Page 67 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

facilities, the Prozone. Things did settle down between us. About two months later I was sitting in my
office discussing team business with Carlos, when a member of staff called to say that Roy was here
to see me. I was startled.
‘I just want to apologise to you for my behaviour,’ he said. That’s when he began describing the

scene at Celtic and telling me how well his work was going. But when I saw him in that Rangers–
Celtic game I knew he wouldn’t carry on with it.
Changes were already in motion before Roy left, but they weren’t yet apparent. There is one
abiding truth about Manchester United: we are always capable of producing new players, fresh
names, and we had them on tap again as Roy was heading out. Fletcher was acquiring maturity and
experience; I brought Ji-Sung Park to the club; Jonny Evans was breaking through.
Often first-team players can’t recognise the regeneration going on around them because they can’t

see beyond themselves. They have no clue what’s going on further down the scale. Giggs, Scholes and
Neville were exceptions. Maybe Rio and Wes Brown. Others would have no idea. They see their job
as playing. But I could see foundations developing. That wasn’t a great period for us in terms of
trophies. Yet when you’re managing change, you have to accept the quieter spells and acknowledge
that transformations take longer than a year.
I could never ask for three or four years to achieve change, because at Manchester United you

would never have that time, so you try to expedite it, and be bold sometimes: play young players, test
them. I was never afraid of that. It was never just a duty, but a part of the job I loved. It’s who I am. I
did it at St Mirren and Aberdeen and Manchester United. So, when we faced those periods, we
always put our trust in younger players.
In terms of recruitment targets, Carlos fancied Anderson strongly. In one day, David Gill travelled
to Sporting Lisbon to sign Nani and then drove up the motorway to buy Anderson from Porto. They
cost a bit of money, but it showed what we thought, as a club, about young talent. We had a good

defensive nucleus of Ferdinand, Vidić and Evra. We were a solid unit at the back. Rooney was
developing. We let Louis Saha go because he was always picking up injuries. We had Henrik Larsson
for a while, and he was a revelation.
After an initial rapprochement, relations with Roy soured again. I saw a remark he had made in the
newspapers to the effect that he had washed Man United out of his life. His claim was that we would
all have forgotten him by then. How could anyone forget what he did for the club? The press used to

see him as a quasi-manager, because of his winning appetite, and the way he drove the team on. They
would ask me all the time: ‘Do you think Roy Keane will be a manager?’ As his career in coaching
developed, it became apparent that he needed to spend money to achieve results. He was always
looking to buy players. I didn’t feel Roy had the patience to build a team.
In the 2011–12 season, we crossed swords again when Roy was highly critical of our young
players after the defeat in Basel, which knocked us out of the Champions League, and I responded by
referring to him as a ‘TV critic’. If you studied his final days at Sunderland and Ipswich, his beard

would get whiter and his eyes blacker. Some might be impressed with his opinions on TV and think:
‘Well, he’s got the balls to take on Alex Ferguson.’ From the minute he became a TV critic, I knew he
would focus on United.
As for blaming the young players? He wouldn’t have aimed that accusation at Wayne Rooney, who
wouldn’t have stood for it. The senior players would sort him out. Fletcher and O’Shea are the two he
picked on, and they were booed as a result by our fans when we played Lille in Paris. His two spells

in management proved one thing: he needs money. He spent at Sunderland and failed. He spent a lot at
Ipswich and came up short.