BIG RON: I DON’T THINK FOR A MINUTE UNITED WILL MAKE THE TOP FOUR
‘United in transition? Barca don’t have seasons in transition.’
‘I’m the only English manager to win a trophy with three different teams. I love that one!’
BIG RON has turned up with a big cut on his head, the unfortunate result of a fall while walking his dogs, Max and Mia, on a golf course near his home in the West Midlands.
‘I always carry a club and half a dozen balls in my pocket in case there’s nobody about,’ he explains. ‘Gordon Strachan calls it my barbecue club, an old big-headed iron thing.
‘I was walking down a wet slope and went flying. I’m lying in the mud and this thing has come down and hit me on the head.
‘I’m covered in mud on one side and blood on the other. Claret everywhere. I was in A&E till three in the morning having six stitches. It’s the first time that club has hit anything right!’
He may be 80 but Ron Atkinson is still great company and good for a one-liner. It’s 33 years since he was sacked by Manchester United to make way for Alex Ferguson, after a return of 13 points from the first 13 games in 1986-87.
No United managers have come closer to replicating that kind of start than Ferguson in 1988 and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer this season.
Whereas Atkinson got the bullet, he believes United should give
Solskjaer more time despite the temptation of seeing Mauricio Pochettino on the job market.
‘Unless it’s an absolute disaster they should stick with what they’ve got until the end of the season at least,’ says Atkinson, freshly tanned from a break at his holiday home in Tenerife, when we meet at a hotel near his house.
‘He should be given the January window. I know it’s not that easy to deal in it but his first three signings (Harry Maguire, Aaron Wan-Bissaka and Dan James) are decent. If Maguire had gone to Manchester City, they would win the league.
‘The Pochettino thing complicates it a bit. It was mentioned even when he was in a job at Tottenham. Now he’s out of a job it will be talked about even more.’
Atkinson has watched them come and go at United since Ferguson retired in 2013. ‘David Moyes was on a six-year contract and thought he was on a rebuild from start to finish,’ he says. ‘At the time, they were talking about transition. Barcelona don’t have a transitional period. Now United are in one — I don’t think for a minute they’ll make the top four.
‘Louis van Gaal was certainly different. At times I thought he made Jose Mourinho look like a shrinking violet. I was manager of Manchester United and also played against them. If you were the opposing manager at Old Trafford, I would say, “As soon as you go out that door, be on your toes because they will come for you hell for leather in the first 20 minutes”.
‘When I was in the other dugout I would say, “They’re expecting it, don’t disappoint them”. I don’t think Van Gaal bought into that.
‘I was a big Mourinho fan but he didn’t lighten up enough for me. Instead of saying after a game, “We got away with that today”, he’d start putting fingers up saying, “I’ve won five”. Don’t do it.
‘When he first came to Chelsea he was abrasive but funny abrasive. Maybe he can rediscover that at Tottenham. I hope he does.’
Mourinho and Van Gaal were criticised for a lack of entertaining football at Old Trafford. It got Dave Sexton the sack when he was replaced by Big Ron in 1981.
During his five and a half years at Old Trafford, Atkinson put a spring back in United’s step, winning the FA Cup in 1983 and 1985. He finished in the top four every season but a failure to end the club’s long wait for the title proved his undoing.
He returned from watching the 1986 World Cup in Mexico convinced that his old friend Ferguson, the Aberdeen boss and Scotland caretaker, had been tapped up by United.
‘I was led to believe from a source out in Mexico that he had,’ says Atkinson. ‘It’s understandable. If I was a chairman and thinking of changing manager I would be identifying who my next one would be. It’s possible before the Mark Robins goal (the winner in the
FA Cup third round at Nottingham Forest in 1990, when United went on to lift the first trophy under Ferguson and probably saved him from the sack) it might have gone on somewhere else.’
Atkinson recalls an awkward encounter with Ferguson when he noticed the Scot couldn’t look him in the eye. Shortly afterwards, Atkinson was sacked and replaced by Ferguson on November 6, 1986.
‘We weren’t kids, you know what goes on,’ he says. ‘One of my best mates was John Bond. When I was at West Brom, we were doing ever so well and he was in the boardroom. One of the directors came over and said, “Is he a mate of yours?” I said “Yes”. “Well he’s just asked me for your job”.’
