IF YOU ALL HATE SCOUSERS!

"My greatest challenge is not what's happening at the moment, my greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their fucking perch. And you can print that."

And today's challenges

"How I portray my team against Arsenal is irrelevant. It's the points, the points make the difference and you can't dispute that. You can't put up an argument against results."

Fergie on comparing the past with the present

"The difference between then [1992] and now would be that I hadn't won the premier division,"

"so me handling today as opposed to then is entirely different. For example, I don't read the newspapers at all. Ever. If we lose a game, what's the point? You work it out for yourself. So I'm in control of that part. I know it's not nice reading and there's nothing I can do about that.

"But there's more personal criticism now. At present it's personal. I'm not getting paranoid about that but I think it happens and not just to me. It happens to other people too. I think managers have always been under fire. Quite rightly you don't sack players, they have to be developed through confidence. Managers are not unbreakable but everyone expects them to have skin like a rhinoceros, which is not the case. Everyone responds to being encouraged, managers are no different. But they need results. Lose a game and a whole week's work goes."

And that's just what happened against the sheep.

"We lost 1-0 to their only strike on target in 90 minutes. Last year we went there and scored four goals and this time we played as well. So it can be hard to measure results and performance."

"When wee things happen here they tend to be magnified, overblown," he said.
"So I have to have a perspective which has a fairness about it. I've got to ignore the hullabaloo. Like the David Beckham incident. I spoke to the boy and he didn't know what I was talking about. He genuinely didn't know"

"Even Roy [Keane], Roy has never done anything like the [Jason] McAteer one. And it was just like a wee schoolboy dig." Surely not? "Well, it wasn't 'take that, ya bastard.' It was just stupid but Roy knows that. It was petty."

The injury list

"My thinking over the past few weeks was to operate on those players suffering with injury and get it over with. Take the poison now and hopefully stabilise the club, keep in the frame and then around December time pick it up.

"There is no magic wand, so we've had to maintain the confidence of the team, maintain consistency - and in the main we've dominated games, knowing fully that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Ruud van Nistelrooy will come again and score goals. It's been about keeping the situation in check. If I was to panic, given my experience at this club, there would be something wrong."

All the talk of a successor doesn't phase the boss

"That's something that doesn't concern me. The important thing is to maintain a successful club and let the future look after itself. And it will.

"There have been cultural changes in that we've got a Brazilian youth coach, we've got a Dutch schoolboy coach, a Portuguese coach with me, and that's to deal with the different cultures within the club. It'll carry on, we've got good staff here and the structure here is about winning things. We address the future well here."