Page 123 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

media. The supporters were entitled to know when I was unhappy with a performance. But not an
individual. It all went back to Jock Stein; I would question him all the time about everything. At
Celtic he was always so humble. It almost became annoying. When I was quizzing him about Jimmy
Johnstone or Bobby Murdoch, I’d expect him to take credit for his team selection or tactics, but Jock

would just say, ‘Oh, wee Jimmy was in such great form today.’ He would never praise himself. I
wanted him to announce, just once: ‘Well, I decided to play 4–3–3 today and it worked.’ But he was
just too humble to do it.
Jock missed a Celtic trip to America after a car crash and Sean Fallon had sent three players home
for misbehaving. ‘No, I wouldn’t have done that, and I told Sean so,’ Jock told me when I pressed him
to tell me how he would have dealt with it. ‘When you do that you make a lot of enemies,’ he said.
‘But the supporters would understand,’ I argued.

‘Forget the supporters,’ Jock said. ‘Those players have mothers. Do you think any mother thinks
their boy is bad? Their wives, their brothers, their father, their pals: you alienate them.’ He added,
‘Resolve the dispute in the office.’
Sometimes ice works as well as fire. When Nani was sent off in a game at Villa Park in 2010, I
didn’t say a word to him. I let him suffer. He kept looking at me for a crumb of comfort. I know he
didn’t try to do what he did. Asked about it on TV, I called it ‘naive’. I said he wasn’t a malicious

player but that it was a two-footed tackle and he had to go. Straightforward. There was no lasting
damage. I merely said he had made a mistake in a tackle, as we all have, because it’s an emotional
game.
People assumed I was always waging psychological war against Arsène Wenger, always trying to
cause detonations in his brain. I don’t think I set out to provoke him. But sometimes I did use mind
games in the sense that I would plant small inferences, knowing that the press would see them as
psychological forays.

I remember Brian Little, who was then managing Aston Villa, calling me about a remark I had made
before we played them.
‘What did you mean by that?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said. I was baffled. ‘I thought you were up to your mind games again,’ Brian said.
When he put the phone down, apparently, Brian couldn’t stop thinking: ‘What’s he up to? What was he
trying to say?’

Though it served me well to be unnerving rival teams, quite often I unsettled opponents without
even meaning to, or realising that I had.