Would Atkinson have delivered the title if United had stuck with him and not gone for Ferguson? ‘I really don’t know. I’m disappointed we never won the league. Que
sera. I moved on and a lot of good things happened afterwards.’
Things may have worked out differently if he had signed England’s Terry Butcher after the 1986 World Cup to partner Paul McGrath in central defence.
Butcher was not the only big name to slip through his fingers, among them Gary Lineker, Glenn Hoddle, Liam Brady, Trevor Francis and Ruud Gullit — ‘I was told he played an instrument in a group and wouldn’t leave Holland’.
Then again, if Liverpool hadn’t spent their money beating United to sign Brighton’s Mark Lawrenson, Atkinson believes Bryan Robson could have ended up at Anfield. Instead, Robson followed Atkinson to United from West Brom for a British record fee of £1.5million, a deal that led to Sir Matt Busby quitting the board.
‘I was at the meeting when Sir Matt did it and I promise you he didn’t do it acrimoniously. It wasn’t a fit of pique,’ Atkinson says. ‘He said, “You know what, I cannot come to terms with what’s going on in the game”. He’ll be turning in his grave.
‘Now I find £30m hard to fathom. That’s still a hard one. The game is awash with money but you could buy a town for that.’
Robson went on to become one of United’s greatest players. He was also at the centre of a drinking culture with Paul McGrath and Norman Whiteside that Ferguson was determined to stamp out. Atkinson thinks the situation was exaggerated and no worse than at Liverpool or Everton.
‘I knew what was going on. Very often Robbo would tell me,’ he says. ‘It was a culture but it was a northern European culture. It would be Saturday night after a game and maybe a Sunday afternoon. If there was nothing in
midweek, they may have a Tuesday night. Kevin Moran and gordon McQueen were as much in that. But they weren’t in there guzzling bottles of champagne and giving it large.
‘It wasn’t something particular to us, either. I went to Israel with Liverpool — Alan hansen, all of them — and I couldn’t believe it. Ian rush was there, Terry McDermott. I wouldn’t let our lot go out with the Liverpool lads. I warned robbo off that.’
Atkinson earned something of a champagne image himself. he chuckles when he recalls summoning robson to his hotel room for a dressing-down after missing training on a tour of hong Kong and the two men getting drunk on several bottles of bubbly instead.
‘I never drank beer,’ he says. ‘And I’ve no idea where Big ron came from, because my nickname as a player was Tank. I played for ron
Saunders who said you cannot enjoy football. I said, “Well I do”.
‘I’ve enjoyed life. I don’t see that as a crime at all. I don’t think anyone in the game has ever worked harder than me at doing their job.’
It took Atkinson to nine clubs as a manager. he went to Atletico Madrid having previously been approached by Barcelona after engineering united’s European Cup-Winners’ Cup win over the Spanish giants in 1984. he twice beat Ferguson’s united in League Cup finals with Sheffield Wednesday and Aston Villa.
‘I’m the only English manager to win a major (domestic) trophy with three different teams. get that one in, I love that one!’ says Atkinson, turning up the collar of his shirt and jutting out his jaw.
‘I’ve had eight top-four finishes which almost gets you a knighthood these days.’ one of the great characters of English football went into the commentary box with ITV and covered six World Cups.
he would have stayed longer but for a racially offensive comment about Chelsea defender Marcel Desailly in 2004 that was picked up on studio mircophones and inadvertently broadcast to parts of the Middle East. Atkinson lost his job.
The incident remains his greatest regret because he is proud of his work with black players, particularly at West Brom, where he oversaw the emergence of Cyrille regis, Laurie Cunningham and Brendon Batson.
recalling that fateful night, Atkinson says: ‘ people in the higher regions at ITV might have been a bit more supportive bearing in mind I was supposed to be the pioneer with black players.
‘I’m still a great believer that the overriding factor should be talent. I can remember going to Everton with Villa. I don’t think Everton had ever had a black player. We had eight in our 12. But they weren’t in the team because they were black, they were in because they were good enough.’
he made the most of his enforced exile, appearing on TV shows Big Ron Manager, Celebrity Big
Brother and Wife Swap. he even did Excuse My French, in which he had to learn the language in a month. ‘hilarious. It was like ’Allo ’Allo!’
More recently, he was back as a pundit on MuTV. It’s good to see Big ron in contact with his old club.
united, that is, not the golf iron.