Page 31 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

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AS the new season dawned in 2002, I was bursting with fresh energy. It felt like day one in a whole
new job. All the doubt brought on by my intended retirement had cleared and I was ready to refresh
the squad after our first season without a trophy since 1998. Those phases of seismic change excited
me. I knew there were solid foundations on which to build a new team of winners.
There had been a golden period, from 1995 to 2001, when we had won the League five times out of

six and secured the first of my two Champions League trophies. At the start of that six-year spell, we
had promoted our homegrown lads to the first XI. David Beckham, Gary Neville and Paul Scholes
became regulars, despite a 3–1 defeat by Aston Villa that prompted Alan Hansen to say on television:
‘You can’t win anything with kids.’
After that hat-trick of League titles we made an error in letting Jaap Stam go. I thought £16.5
million was a good price and I believed he had slipped back in his game since his Achilles operation.
But it was a mistake on my part. This is my chance to nail once and for all the myth that his
contentious autobiography had anything to do with my decision to sell him, even though I called him in

about the book right away. It accused us of tapping him up, of approaching him directly without PSV’s
permission.
‘What were you thinking of?’ I asked. But it played absolutely no part in my decision. Not long
after that, an agent told me that a representative of Roma were trying to make contact. They were
offering £12 million for Jaap. Not interested, I said. The next week we received an approach from

Lazio. I had no interest until the offer reached £16.5 million. By that time Jaap was 30 and we were
concerned about his recovery from the Achilles injury. Anyway, it proved a disastrous episode.
Having to tell him in a petrol station was agony, because I knew he was a really decent man who
loved playing for the club, and who was adored by the fans. It was one of my senior moments. I had
tried to get hold of him at the training ground two days before deadline day. By the time I reached him
on his mobile, he was already on his way home. An equidistant point was a petrol station, off the
motorway, so that’s where our meeting took place.

I knew I could get Laurent Blanc, on a free. I had always admired Laurent Blanc and should have
acquired him many years earlier. He was so composed and so good at gliding out from the back with
the ball. I thought his experience could help John O’Shea and Wes Brown to develop. It was such a
misjudgment on my part to let Jaap go – he ended up playing against us, aged 36, in the semi-finals of
the Champions League.
Centre-backs were always a big part of my managerial planning and Rio Ferdinand was the big buy

in that summer of 2002, when we really should have reached the Champions League final in my home
town of Glasgow. To me that would have been special, playing in my birth place against Real
Madrid, the place where I saw my first-ever European final, Real beating Eintracht Frankfurt 7–3. I