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    Stars tributes to Fergie

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    Parks lives


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    Post by Parks lives Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:25 pm

    Tributes have been flooding in for the legendary Sir Alex Ferguson

    Some of football's biggest names have paid tribute to Sir Alex Ferguson to mark his 20 years as manager at Manchester United.

    Ferguson's achievements during his time with the club have drawn acclaim from past and present players, managers and pundits alike.


    MANCHESTER UNITED PLAYERS PAST AND PRESENT
    "The thing is, you can't imagine life at United without him. One day it will happen, we are all aware of that, and when it does it will be a great shame because of what he has achieved here. But it won't be soon, because he is still desperate to win trophies"
    Midfielder Paul Scholes

    "It wouldn't surprise me if he carried on for five to 10 years longer. Why should he leave? He's as determined as ever. It's a continual challenge at this club, that will keep him young"
    Captain Gary Neville

    "His determination to be the best is constantly on show - even when we're watching The Weakest Link in our hotel he wants to win. He's a one-off and will rightly go down as the greatest ever manager"
    Defender John O'Shea

    "For him to keep going is remarkable. He stands out with his will to win, he knows football, he knows his players and he knows his own club inside-out"
    Former United captain Roy Keane

    "He is a man with a mission, Manchester United through and through. I'd say his drive was more important to our success than anything else"
    Former United midfielder David Beckham in his 2003 autobiography, My Side

    "He expected standards to be high and if you didn't reach those standards or you let them slip he would be quick to remind you. He is a fantastic man-manager and great to work under"
    Ex-United defender Denis Irwin



    PREMIERSHIP MANAGERS
    "When you think that the average life of a manager is one year and seven days, and somebody has done 20, it is a remarkable achievement. I feel we had some heated times - but time will settle things and there is a respect there now"
    Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger

    "I once rang him up and was on for 10 minutes about players and he told me about every player, their strengths and their weaknesses. I put the phone down and I said 'I bet he even knows the Dunfermline groundsman' so I rang him back and said 'Hey Alex, I forgot to ask you about the Dunfermline groundsman' and, by God, he did know his name and where he came from!"
    Sheffield United's Neil Warnock

    "I believe that Sir Alex is number one in England and one of the top two or three in the world. I have found him a nice person, you can talk to him without any problems
    Liverpool's Rafael Benitez

    "I know the pressure he has had to endure over such a long period, so for him to keep driving himself forward and driving his team forward is a fantastic achievement"
    Blackburn's Mark Hughes

    "You have to hold your hands up and say Sir Alex is the number one. He has been at the top for 20 years. His desire is unstinting, his passion and will to win fierce"
    Wigan's Paul Jewell

    "He is a shining light for any young manager who wants to progress. He is probably second to none for what he has done but you can still see that burning ambition in his eyes"
    Manchester City's Stuart Pearce

    "For what he knew was going to be a massive occasion, to change a player he had previously shown a massive allegiance to, showed that cold, cutting edge that all top managers need"
    Reading's Steve Coppell on Ferguson dropping Jim Leighton ahead of the 1990 FA Cup final replay against Coppell's Crystal Palace

    "He is the standard bearer for everyone in terms of management. You have to be a very special character to have that amount of success at a club like Manchester United"
    Middlesbrough's Gareth Southgate

    "Sir Alex is someone I have a great deal of respect for, and someone I would look to emulate one day. If I could match his record it would be fantastic"
    Watford's Adrian Boothroyd

    "Sir Alex is someone I certainly look up to because he is the one who wins things. He epitomises everything you need in football - stability and continuity, and United believed in him"
    Everton's David Moyes

    "I'll tell you why he's stayed in the game so long - he just loves it so much. It gets in your blood and you take the job home with you. He's a fantastic character, a top-class manager and a good man"
    Portsmouth's Harry Redknapp


    OTHER TRIBUTES FROM THE FOOTBALL WORLD
    "At the end of United's Treble-winning season in 1999, we were having a cup of tea at the training ground and he was already talking about what was needed for the season after. That's how he's been so successful!"
    England manager and ex-United assistant boss Steve McClaren

    "He is the best manager of his generation for me. I just know he is a special, special man - I knew he would be a success at United - absolutely no danger"
    Celtic boss and ex-Man Utd winger Gordon Strachan

