Page 78 - Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography

So the figure we inserted was £35 million, which, we thought, would deter all-comers, even Real
Madrid. They agreed it. To David, I said, ‘If they come back next year and pay thirty-five million, at
least we’ll know we have doubled our money on him. If they don’t come, we’ll get the two years in
his contract out of him, and he will be twenty-nine by that point. We’ve had him four years. We’ll be

able to move him on.’ Fine, but the moment Ruud signed that contract he changed. In his last season he
became a really difficult boy. I don’t think he was popular by the end. The alteration in him was
dramatic.
My brother Martin had seen him play for Heerenveen and said: ‘I really like this lad, he does look
the part.’ With that glowing review I needed to get cracking. We went back to see him again but
received word he had already signed for PSV a month previously. That confused me. But it seemed a
done deal. We kept an eye on him regardless and made our move in 2000.

On a short holiday in Spain, during an international break, I received bad news: a message from
our doctor to say Ruud had failed the medical. We were sure we had spotted cruciate ligament
damage. PSV disagreed, insisting that all their tests had shown only minor ligament disruption of the
kind that would not prevent him passing the examination. Mike Stone, however, would not sign it off.
So we sent him back to PSV, who sent him back into training and filmed it, for our benefit. In the
practice session Ruud’s knee completely went. The footage found its way onto TV, where you could

see him screaming. What should we do?
‘These days, if you have the right people looking after you, you can be back from this kind of injury
in a few months,’ I told Martin Edwards.
Van Nistelrooy followed the trusted route to Dr Richard Steadman in Colorado and was out for
almost a year. He returned towards the tail end of that season and we signed him in 2001, after I had
been to watch him against Ajax. His mobility was not impaired and his pace had not diminished. He
wasn’t the quickest striker; he was a galloper who had a quick brain in the penalty box.

I’d also been to see him at his home while he was convalescing and had told him we would still be
taking him to Old Trafford, irrespective of his injury. That was an important message for him, because
I don’t think he was the most confident lad at that point in his career. He was a country boy.
He was a typical old-fashioned Italian-type centre-forward. Forget all that running out to the wings
and tackling. Back in the early 1960s, Juventus had a centre-forward called Pietro Anastasi, who
would contribute little in games before winning them with sudden goal-scoring bursts.

That was the kind of centre-forward who dominated the game in that era. You left them to do their
work in the penalty box. Van Nistelrooy was from that template. Opportunities had to be created for
him. But he was a flawless finisher who scored some true poacher’s goals.
In fact, he was one of the most selfish finishers I ever saw. His personal goal tally was his guiding
obsession. That single-mindedness gave him the edge of a great assassin. He had no interest in build-
up play or how many yards he had run in a game, how many sprints he had made. The only aspect he
was ever interested in was: how many goals did Ruud van Nistelrooy score. He was superb at the

‘early hit’. He would dart to the side of the defender and deliver that quick, lethal strike.
If you put my great goal-scorers together (Andy Cole, Eric Cantona, Van Nistelrooy, Rooney),
Ruud was the most prolific. But the best natural finisher was Solskjaer. Van Nistelrooy scored some
magnificent goals, but many were scabby, six-yard box goals. Andy Cole scored some fine goals, too,
but plenty were close in, scrambled, off the leg, just-get-it-in goals. Solskjaer’s finishing, though,
could be majestic. His thought processes underpinned his skills. He had that analytical mind. As soon

as he arrived in a shooting position, he had it all sized up. He had mental pictures everywhere. Yet he
didn’t play all the time because he wasn’t the most aggressive of strikers. He developed more of that