Benitez is such a lad!

Rafa: My List Of TRUE FACTS

The wife send me to Marks and Spencer. She give me shopping list. I find this inspirational. I get home, I write my own list. But this is not just a list. This is a sane, rational, truthful list. Full of true FACTS.


* FACT: Mr Ferguson is a computer expert who uses his Nintendo Wii to hack into FA fixture computer in order to get the matches that suit him. He also can score over 200 on Nintendo Wii bowling by cheating.

* FACT: Mr Ferguson personally referees games in disguise. This is a talent he acquired in the 1970s when he replaced Peter Gabriel in Genesis. This is a fact that THEY do not want you to know. By THEM I refer to Phil Collins especially.

* FACT: The cunning of Mr Ferguson knows no bounds. He unsettles visiting teams at Manchester United by sending radio-controlled mice into the away dressing room with the purpose of to steal clothes, spy on tactical team talks and frighten Fernando Torres.

* FACT: Mr Ferguson has a big kennel in his garden where he keeps selected Premier League referees, which he feeds on dog biscuits and honeyed words.

* FACT: Mr Ferguson was arrested for his part in the 1993 Waco Siege yet walked away a free man. That very year, the Premiership was introduced and Manchester United won it. Coincidence? OPEN YOUR EYES.

* FACT: Manchester is suspiciously close to Liverpool. How convenient. I will say no more, for he is listening.

* FACT: And watching too. His eyes are everywhere. Only just now, in the supermarket, I see a man who look very much exactly like referee Steve Bennett talking on the phone while buying a tin of shortbread. No doubt he was on the phone to Ferguson.

* FACT: He is clever too, the man Bennett. He speaked on the phone so to throw me off the scent and saying "Yes dear...no dear...no I haven't forgotten...I am just buying the bloody shortbread now...Yes, I'll pick up some flowers for your mother...No dear I am not going to pub". But not clever enough. I know real Mr Ferguson would never choose flowers over pub.

* FACT: For that was a decoy Bennett. The real one is follow me back to my car waving red card for poor Javier Mascherano. I run. I am shouting: "Get this man away from me." I grab policeman and say: "He is behind me, asking me for Respect but bullying my player."

* FACT: The policeman say: "There is nobody behind you, sir. Are you feeling alright?"

* FACT: Mr Ferguson is even better than I thought. He has mastered the devilry of invisibility. I must return to Anfield manager's office (coated with tin foil to stop HIS EYE being upon me) at once.

* FACT: Kevin Keegan phone up to say: "You've got the bugger right where you want him, Rafa. Let's plan what you're going to say this weekend."

Clearly made up by John Nicholson and Alan Tyers

http://football365.com/story/0,17033,8751_4784094,00.html

kas wrote:
* FACT: Mr Ferguson was arrested for his part in the 1993 Waco Siege yet walked away a free man. That very year, the Premiership was introduced and Manchester United won it. Coincidence? OPEN YOUR EYES.

My personal favourite:

* FACT: He is clever too, the man Bennett. He speaked on the phone so to throw me off the scent and saying "Yes dear...no dear...no I haven't forgotten...I am just buying the bloody shortbread now...Yes, I'll pick up some flowers for your mother...No dear I am not going to pub". But not clever enough. I know real Mr Ferguson would never choose flowers over pub.

The Keegan thing is totally overblown, all of this stuff is. Fergies mindgames probably have about 0.1% influence on the game compared to all the other factors to calculate in.

This whole thing is created by the self-important media, wrongly thinking they have an affect on anything. This whole tiff will have no impact on the title race.

Benitez should have stayed on his high horse. The one Wenger kept falling off all those years.

Six wrote:The Keegan thing is totally overblown, all of this stuff is. Fergies mindgames probably have about 0.1% influence on the game compared to all the other factors to calculate in.

This whole thing is created by the self-important media, wrongly thinking they have an affect on anything. This whole tiff will have no impact on the title race.

Benitez should have stayed on his high horse. The one Wenger kept falling off all those years.

On Second Thoughts: Sir Alex Ferguson's mind games

The Manchester United manager is considered the master of mental manipulation, but his press promptings don't really have any effect at all

History, it's no great revelation to report, is written by the victors. So the story of the denouement to the 1995/96 Premiership battle between Manchester United and Newcastle is told like this.

