Page 126 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

width and ball-circulation, always with an extra man in midfield. After Bobby Robson, they went
back to the Dutch way, with Van Gaal and Frank Rijkaard. What Guardiola added was a method of
pressing the ball. Under Pep they had this three-second drill, apparently, where the defending team
would be allowed no more than three seconds on the ball.

After the win in Rome, Guardiola said: ‘We’re fortunate to have the legacy of Johan Cruyff and
Charly Rexach. They were the fathers and we’ve followed them.’
What I could never quite understand is how their players were able to play that number of games.
They fielded almost the same side every time. Success is often cyclical, with doldrums. Barcelona
emerged from theirs and went in hot pursuit of Real Madrid. I don’t like admitting, we were beaten by
a great team, because we never wanted to say those words. The biggest concession we ever wanted to
make was: two great teams contested this final, but we just missed out. Our aim was to attain that

level where people said we were always on a par with Europe’s best.
To beat Barcelona in that cycle you needed centre-backs who could be really positive. Rio and
Vidić were at an age where their preference was to defend the space. Nothing wrong with that. Quite
correct. But against Barcelona it’s a limited approach. You need centre-backs who are prepared to
drop right on top of Messi and not worry about what is happening behind them. OK, he’ll drift away
to the side. That’s fine. He’s less of a threat on the side than he is through the centre.

They had four world-class players: Piqué, the two centre-midfield players and Messi. Piqué was
without doubt the most underrated player in their team. He is a great player. We knew that when he
was a youngster player with us. At a European conference, Guardiola told me he was the best signing
they had made. He created the tempo, the accuracy, the confidence and the penetration from that deep
position. That’s what we tried to nullify by shoving our strikers on top of them and being first to the
ball or forcing them to offload it. For the first 20 or 30 minutes it worked really well, but then they
score. They wriggle out.

They had this wonderful talent for escapology. You put the bait in the river and a fish goes for it.
Sometimes it doesn’t, though. Xavi would pass the ball to Iniesta at a pace that encouraged you to
think you were going to win it. And you were not going to win it, because they were away from you.
The pace of the pass, the weight of the pass, and the angle, just drew you into territory you shouldn’t
have been in. They were brilliant at that form of deception.
The Premier League desperately want a more lenient policy on work permits. There would be a

danger in such a laissez-faire approach. You could flood the game with bad players. But the big clubs
should be granted that freedom, because they have the ability to scout the best players. That’s a bit
elitist, I know, but if you want to win in Europe, one way round it is to change the work permit status
in favour of the clubs. In the EU we could take players at 16.
Two years later, our clubs converged on the final again, this time at Wembley. We had the same
intention as in Rome, started well, and were then just overrun in the middle of the pitch in a 3–1
defeat. We started with Edwin van der Sar in goal, Fabio, Ferdinand, Vidić and Evra across the back,

Giggs, Park, Carrick and Valencia in midfield and Rooney and Hernández up front.
We didn’t handle Messi. Our centre-backs weren’t moving forward onto the ball. They were
wanting to sit back. Yet the preparation for that game was the best I have seen. For 10 days we
practised for it on the training ground. You know the problem? Sometimes players play the occasion,
not the game. Wayne Rooney, for example, was disappointing. Our tactic was for him to raid into the
spaces behind the full-backs and for Hernández to stretch them back, which he did, but we failed to

penetrate those spaces behind the full-backs. For some reason, Antonio Valencia froze on the night.
He was nervous as hell. I don’t mean to be over-critical.