Page 66 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

apologise for the times I stuck up for them when there were sound reasons to lurch the other way.
There were times when I thought, ‘Christ, what were you thinking about?’ Cathy posed that question
to me many times. But I couldn’t take sides against my players. I had to find solutions other than
castigating them in public. Sometimes I had to fine or punish them, of course, but I could never let it

out of the dressing room. I would have felt I had betrayed the one constant principle of my time as a
manager: to defend. No, not to defend, but to protect them from outside judgments.
In modern football, celebrity status overrides the manager’s power. In my day you wouldn’t
whisper a word about your manager. You would fear certain death. In my later years, I would hear
constantly about players using their power against managers, and the player receiving the support of
the public and even the club. The player will always spill his resentments to whoever might care to
listen, but the manager will not do that, because he has wider responsibilities.

I think Roy realised he was coming to the end of his playing career and was starting to think he was
the manager. He was assuming managerial responsibilities, and, of course, it’s not a managerial
responsibility to go on Manchester United television and slaughter your team-mates.
By stopping it going out, we saved Roy from losing the respect of everyone in that dressing room.
But once the meeting in my room developed such a venomous tone, that was the end of him.
The one thing I could never allow was loss of control, because control was my only saviour. As

with David Beckham, I knew the minute a football player started trying to run the club, we would all
be finished. The real players like that. They like a manager who’s tough. Or can be tough.
They like the manager to be a man. There’s a reward. The player will be thinking: ‘1. Can he make
us winners? 2. Can he make me a better footballer? 3. Is he loyal to us?’ These are vital
considerations, from the player’s side. If the answer to all three is yes, they will tolerate murders. I
had some terrible mood-storms after games and was never proud of my outbursts. Some nights I
would go home assailed by fear of the consequences. Maybe the players wouldn’t be talking to me

next time I entered the training ground. Perhaps they would be raging or conspiring against me. But on
Mondays, they would be more terrified of me than I was of them, because they had seen me lose my
temper and were not keen to see it happen again.
Roy’s an intelligent guy. I saw him reading some interesting books. He’s a good conversationalist
and good company when he’s in the right mood. The physio would come in and ask, ‘What sort of
mood is Roy in today?’ because that would determine the whole mood of the dressing room. That’s

how influential he was in our daily lives.
With his contradictions and mood swings he could be wonderful one minute and antagonistic the
next. The switch would flick in a moment.
In one deep sense, him leaving was the best thing that could have happened, because a lot of the
players were intimidated by him in the dressing room, and those players emerged well from his
departure. John O’Shea and Darren Fletcher were certainly beneficiaries. When we went to France to
pay Lille in Paris in November 2005, the players were booed on the pitch in the warm-up, partly as a

consequence of what Roy had said in the MUTV interview. Fletcher and O’Shea took most of the
heckling.
I think the dressing room relaxed when Roy left. Relief swept the room. They no longer had to
listen to the barrage that some of them had grown to expect. Because he’d been a declining force, the
gap he left was not as big as it would have been three years previously. I watched him in a Celtic v.
Rangers game and said to Carlos beforehand, ‘He’ll be the star man today.’

Roy was never in the game. He played a passive role. The dynamic, fist-clenching, demanding Roy
Keane wasn’t there. He loved it at Celtic Park. I spoke to him about it and he praised the training, the