After seeing his team squeeze past a resolute Leeds, Alex Ferguson craftily wondered aloud whether Howard Wilkinson's struggling side would try as hard against Newcastle in their upcoming fixture. Kevin Keegan's side would win that game but, incandescent with post-match rage, the Newcastle boss responded to Ferguson's slight on Leeds by losing the place completely live on national television. Newcastle subsequently self-combusted and Ferguson, credited with unsettling his rival at a crucial stage of the season, scuttled off with the prize. All hail the master of mind manipulation, the patriarch of paranormal prompting, the supreme sovereign of soccer-centric psychological suggestion.

It's a lovely story, that, the way it pans out. Sadly, whether it stands up to scrutiny is another matter. Here's another way of telling it.

After seeing his team squeeze past a resolute Leeds, Ferguson had good reason to be worried. United had previously just lost at Southampton, and followed that performance by making a right old meal of it against Wilkinson's struggling side, who were down to 10 men for 73 minutes – and with defender Lucas Radebe in goal after keeper Mark Beeney had been sent off. United were "muddled and nondescript", reported the Guardian's legendary football correspondent David Lacey. "Carlton Palmer was the best player on the field," read Lacey's damning verdict the day after, "which said much about the poverty of Manchester United's football as it did for Palmer's rare display of vision and consistently good passing." Roy Keane had hauled his men out of bother with a slightly fortuitous late winner, latching on to Paul Scholes's deflected shot, but there was no doubting United had mislaid their form at exactly the wrong time of the campaign.

After the match, Ferguson gave the interview that would eventually send Keegan into meltdown. "I can't understand the Leeds players," his diatribe began. "I'm absolutely in support of their manager. He doesn't deserve his players. If they had played like that all season they'd be near the top. They raised their game because they were playing Manchester United. It was pathetic. I think we can accept any club coming here and trying their hardest, so long as they do it every week."

That interview, and subsequent events, effectively sealed Ferguson's status as football's king of mind games, but it is scattergun at best. Like his first indigo-hued attack on Arsène Wenger after a 3-2 home defeat to Derby in April 1997 – "Wenger has been in Japan … he doesn't know anything about English football … he's at a big club, well, they used to be a big club, Arsenal … he should keep his mouth shut, firmly shut" – it seemed primarily designed to deflect attention away from a poor performance. Certainly it fails to stand up as part of a carefully considered psychological masterplan – a reading that sits uneasily with the now-common perception of a mind-games guru toying with a hapless foe, idly flicking chess pieces around a board while stroking a cat. In fact, given his response to Southampton's first-half three-goal salvo the weekend before – a wholly irrational half-time decision to order his side back out in different-coloured shirts – it could be argued that Fergie seemed to be cracking a wee bit himself.

Anyway, by this stage, Newcastle were already buckling under the pressure of trying to bring the title to St James' Park for the first time since 1927: they had lost their last three away games, at Arsenal, at Liverpool in that game, and at Blackburn. So whether Ferguson's remarks and Keegan's subsequent outburst accelerated an already worrying trend for Newcastle should – but somehow doesn't – remain a moot point.

Hindsight distorts, especially as Newcastle drew their last two games, so it's also easy to forget that, at the time, some even questioned the sagacity of Fergie's gambit, such as it was. "Ferguson's tactics could backfire on him," opined Stephen Smith, a chartered psychologist specialising in sports personalities, in the Guardian a couple of days after Keegan flipped his lid on Sky. "Monday's outburst may act as a catharsis … if Ferguson's comments were a calculated manoeuvre, it has met with only limited success … Newcastle's players now have a vital role. They must have noted the effect this has had on their likeable and honest manager … if they feel Keegan has been unfairly treated by their common foe, their Goliath, it could be the best spur they have for greater motivation and team cohesiveness."

