Page 49 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

We arrived back in Manchester, and Mark was on a mobile phone to a Chinese restaurant to order
a takeaway. ‘Is there no end to you?’ I asked him. ‘Think what you’re doing.’ I just couldn’t make an
impact on him.
You don’t recover easily from losing a Peter Schmeichel. He was the best goalkeeper in the world,

and his presence, his personality, were suddenly no longer there. We should have replaced him with
Van der Sar. His agent had told me, ‘You’ll need to be busy, because he’s talking to Juventus,’ but we
missed the boat. I had to return to Edwin’s agent and tell him we had already agreed to take someone
else and that I would have to withdraw my interest.
I should have taken him as well, as a second purchase. We’d have soon found out about Bosnich
and Edwin would have played from the end of the Schmeichel era pretty much to my last years in
charge. I wouldn’t have needed to spend money on Massimo Taibi or Barthez, who was a good

goalkeeper, but had problems back in France.
Later we saw that Van der Sar’s qualities were in the same league as those of Schmeichel. There
was little between them, talent-wise. Schmeichel pulled off saves he wasn’t entitled to make. There
were moments of wonder. ‘Jesus, how did he do that?’ I would ask. He had such spring, such
athleticism. With Van der Sar I would point to his composure, his calmness, his use of the ball, his
organisational ability. It was a different style of goalkeeping but still invaluable. It affected people

around him in a good way.
Schmeichel, by contrast, had a love–hate relationship with Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister. He
would come out screaming and bawling at them and Brucey would say, ‘Get back in your goal, you
big German tart.’ Schmeichel hated that. ‘I’m not German,’ he would hiss. They were great buddies
off the field, though. On it, Schmeichel was a volatile individual.
In the dressing room, Van der Sar was very emphatic about performances. He had a strong voice, a
Dutch voice. ‘No messing about here!’ he would bark. Schmeichel would impose his voice on the

team as well. I was lucky to have the two best goalkeepers of those three decades. An honourable
mention would have to go to Peter Shilton, and to Gianluigi Buffon; but to me, Schmeichel and Van
der Sar were the best from 1990–2010.
There is more to the art than the goalkeeping. It’s a question of the personality you bring to the job.
Not only do keepers have to deal with the business of making saves, they must cope with the process
of making errors. You need a big character at Manchester United to handle the aftermath of a high-

profile mistake. I had scouted Schmeichel half a dozen times. Alan Hodgkinson, the goalkeeping
coach, had told me: ‘He’s a certainty. Take him.’
At first I was ambivalent about bringing foreign goalkeepers into the English game. One of
Schmeichel’s early games was against Wimbledon. The ‘Crazy Gang’ were blitzing him, dropping
bombs on top of him and elbowing him. Schmeichel was going crazy, shouting for the officials to help
him. ‘Referee, referee!’
I watched this scene unfold and thought, ‘He’s got no chance.’ The ref couldn’t get back up the

pitch and away from the conflict zone quickly enough. In another of his early matches, Peter came out
for a cross at the back post and missed it by about two days. Lee Chapman knocked it in. So he did
make mistakes while he was adjusting to the game in this country, and people were saying, ‘What
have we got here?’ But he also had an incredible physique, he covered the goal and he was brave.
His distribution of the ball was marvellous. All those qualities came to his assistance in those torrid
early days.

Van der Sar oversaw a lot of change in our defence. Schmeichel stood behind the same back four
just about every week. Parker, Bruce, Pallister, Irwin. They played virtually every game. Van der Sar