Page 121 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

prophecy.
Tapping my watch was another psychological ploy. I didn’t keep track of the time in games. I kept a
loose eye on it but it was too hard to work out how long might be added for a stoppage to have an
accurate sense of when the game should end. Here’s the key: it was the effect it had on the other team,

not ours, that counted. Seeing me tap my watch and gesticulate, the opposition would be spooked.
They would immediately think another 10 minutes were going to be added. Everyone knew United had
a knack of scoring late goals. Seeing me point to my timepiece, our opponents would feel they would
have to defend against us through a spell of time that would feel, to them, like infinity.
They would feel besieged. They knew we never gave up and they knew we specialised in late
drama. Clive Tyldesley said it, in his ITV commentary on the 1999 Champions League final, at the
beginning of stoppage time: ‘United always score’, which was comparable to Kenneth Wolstenholme

in the 1966 World Cup final. That’s a mind game.
There is a psychological dimension also to handling individual players. With errant behaviour it
helps to look for a moment through their eyes. You were young once, so put yourself in their position.
You do something wrong, you’re waiting to be punished. ‘What’s he going to say?’ you think. Or,
‘What’s my dad going to say?’ The aim is to make the biggest possible impact. What would have
made the deepest imprint on me at that stage of life?

A manager’s advantage is that he knows the player wants to play. Fundamentally, they all want to
be out there on the park. So when you deprive them of that pleasure you’re taking away their life. It
becomes the ultimate tool. This is the greatest lever of power at your disposal.
With the incident with Frank McGarvey at St Mirren, I was consistent in telling him, ‘You’re never
going to play again.’ He believed that. For three weeks he believed it. He finished up begging me for
another chance. In his mind was the idea that all the power was on my side. Freedom of contract
wasn’t a reality then.

People talked non-stop about my mind games. Every time I made a public utterance, a swarm of
analysts would look for the hidden meaning, when 98 per cent of the time there was none. But
psychological pressure has its place. Even superstitions, because everyone has one.
A woman said to me at Haydock races one day in 2010: ‘I see you on the television and you’re so
serious, yet here you are laughing and enjoying yourself.’
I told her, ‘Well, do you not want me to be serious at work? My job is about concentration.

Everything that goes on in my brain has to be beneficial to the players. I cannot make mistakes. I don’t
take notes, I don’t rely on video evidence, and I have to be right. It’s a serious business and I don’t
want to be making mistakes.’
I made plenty, of course. In a Champions League semi-final against Borussia Dortmund, I was
convinced Peter Schmeichel had made an error. But at that time I wasn’t wearing my spectacles at
games. Peter said: ‘It took a deflection.’
‘Deflection, my arse,’ I shouted. ‘No deflection.’

When I saw the replay later, I could see the ball had made a violent change in direction. So I
started wearing my glasses to games. I couldn’t afford to make mistakes like that, to embarrass
myself. If you ask a defender, ‘Why did you try to play him offside?’ and his reply is, ‘I didn’t try to
play him offside,’ you need to know you’re correct in your assertion.
It makes no sense to offer players an easy chance to tell themselves, ‘The manager’s lost it.’ If they
lose faith in your knowledge, they lose faith in you. That grasp of the facts must be kept at a high

level, for all time. You have to be accurate in what you say to the players. Trying to be right could be
fun, too. It wasn’t all a quest for the truth. A game we would play was trying to guess the opposition’s