Of course Newcastle's players failed to respond as Smith suggested they might, but it would be wrong to dismiss his analysis as woefully wide of the mark. Because the year before, Fergie's Amazing Mind Games had exactly that effect on the opposition. Having already stated that "Blackburn will have to finish like Devon Loch to give us any chance", Ferguson over-egged the pudding, going on to question the "bottle" of Kenny Dalglish's side. Rovers did indeed stumble badly as they approached the line, but Ferguson's "bottle" remark would galvanise the side in a crucial late-season fixture against Newcastle.

Rovers won that game – the penultimate of a season that would eventually be decided by one point – by one goal to nil, despite Newcastle battering away at them for the majority of the match. Tim Flowers made five superlative saves, and after the game was happy to respond to Ferguson's taunts. "Don't talk to me about bottle," he told Sky, "don't talk to me about bottling it, cos that's bottle out there. That's quality players out there, giving their all … we're gonna fight to the death, cos we've got bottle … all we can say is we'll give exactly what we've given today, exactly what we've given all season, and that's 100% bottle." Bottle, bottle, bottle, bottle, bottle. Fergie's remarks, as Smith suggested they could have been for Newcastle, had certainly been a "spur for greater motivation and team cohesiveness" to Blackburn. The result: Manchester United 0 Blackburn Rovers 1 (Ferguson og).

It's a thin line between genius and folly. But somehow Ferguson's reputation as psychological mastermind wins out whatever occurs. Perhaps mindful that his goading appeared to affect the combustible Keegan, but had no purchase whatsoever on the more measured Dalglish. Ferguson has, contrary to received wisdom, rarely tried it on since. Playground retorts don't get under the skin of sensible grown-ups – and so his spats with Wenger and Jose Mourinho, while amusing distractions for sure, were usually harmless blasts of hot air, bouts of media showboating that failed to change the course of a single season. In fact, the one time Fergie did seriously attempt to stir up a hornet's nest, ahead of United's 2003 Champions League quarter-final with Real Madrid – by accusing Uefa of fixing a "nice draw" for Spanish and Italian sides, while demanding a "strong" referee to keep an eye on Real's "dirty tricks" – he came a terrible cropper, Real steamrollering his team 3-1 at the Bernabeu before the original Ronaldo came to Old Trafford and slotted away an outrageous hat-trick in a 4-3 United win that flattered the home side immensely.

And yet the myth persists, to the point that one only has to imagine how the headlines of the past week would have played had Ferguson quietly read out some gently amusing pre-written pot-stirring words, and Rafael Benítez responded by resorting to personal abuse and branding his opponent "angry" and "disturbed". This ever-so-tedious spat was immediately filed under Mind Games, so the feeling persists that, either way, Fergie was going to be hailed the winner.

Thing is, though, whose fault is that? Or, indeed, any of this? Not Ferguson's. It's the media who are to blame for propagating this myth, a result of the unhinged importance placed on jabberings made during the immediate aftermaths of hotly contested games, or musings made to fill the dead-air time of Friday-afternoon press conferences. And it makes you wonder: who has really lost out as a result of these supposed mind games? Keegan? (Newcastle were shot through anyway.) Benítez? (Nobody knows how that will pan out, at least until United aren't awarded a penalty for the next three seasons.) Or could it be Ferguson himself?

Take one example: arguably the bravest thing one of the greatest managers in the history of British football has ever done is to wantonly dismantle his first great United side – a Double-winning one to boot – and fill his teamsheet with kids: in a Manchester Evening News poll that summer, more than half the respondents wanted Ferguson sacked. Then, in that new team's virgin season, Fergie led them to a then-unprecedented second Double. That achievement (along with Eric Cantona's remarkable contribution to United's successful run-in, but that's another story) is rarely recalled these days. Partly because Ferguson has won a few more league titles, a couple of European Cups, and a Treble since, so it doesn't seem to matter so much. But mainly because there's one thing, over everything else that happened that year, which everyone remembers the 1995/96 season for. That thing being? Yep, you got that straight.

So one of the most remarkable managerial decisions in English football has been dwarfed in the history books by a few throwaway lines uttered into a microphone at the heat of the moment. Well, there's only one response anyone in their right mind should give to that: "I would love it if this myth could be laid to rest for ever. Love it."

Posted by Scott Murray Thursday 15 January 2009 11.13 GMT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2009/jan/15/sir-alex-ferguson-mind-games

One of them gets it!