Sir Alex Ferguson reckons he’s either watched or been involved with around 2,800 football matches in his lifetime, and in his new book he recalls 21 of the most meaningful. Review by Alan Pattullo
Talk about measuring out your life in football matches. By picking out 21 games from not just his career but a lifetime spanning 84 years to date, Sir Alex Ferguson underlines that there’s nothing wrong with his cognitive abilities following the brain haemorrhage that meant his own final whistle almost blew in 2018.
The genesis for the book was the task he set himself a couple of years ago, possibly to help stimulate the grey matter, of calculating the number of games he’d either watched or been involved with to date.
He knew it was a large number but even he was surprised by the total. There were the 1,500 he had overseen as manager of Manchester United for a start. He reckons on another 655 in all competitions while working in Scotland for the national side, as well as Aberdeen, St Mirren and East Stirlingshire.
He even includes games he played in his schooldays for Govan High School and Glasgow City. He settles on a figure of around 2,800. This is before all the matches he’s watched on TV, which still averages out at about five a week. Now widowed following the death of his wife Cathy, to whom his latest book is dedicated, it’s a blessing that the game continues to hold him in thrall. “My bond with football began as a small boy and only deepened as the years went by,” he writes. “It has never wavered.”
As he once exclaimed while flushed with post-Champions League winning awe: “Football, bloody hell!” He makes the point that the game has taken him from a Glasgow tenement to Buckingham Palace, where he was bestowed with a knighthood while wearing his kilt two months after that victory over Bayern Munich in Barcelona.
Interestingly, that storied win – when United scored twice in “Fergie time” at the end to overturn the German side’s 1-0 lead – doesn’t feature in this book, nor does the second time he won the competition in 2008.
An Aberdeen fan I know says he quickly tossed this book back on the bookshelf in disgust at Ferguson choosing just one game from his celebrated time at Pittodrie. It isn’t even the one people would have expected: beating Real Madrid to lift the European Cup Winners’ Cup in 1983. Rather, Ferguson selects the game where Aberdeen won the Scottish title for only the second time in their history, the first time under him: Hibs 0 Aberdeen 5.
He explains he doesn’t wish to revisit old ground and has opted to look beyond games covered in exhaustive detail in previous autobiographies. This is his fourth memoir; another, A Light in the North from 1985, covers that glorious Aberdeen chapter.
Games of My Life, written in conjunction with billionaire author/venture capitalist Michael Moritz, is all the better for avoiding the obvious ones. Not that Sir Alex abides by any editorial guidance to stick to the matches in question. The chapters, though hinged on a specific game, spin out in all directions.
Ferguson heads down some roads less travelled in the context of his career. While Aberdeen’s fabled 2-1 win over Real Madrid in Gothenburg isn’t included among the 21 games, Albion Rovers 6 East Stirlingshire 2 – his first loss as East Stirlingshire manager – is.
“It wasn’t quite pub football, but it was far closer to that standard than it was to Celtic and Rangers,” he ventures of a period at the lowest rung of the senior game, where he wound up after calling quits on his playing career. He rolled up in his Ford estate at Firs Park just a couple of weeks before the start of the 1974-75 season.
His first 45 minutes as a manager were inauspicious to say the least: East Stirlingshire were 3-0 down against Forfar Athletic. But a three-goal comeback suggested Ferguson quickly mastered the art of the half-time talk. Either that or he’d already fired up the Hairdryer – that up close and personal verbal reprimand he patented. This ruminative, engrossing, slightly elegiac tome, which might very well be the final word, is less a blast of hot air, more a long warm bath in memories from a remarkable life in football. We really will never see his like again.
Games of My Life, by Alex Ferguson, Macmillan, £40
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