Page 130 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

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THE best piece of advice I ever received on the media front was from a friend called Paul Doherty,

who was then at Granada TV. Great lad, Paul. He sought me out one day and said: ‘I’ve been
watching your press conferences and I’m going to point something out to you. You’re giving the game
away. You’re showing your worries. Look in that mirror and put the Alex Ferguson face on.’
Appearing beleaguered is no way to handle the press. Showing your torments to them is no way to
help the team or improve your chances of winning on a Saturday. Paul was right. When he gave me
that advice I was displaying the strains of the job. I couldn’t allow a press conference to become a

torture chamber. It was my duty to protect the dignity of the club and all that we were doing. It was
important to be on the front foot and control the conversation as much as possible.
Before I went through that door to face the world, I trained myself, prepared myself mentally.
Experience helped. I reached the point in my Friday press conferences where I could see the line a
journalist was pursuing. Sometimes they agreed a party line, telling one another: ‘Right, you start that,
I’ll go the other way.’ I could read them all. Experience gave me that. Plus, the internal mechanism
starts to work faster. I loved it when a journalist asked a big long question because it allowed me

time to prepare my answer. The hard ones were the short questions: ‘Why were you so bad?’
That kind of pithy inquiry can cause you to elongate your response. You stretch it out while you’re
trying to think, and end up justifying your whole world to them. There’s an art to not exposing the
weaknesses of your team, which is always your first priority. Always. You might have a game three
days later and that, too, should be at the forefront of your thoughts when being interrogated. Winning

that game is what counts, not scoring intellectual points in a news conference.
The third objective is not to make a fool of yourself by answering stupidly. Those were the
considerations working away in my brain as I was being grilled. The skills, that greater awareness,
took years to acquire. I remember being on television as a young player and blubbing about a six-
game suspension I had received from the Scottish Football Association. I said on air: ‘Aye, that’s the
Star Chamber justice they operate in Scotland.’
Right away, a letter from the SFA came flying in to the club. Thinking you have a duty to be
interesting, you can say something you regret. I was right that day in Scotland but I finished up having

to write a letter to explain myself. The manager asked me: ‘Where the hell did you get that one from –
the Star Chamber justice line?’
I couldn’t hide the origins of my speech. ‘I was reading a book and just thought it sounded good,’ I
told him.
Of course my longest and biggest media bust-up was with the BBC, which lasted seven years until I

decided enough was enough in August 2011. There were many annoyances from my perspective,
including an article in Match of the Day magazine, but the step too far was a documentary called