    "People did not know how much he used to watch the youth team when the like of the Nevilles, Butt, Scholes and Beckham were in it, he knew every player well. Nobody at Old Trafford thought you could emulate Sir Matt Busby or beat his record. But Sir Alex did and that tells the tale"
    Former United youth coach Eric Harrison
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    Parks lives


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    Post by Parks lives Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:25 pm

    Await Ricardo and the like to say how shit he really was. Laughing
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    Post by Kimbo Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:26 pm

    Some of football's biggest names you say? scratch Laughing
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    Parks lives


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    Post by Parks lives Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:32 pm

    BBC's words. Razz

    Apart from O'Shea though, there all big names.
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    Post by Parks lives Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:37 pm

    Parks Lives wrote:
    "I believe that Sir Alex is number one in England and one of the top two or three in the world. I have found him a nice person, you can talk to him without any problems
    Liverpool's Rafael Benitez


    Btw, thats gotta hurt. Laughing
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    Post by Parks lives Sat Nov 04, 2006 12:52 pm

    Ferguson's United: one vision, two decades and a lot of silverware

    The people who know him best reveal how Fergie has survived for 20 years at the top.

    Daniel Taylor

    Ron Atkinson can still remember the exact time. It was 10.09am, November 6, 1986, when his car phone rang. The voice on the other end belonged to Pauline Temple, secretary to the Manchester United chairman Martin Edwards. "Ron," she said simply. "Could you pop into the ground? The chairman wants to see you. Right away, please!"

    A few hours later, as Atkinson cleared out his belongings, sacked for his failure to win the league championship, a black Mercedes nosed into The Cliff, United's old training ground. Out stepped the 44-year-old Alex Ferguson, then just a plain old Mister, for the first day of the rest of his life. "Alex got all the players in the gym," Bryan Robson recalls of that seminal moment. "He said: 'Everyone has got a fresh start and a chance. If you play well in training you will make the team. I'll judge everybody as we go along.' He made a very good first impression."

    It was a period of Merseyside football domination. United had not won the league since 1967 and carried the failure like a sack of bricks. The crowds had dropped below 40,000 and the team were next to bottom of Division One. A failing football club is a depressing place and Old Trafford in the 1980s was all simmering discontent.

    "He came down the stairs to meet everyone and he was intent on making sure we all knew who the new manager was straight away," says Norman Whiteside, the former midfielder. "It was not so much what he said, as the tone of his voice. We knew he meant business."

    Revolution to revulsion

    Slowly but surely, the revolution began. The hard way. Ferguson was alarmed by what he heard of the players' nocturnal habits and he encouraged a snitch mentality, employing a network of contacts throughout a 20-mile radius of Manchester. "I'm running a football club, not a drinking club," he complained shortly after taking over. When his warnings went unheeded, with players turning up for training reeking of alcohol and with nicotine-stained fingers, he started to get rid of the worst offenders, starting with Whiteside and Paul McGrath.

    "He made it clear what he wanted," says Robson, "so you either changed or you carried on what you were doing. He brought me in for a chat because I was captain and he said: 'I'm telling you now, I don't want drinking through the week. I want people to start cutting down on the alcohol because I don't like the stories I'm hearing.' I told the lads but he still heard stories about them. Inevitably, if anyone ignored him he would move them on."

    Restoring true greatness to Old Trafford was always going to be a long, drawn-out process and, three years in, the recovery was not going as quickly as the fans wanted. "Resign now. Do the decent thing," one supporter, Teresa McDonald, wrote in a "crisis" issue of the fanzine Red News in December 1989. The crowd chanted "Bye-bye Fergie". One fan, Pete Molyneux, took an old bedsheet and a pot of paint and created a banner that has gone down in folklore: "3 YEARS OF EXCUSES AND IT'S STILL CRAP . . . TA-RA FERGIE."

    The manager's job allegedly hung on the result of an FA Cup third-round tie at Nottingham Forest, one of the most feared teams of that era. United won 1-0, courtesy of a famous Mark Robins goal, yet Edwards argues the debate was never as cut and dried as was made out.

    "If I had listened to the fans and taken notes of what they were writing in their letters, Alex would have been sacked," he says. "But I always had great faith in Alex, even when things were not going well. There was a lot of paper talk that the board would be considering his future. But it was never an issue with the board or me because we knew what was happening further down the club."

