Page 34 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

I had a few like that. Phil would do anything for the team. He would only think of the team. For the
most part, if he were to play a limited part in the successful functioning of the side, he would find a
way to be happy with that. In the end, though, Gary came to talk to me, to see how I felt about Phil’s
diminishing role.

‘I don’t know what to do, he’s such a great lad,’ I told Gary.
‘That’s the problem,’ Gary said. ‘He doesn’t want to come to you.’ Phil lacked Gary’s directness,
you see.
I invited Phil out to the house for a talk. He came with his wife Julie. At first I didn’t notice her in
the car. ‘Cathy, go and bring Julie in,’ I said. But when Cathy got out there, Julie began crying. ‘We
don’t want to leave Man United,’ she was saying. ‘We love being at the club.’ Cathy took her a cup of
tea, but she wouldn’t come into the house. I think she was worried she might break down and

embarrass her husband.
My point to Phil was that I was doing him more harm than good with the way I was using him. He
agreed. He told me he needed to move on. I left him to work out how he would approach that with his
wife.
When they had left, Cathy said: ‘You’re not going to let him go, are you? You can’t let people like
that go.’

‘Cathy,’ I said, ‘it’s for his own good. Do you not understand? It’s killing me more than it’s killing
him.’
I let him go cheaply, for £3.6 million. He was worth double that, because he could play five
positions for you – in either of the full-back positions or all across the midfield. He even played
centre-half for Everton, when Phil Jagielka and Joseph Yobo were injured.
Letting Nicky Butt go was similarly traumatic, although Nicky had no problem standing up for
himself. Nicky was a cheeky sod. Gorton boy. Great lad. He would fight your shadow, would Nicky.

He would come in and say: ‘Why am I not playing?’
That was Nicky. I loved that. And I would say, ‘Nicky, you’re not playing because I think Scholes
and Keane are better than you.’ Sometimes, away from home, I would put him in ahead of Scholesy. In
the Champions League semi-final at Juventus, for example, I played Butt instead of Scholes. Scholes
and Keane were on two bookings and I couldn’t afford to risk them both missing the final, though in
the event both missed out through suspension. I brought Scholes on for Butt when Nicky picked up an

injury – and Paul was booked. In the end I sold Nicky to Bobby Robson at Newcastle for £2 million.
What a great buy that was.
The clouds began to clear in 2002 with the 5–3 win over Newcastle at the end of November. Diego
Forlán, who had taken 27 games to score his first goal for us – a penalty against Maccabi Haifa – was
a factor in our 2–1 win at Liverpool, after Jamie Carragher had headed the ball back to Jerzy Dudek
and Forlán had nipped in to score. We then beat Arsenal 2–0 and Chelsea 2–1, with Forlán again
scoring the decisive goal. On the training ground that winter, we worked intensively on our defensive

shape.
In February 2003 we lost an FA Cup fifth-round tie 2–0 at home to Arsenal. It was the game in
which Ryan Giggs missed an open goal, lifting the ball over the bar with his right foot, when the net
was undefended. ‘Well, Giggsy,’ I told him, ‘you’ve scored the best-ever goal in the FA Cup, and
now you’ve added the best-ever miss.’ He had all the time in the world. He could have walked the
ball into the net.

That game, which sent me into a fury, was to have more serious implications for my relationship
with another graduate of the 1992 FA Youth Cup winning side. A butterfly plaster was involved, but