Page 161 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

storm at the start of the match. We could have won by six. I held no fear of facing José Mourinho’s
team again at home. Our preparation was perfect. We devised a good plan for the game, our energy
was terrific and we forced three or four great saves from their goalkeeper. David de Gea barely made
a stop.

Nani was sent off in the 56th minute for leaping to meet the ball and making slight contact with
Álvaro Arbeloa, and for ten minutes we were up against it. We were in shock. On came Modrić for
Real to equalise Sergio Ramos’s own goal and then Ronaldo finished us in the 69th minute. But we
might have scored five in the last ten minutes. It was an absolute disaster.
I was particularly upset that night and gave the post-match press conference a miss. If we had
beaten Real Madrid, there would have been every reason to imagine we could win the competition. I
left Wayne out of that second leg because we needed someone to get on top of Alonso and play off

him. The Ji-Sung Park of earlier years would have been perfect for that job. Andrea Pirlo’s passing
rate for Milan had been 75 per cent. When we played them with Ji-Sung Park in the hounding role we
reduced Pirlo’s strike rate to 25 per cent. There was no better player in our squad to keep on top of
Alonso than Danny Welbeck. Yes, we sacrificed Wayne’s possible goal-scoring, but we knew we
had to choke Alonso and exploit that gain.
Ronaldo was wonderful in those two games. In the Madrid leg he made his way into our dressing

room to sit with our players. You could tell he missed them. After the Old Trafford game, as I was
watching the video of the sending-off, he came in to sympathise. The Real players knew the sending-
off had been absurd. Mesut Özil confessed to one of our players that José’s team felt they had got out
of jail. Cristiano declined to celebrate his goal, which is just as well, because I would have strangled
him. There were no issues with him at all. He’s a very nice boy.
My final thought on Man City losing the title to us was that they couldn’t call on enough players
who understood the significance of what they had achieved by winning the League for the first time

for 44 years. Evidently it was enough for some of them to have beaten Manchester United in a title
race. They settled down into a sense of relief. Retaining a title is the next hard step and City were not
in the right state of mind to defend what they had won on the most dramatic closing day in Premier
League history.
When I won the League for the first time in 1993, I didn’t want my team to slacken off. The thought
appalled me. I was determined to keep advancing, to strengthen our hold on power. I told that 1993

side: ‘Some people, when they have a holiday, just want to go to Saltcoats, twenty-five miles along
the coast from Glasgow. Some people don’t even want to do that. They’re happy to stay at home or
watch the birds and the ducks float by in the park. And some want to go to the moon.
‘It’s about people’s ambitions.’