‘IF YOU HAVE BEEN WONDERING WHY Sir Alex Ferguson is going publicly nuts, I have the answer. He is a failure. He is aware of this — deeply, agonisingly aware — but will not admit it, neither to himself nor to any one else. And the strain of knowing that he is a failure while trying to maintain the belief that he is not a failure is tearing him apart.
We are talking about a pretty rarefied form of failure here, admittedly, but every failure hurts. And perhaps it is more painful to fail to win the greatest prize of all than it is to fail with a little prize of no account. I wouldn’t know; like most of us, I have never had the chance to find out.
But Ferguson has failed in the way that Margaret Thatcher failed, in the way that Harold Wilson failed. He got where he wanted to be, but he didn’t stay there. He didn’t do all he had planned to do. He climbed Everest, he flew to the moon, but he came straight back down to earth again. And he wanted to stay.
Under his management, Manchester United won the European Cup. Once, in 1999, and it is not enough. He wanted to make Manchester United like Real Madrid (1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960) or Ajax (1971, 1972, 1973) or Bayern Munich (1974, 1975, 1976) or Liverpool (1977, 1978, 1981, 1984).
Thatcher wanted to go on and on and on — the very words were her undoing. Wilson wanted to make Labour "the natural party of government". Ferguson wanted to go on and on and on, making Manchester United the natural champions of Europe.
What he has achieved would last most footballing men for several lifetimes but he has fallen short in what he most wanted for himself — what he believed was in his grasp. He knows it, and that knowledge is destroying him.
The sense of failure has driven him into snarling self-caricature in that he is now a ringer for the Peter Cook character who beats a man senseless for saying hello. "Don’t you f****** hello me, mate".
Ferguson’s crisis is not the same as everybody else’s crisis, but it is crisis nonetheless. His team is losing too many matches and every suggestion that this is happening is met with increasingly disturbing outbreaks of rage. With each defeat, with each tantrum, Ferguson is making himself — and he has no copyright on the phrase — a f****** idiot.’