FERGIE’S FIGHT FOR LIFE
Emergency surgery for brain bleed after Sir Alex is rushed to hospital following fall
SIR ALEX FERGUSON had emergency surgery for a brain haemorrhage last night after being rushed to hospital.
The 76-year-old former Manchester United manager, who led them to 38 trophies during his 26 years in charge of the club, is understood to have suffered a fall at home.
An ambulance was called to Ferguson’s house in Cheshire at about 9am yesterday and took him to Macclesfield District Hospital. The Scot was then transferred, with a police escort, to be treated at Salford Royal.
His son Darren, the Doncaster Rovers manager, missed his club’s final league game to be by his father’s bedside after being told of the news.
Later the family were said to be pleased with how the operation went and a Manchester United statement read: ‘Sir Alex has undergone emergency surgery today for a brain haemorrhage. The procedure has gone very well but he needs a period of intensive care to optimise his recovery. His family request privacy in this matter.’
The club later tweeted: ‘We will keep Sir Alex and his loved ones in our thoughts during this time, and we are united in our wish to see him make a comfortable, speedy recovery.’
United players were made aware of Ferguson’s condition before the information was made public and the statement issued by the club.
Ferguson, who led Aberdeen to Cup Winners’ Cup glory in 1983 and managed Scotland at the 1986 World Cup, was on the pitch at Old Trafford last Sunday, when he presented retiring Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger with a commemorative trophy.
As a host of football figures and clubs rallied round to give support to the United legend, last night Wenger told The Mail on Sunday: ‘I am concerned and I’m thinking about him and his family. I trust his strength and his strong character will get him well very quickly.’
Messages of goodwill poured in from fierce rivals Liverpool and Chelsea, while Manchester City captain Vincent Kompany also took to social media to say: ‘Hang on in there Sir Alex. Thoughts are with the family and close ones.’
In 2003, Ferguson was admitted to
SIR ALEX FERGUSON often seemed invincible as a football manager. Last night the world of football was wishing him well and hoping that would also prove to be the case for the 76-year-old Manchester United boss, following the surgery on a brain haemorrhage.
Just a week ago he stood alongside his old adversary, Arsene Wenger and presented him with an engraved vase marking his achievements as the Frenchman visited Old Trafford for the last time as Arsenal manager.
They both beckoned the current United manager, Jose Mourinho, to join them. He did briefly and so there was a snapshot of three men who represent 19 titles from the past 25 years. That was pretty much the history of the Premier League greats in one photo.
But Mourinho resisted the invitation to stay and lingered only briefly. He can be crass in press conferences but, in real life, Mourinho reads situations perfectly. He knew this moment was instinctively about these two men and not him. Between them they represented 49 years of service to two great clubs.
Like Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, or Seb Coe and Steve Ovett, these two were at one time defined by each other. To Ferguson, Wenger was initially the ‘novice’ who should stick to talking about Japanese football, from whence he came. And his team were ‘a disgrace’ particularly when they flicked pizza at him in the Old Trafford tunnel.
So some disliked last week’s show of affection, the peace pact made public. They yearned for the angrier days when, at the peaks of their powers, these two greats traded insults off the pitch before sending warriors such as Patrick Vieira and Roy Keane to do battle on it.
Yet in reality, last Sunday’s scene was as much a part of Sir Alex’s greatness as the aggression and belligerence which also characterised his career. A man with just those qualities would merely be a bully.
And though he has latterly recognised that at times his infamous hairdryer rants crossed a line, Sir Alex is much more than that. His charm is genuine and his smile can dominate a room and lighten it. In his career we didn’t often see that side of him. But his players did.
That is why Wenger was moved to embrace him. It’s hard to resist the lure of Ferguson’s charisma. And for the past 10 years, Ferguson and Wenger have been dining partners by Lake Geneva in Nyon, where they meet at UEFA’s convention for coaches.
These two extraordinarily wellread and intelligent managers, one entirely self-taught and the other a university graduate, discuss economics, literature and politics equally adroitly. Presumably occasionally they turn the talk to football. But both have always had wider interests, a hinterland, a quality the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey insisted was necessary for a successful politician. It seems the same applies to football managers.
Players would recall, in those early days at United, where success hardly seemed inevitable and the sack more likely, he would head down to The Cliff training ground on Thursday nights to watch the Under-16s train. They were nobodies at the time, run of the mill local boys with names like Paul Scholes, Gary Neville and Nicky Butt and a Londoner called David Beckham. But Ferguson not only got to know each and every one of them as youths. He would get to know their parents and their siblings too.
If he was going to rebuild United, he would do so from the foundations upwards. He would never been given that time now. Instead, there would be a £300million summer spend to revive fortunes instantly.
But though his greatest gift was never to grow old in the job, always adapting to modernity, and thus was willing to spend big when the time came, he was from a different era, where clubs were only as good as their youth scouts. He was horrified to discover on his arrival that Manchester City’s were better. They weren’t for long.
He was fiercely protective of his players. Gary Neville recalls that the focus of fury when Keane was locked up by police on a club night out was not his skipper, but his team-mates. ‘Why didn’t you ring me?’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this was happening? You’ve all gone home and got into your beds and left one of your team-mates on his own! Why didn’t any of you think to tell me?’
But it is his ability to stay so young in an industry that ages men in the matter of weeks which has always been his principal gift. Fundamentally, he simply seems to like young people and never wearies of them, whatever odd musical tastes, bizarre clothes or strange haircuts they embraced.
And he seemed to have found mental tricks to ensure he stayed sharp. In his last season, in 2013, before his last-ever game against Liverpool, he began regaling a small group of journalists on the rivalry between the two great cities and how it all went back to the building of the Manchester Ship Canal, which allowed Salford Docks to undercut Liverpool.
For a terrible moment he seemed to have forgotten the name of the engineer behind its construction. ‘I know this,’ he told himself, annoyed that the name had slipped his mind. It not being entirely relevant to the outcome of the game that coming Sunday nor conducive to a headline, it was suggested we might move on. But he would not. It was important to him to recover the name from his memory bank. It took a good 20 seconds of silence and shuffling of feet but of course, it came.
‘Sir Edward Williams,’ he said triumphantly. And then we could move on to Brendan Rodgers and Luis Suarez. In that moment both his determination and singlemindedness were evident.
Somehow, unlike Wenger, when he chose to go, he managed to go out at the top, with a Premier League title in 2013.
Football managers share the fate of boxers and politicians in that they don’t usually get to pick the time of exit nor script it as a happy ending. That he could was down to his genius, that ability neither to wither nor grow old.
And that is why his vulnerability now seems so incongruous. It doesn’t seem right and it is to be hoped it is but a brief pause in his busy retirement schedule of United games, racing days and University lectures. Football will wish him well.
As Wenger will testify, even those who have identified him as a professional enemy at one time, usually get round to embracing him in the end.