Page 138 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

been better for the game.
The purchase of Phil Jones was a long-term plan from when Sam Allardyce was Blackburn
manager. When Rovers beat us in the FA Youth Cup, I called Sam the next day and said, ‘What about
the boy Jones?’

Sam laughed and said, ‘No, he’ll be in the first team on Saturday,’ which he was. And he stayed
there. Sam was a big fan of Jones. Blackburn wouldn’t sell him in the 2011 January transfer window
because they were in a relegation battle. By the end of the season, every club was on his tail:
Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea. He spoke to all four clubs but we managed to coax him to United, at 19
years of age.
At the point we signed Phil, I was unsure what his best position would be. Later I came to feel it
would be at centre-back. He gave us versatility. He could play almost anywhere. In the 2011

Community Shield I took Ferdinand and Vidić off at half-time and assigned Jones and Evans to push
right on top of the opposition. Evans is good at that too: breaking into the middle of the pitch. Vidić
and Ferdinand were more old school. They have got good heads, understand the game well, don’t get
caught out. They were a great partnership. Increasingly, though, I could apply variations at centre-
back, and Jones was a major part of my thinking.
Evans, I think, needed a shake. He didn’t appreciate me signing Jones and Smalling. It caused him

to question my opinion of him. But he proved himself in his own right and did increasingly well for
us. It’s always gratifying when a player responds to new arrivals by redoubling his own efforts.
Tom Cleverley, another young hopeful, was the victim of a shocking tackle against Bolton early in
that season, which killed his year in many ways. He came back after about a month and we played him
right away against Everton. A recurrence of the injury then kept him out for about three months. The
plan was to send him off for an operation, which he didn’t want. It would have kept him out for nine
months. He wanted to carry on, and it worked, but by that time I had Scholes and Carrick back. I was

never able to place Tom in the side regularly.
He’s a very clever player, the boy. Very intelligent. He’s mobile and a good finisher. He was in the
London Olympic squad, which pleased me because he needed a challenge to lift his self-belief right
up. Darren Fletcher, meanwhile, was battling a colonic illness. In the summer of 2012, it was
possible he might have an operation, but he needed to be well to go under the knife. With a setback he
had, he was going to be out until December. The previous season I had him with the reserves to do

some coaching. He enjoyed that. Scholesy had gone back to the first team. Darren delivered a couple
of half-time talks in reserves games and was impressive.
De Gea, who was 20 when we signed him for 24 million euros from Atlético Madrid, had a torrid
time to begin with. It was obvious he lacked the physique of Van der Sar or Schmeichel. That part of
his body needed to be developed and we devised a programme to help him add muscle mass. A
complication for him was that we lost Ferdinand and Vidić in our first game of the 2011–12 League
campaign: a 2–1 win at West Bromwich Albion, in which he allowed a weak shot from Shane Long to

slip through. I described the battering he received in our penalty box at West Brom as his ‘welcome
to England’.
Vidić was out for six weeks and Rio for three. De Gea then had Smalling and Jones playing in front
of him. Young players. He did all right but was a few degrees short of infallible. There were issues
with his handling of the players in front of him. By the time we played Liverpool in October, he
conceded the first goal from a corner kick. He should have dealt with that better: not just him but

Evans and Smalling, the centre-backs on that occasion.
Their positioning was bad, which locked De Gea in to his six-yard area, but it’s the goalkeeper