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| The sorry saga of David Moyes won't shake Sir Alex Ferguson's self-belief | The sorry saga of David Moyes won't shake Sir Alex Ferguson's self-belief |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| The one thing it isn't, I'm afraid, is "hugely embarrassing for Sir Alex Ferguson". Quite how put out you are by that ineluctable truth is a matter of personal taste. You may in fact find it very palatable that the former Manchester United titan will regard himself as entirely unbesmirched by the sorry saga that on Tuesday saw his chosen successor find his desk in the lift. Or you may wish fervently that a chastened Ferguson were sitting right now in a luxury hotel room, crying his humiliated little heart out, as José Mourinho reportedly did after learning the United manager's job would be going to David Moyes in the first place. | |
| But to adopt either position counts as what the pop psychologists would categorise as projecting. Something can only really be deemed embarrassing if there is an embarrassee, and to imagine that Ferguson is fundamentally questioning himself at this juncture is to misunderstand the man, and everything that experience should have taught those who had the opportunity to observe him for so long. | But to adopt either position counts as what the pop psychologists would categorise as projecting. Something can only really be deemed embarrassing if there is an embarrassee, and to imagine that Ferguson is fundamentally questioning himself at this juncture is to misunderstand the man, and everything that experience should have taught those who had the opportunity to observe him for so long. |
| People don't change. And 72-year-old people change even less. You don't achieve the vast success that Ferguson did by taking long, agonising looks at yourself, whatever the self-help book industry pretends. Self-reflection is obviously required on occasion but only as a function of self-interest: to enable the elimination of mistakes that are preventing the benighted from realising your primacy. Whether motivated by fear of failure or the desire to win, the victor's personality type requires the constant assertion of the self – a self in which one can only place the most fervent and unshakeable belief. As Ferguson himself stressed time and again in interviews during his managerial career: there is absolutely no room for self-doubt. And if there wasn't then, there certainly won't be now. He's just not wired for it. | |
| Even if he eventually acknowledges the Moyes debacle by tossing out some cursory platitude about taking responsibility, Ferguson will be reducing that phrase to levels of meaninglessness unchanced even by Tony Blair. Of course, if you collect instances of people in public life claiming to take responsibility when they are doing anything but, you may be vaguely disappointed that the opportunities for Ferguson to deploy the line are rather diminished since he took a backroom role. We won't hear his answers to any questions asked about it under the Chatham House rules of his lucrative speaking engagements. And even if the Moyes sacking had happened a week or two previously, I suspect it would not have been an area Christies dared visit in its puff interview to mark Fergie's decision to offload an estimated £3m of his bin-ends, in a fine wine auction that once again reminds us what an idiosyncratic stripe of socialist he really is. | Even if he eventually acknowledges the Moyes debacle by tossing out some cursory platitude about taking responsibility, Ferguson will be reducing that phrase to levels of meaninglessness unchanced even by Tony Blair. Of course, if you collect instances of people in public life claiming to take responsibility when they are doing anything but, you may be vaguely disappointed that the opportunities for Ferguson to deploy the line are rather diminished since he took a backroom role. We won't hear his answers to any questions asked about it under the Chatham House rules of his lucrative speaking engagements. And even if the Moyes sacking had happened a week or two previously, I suspect it would not have been an area Christies dared visit in its puff interview to mark Fergie's decision to offload an estimated £3m of his bin-ends, in a fine wine auction that once again reminds us what an idiosyncratic stripe of socialist he really is. |
| Obviously, only the maddest conspiracists – the Old Trafford truthers who see it all as an inside job – could possibly think that Ferguson actually wanted Moyes to fail. But now that he has, the reality is that his predecessor will see that failure as something that underscores his inimitable success, because that is the nature of the beast. | |
| Not that you'd know it from the way the Moyes fallout is being talked about in many quarters. If there are arenas in which psychology is more routinely misread than in top-flight football, I should love to know what they are. Just as the idea of Ferguson and Mourinho's mutual adoration society was peddled and promulgated for years, and turned out to be complete cobblers, so too will the notion that Ferguson must be experiencing some sort of shaming epiphany on the Moyes appointment he famously made. | Not that you'd know it from the way the Moyes fallout is being talked about in many quarters. If there are arenas in which psychology is more routinely misread than in top-flight football, I should love to know what they are. Just as the idea of Ferguson and Mourinho's mutual adoration society was peddled and promulgated for years, and turned out to be complete cobblers, so too will the notion that Ferguson must be experiencing some sort of shaming epiphany on the Moyes appointment he famously made. |
| This idea of the great embarrassment was a line which anyone with a Ladybird-level appreciation of human psychology surely should have tired of hearing four minutes after Manchester United formally announced their decision to part company with Moyes. (Incidentally, those minded by the saga to call into question United's fabled classiness should note that the club announced the news in a tweet prefaced by the word "Breaking". Ought news really to be described as breaking by the club whose news it is? One for the Bumper Book of Premier League Etiquette, perhaps.) If anything, and despite appearing to be in contravention of much that Ferguson held dear, the manner in which Moyes' sacking was handled will reinforce his sense of self as opposed to result in any introspective self-flagellation. | |
| Contrary to what many seem to imagine, it will be perfectly possible for a personality type like Ferguson to fold the entire foul-up into his personal mythology. Oh, Sir Alex knows what people are saying: that telling the papers before the man in question is the last word in tackiness. That banging on about time and loyalty and continuity and whatnot, and then ditching those so-called principles before the end of even a season, makes you look even sillier than the chap who thought you actually "played very well" against Everton at the weekend. That what has been belatedly knocked off its perch is the notion of Old Trafford as some halcyon idyll of yesteryear footballing values. He knows they'll be relishing the opportunity to point out that Manchester United is not a foreign country, and that they don't actually do things differently there. | Contrary to what many seem to imagine, it will be perfectly possible for a personality type like Ferguson to fold the entire foul-up into his personal mythology. Oh, Sir Alex knows what people are saying: that telling the papers before the man in question is the last word in tackiness. That banging on about time and loyalty and continuity and whatnot, and then ditching those so-called principles before the end of even a season, makes you look even sillier than the chap who thought you actually "played very well" against Everton at the weekend. That what has been belatedly knocked off its perch is the notion of Old Trafford as some halcyon idyll of yesteryear footballing values. He knows they'll be relishing the opportunity to point out that Manchester United is not a foreign country, and that they don't actually do things differently there. |
| "Ah," he'll be thinking, probably over a £1,500 glass of Margaux, "but they didn't in my day …" |