ATKINSON: FERGUSON EXAGGERATED DRINKING CLAIMS
ALEX Ferguson got it wrong when he said he inherited a club with a drink problem at Manchester United, his predecessor Ron Atkinson has declared in a new autobiography in which he says the idea his players were drinking themselves into oblivion was a “massive exaggeration”.
Ferguson titled the chapter of his autobiography covering his first months at Old Trafford as “Drinking to Failure” and criticised Atkinson’s timing in holding a leaving party with United players “48 hours before they were due to play an away match at Oxford”.
But Atkinson insists in his book, The Manager, that captain Bryan Robson complained that he couldn’t get his teammates to go and that other clubs, including the imperious Liverpool side of the mid-1980s, drank vast amounts of alcohol.
“Under me Manchester United were a team that were supposed to have drunk themselves into oblivion,” Atkinson writes. “That was a massive exaggeration. Alcohol was part of the temper of the times in English football and it was not confined to Manchester United.
“I once joined Liverpool on a post-season tour to Israel and I could not believe the amounts of booze that team put away; even those you wouldn’t suspect were big drinkers, like Alan Hansen. Everton won two championships with Howard Kendall taking his team to Chinatown most Tuesday afternoons.”
Ferguson described how he replaced Atkinson’s “feeble prohibition” of a ban on drinking less than two days before a game with a rule that no one drink while in training. He said what he inherited after arriving from Aberdeen in 1986 was “almost as much of a social club as a football club”.
He described Paul McGrath and Norman Whiteside as players he sold because he could not recover them from excess drink.
But Atkinson says in the book that far from being the players who were “difficult to manage” as Ferguson had suggested, McGrath and Whiteside were “very easy to manage” and were sent into their alcohol-fuelled downward spiral when injuries side-lined them.
McGrath’s success at Aston Villa after Ferguson sold him demonstrated he was not such a malign presence and lost cause, as Ferguson suggested, states Atkinson, who later managed the defender again at Villa Park.
“Paul had pace and he had power,” he writes.
“He became, for what my opinion is worth, the best centre half the Premier League has seen. After I left Old Trafford, Manchester United tried to finish him. Fergie wanted to cash in on the insurance, accept his knee injury was chronic and in return for that Paul would get a payoff and a testimonial in Dublin. Had they offered him more money, Paul might have accepted, which would have meant his career would have been over in 1989, a few years before it reached its peak at Villa.”