Oliver Kay
Last updated at 12:01AM, October 26 2013
The Harry Walker Agency is on Lexington Avenue, just around the corner from the Chrysler Building and Grand Central Station. It purports, with some justification, to have the most exclusive list of public speakers in the world, including Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Kofi Annan, Henry Kissinger and their latest signing, Sir Alex Ferguson.
If you were thinking of asking Ferguson, now that he has a bit of time on his hands, to open your village fête or give out prizes on a school open day, you might want to think again. Harry Walker Agency clients do not come cheap. The suggestion is that any company wishing to hire Ferguson for a day’s work — glad-handing clients, offering anecdotes and thoughts on leadership and management — will have to pay about £100,000.
As such, it is unlikely that there will be too many more question-and-answer sessions as accessible as those surrounding his promotional tour for
Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography. He will appear in Manchester on Monday, followed by dates in Glasgow, London, Dublin and Aberdeen, where they might want to ask him why his time at Pittodrie barely gets a mention in his new book. (Mark Hughes, incidentally, does not crop up once.)
There are some questions that Ferguson, evidently, will never answer, as he made clear after Matt Dickinson, of The Times, asked him on Tuesday why, in his book, he skirted over the Rock Of Gibraltar affair as if it were as trivial as one of those post-match rows about handshakes.
For the uninitiated, Ferguson’s dispute in 2003 with United’s two biggest shareholders over the stud rights to the champion racehorse severely destabilised him and the club. It led to an internal investigation of his son’s purported involvement in the club’s transfer dealings and, ultimately, to the takeover by an American family whose ownership has cost the club more than £500 million to prop up over the past eight years.
Ferguson, though, is “no gettin’ intae that”. So perhaps in future inquisitors should stick to football and ask him to expand on other matters arising from his autobiography, such as his claim to be “one of the few who felt [Steven] Gerrard was not a top, top player”.
This will be news to Gerrard, who has told how Gary Neville used to inform him on England duty that Ferguson longed to sign him. Indeed, in 2004, Ferguson described him as “the player you would replace [Roy] Keane with”, adding that “he has become the most influential player in England, bar none, more than [Patrick] Vieira. Anyone would love to have Gerrard in their team”.
The sudden reappraisal of Gerrard sticks out in that it is offered in such a throwaway, off-hand manner, lacking the slightest technical or tactical insight, particularly in stark contrast to Ferguson’s more detailed, if scathing, assessment of Jordan Henderson, another Liverpool midfield player.
It poses a question as to what Ferguson perceives Gerrard to lack. That is not a rhetorical question. It cannot be coincidence that neither Rafael Benítez nor Fabio Capello liked to use him in his favoured role as a box-to-box central midfield player — although this, naturally, is used earlier in the book by Ferguson as a stick with which to beat Benítez.
A hint, perhaps, comes in the context in which Ferguson makes his remark about Gerrard. After he laments England’s failure to make the most of the talents of Paul Scholes and Michael Carrick, Ferguson writes “Michael’s handicap was, I feel, that he lacked the bravado of Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard.”
Bravado is a good word. Ferguson’s favourite United team was full of it. Peter Schmeichel, Roy Keane, Paul Ince, Eric Cantona, Hughes — those were players with bravado, in a good way. His latter-day United were very successful, but on the occasions they fell short against top-level opposition, one persistent failing was a lack of Gerrard-esque aggression and tenacity in midfield, certainly if you read Ferguson’s assessments of where they went wrong in the Champions League final defeats by Barcelona.
Rightly or wrongly, English football culture treasures a Gerrard more than it does a Carrick or even a Scholes. Scholes was a genius, yet only twice in a long, illustrious career did his fellow professionals name him in the PFA Team of the Year. Gerrard has received that honour seven times — more than any other Premier League player in the era. Vieira and Ryan Giggs were nominated six times, Keane five, David Beckham four, Lampard three, Cesc Fàbregas twice and Carrick not at all until his deserved inclusion last season.
These records are cited not as proof of one player’s superiority over another but of Gerrard’s impact throughout his career, in a team that lacked quality in other departments, and of how highly regarded he is by his peers.
On the eve of his 100th England cap last November, Gerrard cited Scholes as the best player he had played alongside for England, saying that “his game is very similar to mine”. On the contrary, their games are rather different; Gerrard is the forceful all-rounder who likes to grab the bull by the horns, whereas Scholes, particularly in his later years, delighted in controlling the tempo of a game — pass, receive, pass, receive.
Gerrard is a more obvious product of a football culture in which, as Neville told
The Times recently: “Kids growing up wanted to be Bryan Robson, Graeme Souness, Peter Reid — spirit, fight, great players, fantastic players, that bulldog spirit of player, who would go into every tackle as if their life depended on it.” Neville was drawing a contrast with the emerging generation of English youngsters and, while welcoming a more technical approach, he also seemed concerned by a loss of intensity.
A few weeks ago, Neville and Jamie Carragher debated on Sky Sports about who was the best of Gerrard, Scholes and Lampard. No prizes for guessing who they both chose. It is a futile debate, but at least there was insight. Carragher, for example, suggested that Scholes’s brilliance in England training sessions was not reflected in the very biggest matches — and do not get distracted by the notion that Scholes was played out of position by Sven-Göran Eriksson, which did not happen until the final games of his international career.
You can pick holes in any player’s game if you are desperate to do so, but to suggest, as some do, that Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo excel as they do only because they have teams set up to optimise their talents, is to ignore the technical brilliance and artistry in just about everything they do. To suggest that Xavi Hernández and Andrés Iniesta are merely cogs in a well-oiled machine at Barcelona is to ignore that this very machine was built around their almost unrivalled majesty in possession of the ball.
To dismiss Gerrard and Lampard casually, as Ferguson did, seems unusually lazy and you are left with the impression that Ferguson regards Gerrard, like he did Alan Shearer, as one who got away. Gerrard, like Shearer, has devoted the best years of his career to his hometown club and does not have a Premier League winner’s medal. Carrick has five. Less deservedly, Anderson, whose contribution Ferguson does his best to talk up in the book, has four. Tom Cleverley and Darron Gibson have one each. On a related note, Giggs, a month short of his 40th birthday, is one of United’s best options in midfield.
In the post-Keane era, United have shown that it is possible for an English team to thrive without a midfield player of Gerrard’s ability, and, yes, bravado.
Does Ferguson really believe, though, that such a player would not have made them an even better team? Answering that question would give genuine insight not only into one of the best English players of his generation but also into the Achilles heel in an extremely successful United team. By contrast, asking about the Rock Of Gibraltar affair, when you know after last Tuesday that he’s “no gettin’ intae that”? That would just be bravado.
