Page 100 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

our dignity, whatever the result. It was vital, too, that we concealed our weak points, and Liverpool
were equally guarded in that respect.
Gérard had been a visiting trainee teacher in Liverpool during his course at Lille University, and
had examined the club with an academic’s eye. He was not entering Anfield blind to its traditions. He

understood the ethos, the expectations. He was a clever man; affable, too. After he was rushed to
hospital following a serious heart attack, I said to him, ‘Why don’t you just step upstairs?’
‘I can’t do that,’ Gérard replied. ‘I like working.’ He was a football man. Heart trouble could not
break his addiction.
Expectation always bears down on Liverpool managers and I think that brand of pressure pierced
Kenny’s defences in the end. At the time he abandoned the role of iconic player and moved into the
dug-out, he possessed no managerial background. The same disparity undermined John Greig at

Rangers. Possibly the greatest Rangers player of all time, John inherited a disintegrating team that
could not be restored to an even keel. The emergence of Aberdeen and Dundee United was no help.
Playing in the glamour role up front as one of Liverpool’s finest players and then graduating to
manager almost the next day was very difficult for Kenny. I remember him coming to see me in the
Scotland camp and asking for advice about a job he had been offered in management. It was only later
I realised he had been talking about the big one.

‘Is it a good club?’ I had asked him.
‘Aye, it’s a good club,’ he said.
So I told him: if it was a good club, with good history, some financial leeway, and a chairman who
understands the game, he would have a chance. If only two of those variables could be ticked off, he
was in for a battle.
Without my intensive education at Aberdeen, I would have been poorly qualified to take over at
Manchester United. I started at East Stirling without a penny. I enjoyed that, with 11 or 12 players.

Then I went to St Mirren without a dime. I freed 17 players in my first season: they weren’t good
enough. They had 35 before I started swinging my machete. There, I would order the pies and the
cleaning materials and the programmes. It was a full education.
When Gérard started importing large numbers of foreign players, I thought the treble-winning
season offered proof that the policy might restore the club to its pomp. The likes of Vladimír Šmicer,
Sami Hyypiä and Dietmar Hamann had established a strong platform on which Houllier could build.

Any Cup treble has to be taken seriously. You might say fortune smiled on them in the FA Cup final
against Arsenal, because Arsène Wenger’s team battered them in that match before Michael Owen
won it with the second of his two goals. It wasn’t the individuals that worried me around that time so
much as the name: Liverpool. The history. I knew that if this upsurge continued they would become
our biggest rivals again, ahead of Arsenal and Chelsea.
A year after that Cup treble, they finished runners-up, but then fell away to fifth after Gérard
brought in El Hadji Diouf, Salif Diao and Bruno Cheyrou, from which many commentators drew a

line of cause and effect. Cheyrou was one we looked at when he was at Lille. He had no pace but a
nice left foot. A strong lad, but not quick. Diouf had a good World Cup with Senegal and made a name
for himself. You could understand Gérard’s antennae twitching. I was always wary of buying players
on the back of good tournament performances. I did it at the 1996 European Championship, which
prompted me to move for Jordi Cruyff and Karel Poborský. Both had excellent runs in that
tournament, but I didn’t receive the kind of value their countries did that summer. They weren’t bad

buys, but sometimes players get themselves motivated and prepared for World Cups and European
Championships and after that there can be a levelling off.