    Golden Generation

    Emboldened, Ferguson went into the 1990s promising "a decade of success." The trophies quickly followed. First the FA Cup, then the European Cup Winners' Cup, followed by the League Cup and, crucially, the first of his eight league championships.

    He was showing himself to be the bravest manager of his time, and of probably any time. The youth system he had put in place was beginning to flower and in 1995 he dismantled his first great team to usher in the Golden Generation.

    "The really big one was when Mark Hughes left," says Gary Neville, one of the players to break through. "He was a huge player for United. But the manager had great faith in us. He had Paul Scholes and Nicky Butt to replace Paul Ince, David Beckham to replace Andrei Kanchelskis, and me to replace Paul Parker. He had incredible faith in us, a belief we didn't even possess ourselves. He thought we were good enough but, at the time, it was a huge call for him to make. But that's what he does better than anyone. He makes those calls. And that team of kids went on to win the Double that season."

    In 1999 they went even further, winning the league, the FA Cup and the European Cup. "He had a vision of young players, who grew up with the club, who loved the club and who had the spirit to take the club to a different level," says Neville. "In his early years at the club, Sir Matt Busby was still alive, he had an office here and the manager would talk to him. I am sure that played a part too."

    Pre-Abramovich, Fergie's achievements were as solid as the Old Trafford stadium. At the height of his reign they had a photograph in the match-day programme - a rubbish skip outside the ground, overflowing with empty tins of silver polish.

    Clinging to the top

    Yet among all the accolades that will be bestowed on the 64-year-old over the coming week it would be remiss to ignore the fact that a little of the legend has begun to unravel over the last few years. Even putting aside the emergence of Chelsea, there was the Rock of Gibraltar saga, an argument with one of the club's biggest shareholders that indirectly resulted in the Glazer family's takeover. There have been questions about many of his signings and the way he has fallen out with so many A-list players. David Beckham and Roy Keane were both fed to the sharks. Ruud van Nistelrooy was the latest to be fitted with concrete boots.

    There are many layers to Ferguson's personality, however, that get overlooked too often. For all his success, he is essentially a modest man. He never watches the videos of all those great triumphs, not even the Champions League final. And his reaction to this period of commemoration tells its own story. "My anniversary is hard to escape, though I must admit I am finding it hard to come to terms with," he says. "My first intention was not to pay any attention to it lest it confuse and distract me, but it has become obvious that it is something that is being thrust upon me whether I want it or not."

    He does admit, however, to feeling "proud" when he reflects on the achievements of the last two decades, knowing that the club he is in control of now is virtually unrecognisable from the one he inherited.

    In Andy Mitten's excellent account of United in the 1980s, We're the Famous Man United, the author remembers the club recording an attendance jump of 13,000 over two games, simply because the team had a chance of moving up to fourth if they beat Chelsea in a league game. The match finished 0-0.

    Today, there will be nearly 76,000 shoehorned into Old Trafford for the visit of Portsmouth. United are top, with the best goal difference, playing the most attractive football. Somehow it feels appropriate.
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    Post by S4P Sat Nov 04, 2006 1:47 pm

    Mourinho on Ferguson: "I think he has an unbeatable recor. I do not believe anybody can do in English football what he has done"
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    Post by Saintsar Sat Nov 04, 2006 1:58 pm

    He was alright, I suppose. If he's the first manager to break Mourinho's monopoly then I'll be impressed.
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    Post by L r d Sat Nov 04, 2006 2:09 pm

    Ferguson is world class, says Benitez
    Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson is the best manager in England and "among the top two or three in the world" claims Rafa Benitez.


    The Spaniard, who has never forgotten Ferguson's help many years ago when he was travelling Europe as a young manager learning from the best, insists that it is "amazing" that anyone can stay at a club for 20 years, an achievement the Manchester United boss celebrates on Monday.

    Liverpool boss Benitez said: "It is amazing to be 20 years at one club, but especially in a top club. To do that at a very big club with so much constant pressure shows you that he is a top, top manager.

    "I believe he is the number one in England and one of the top two or three in the world.

    "To win the high number of trophies he has had over these years says everything you want to know about him. The secret to his success is that he is a very clever man and manager."

    He added: "Twenty years at one club for me? Why not? If it is what you want to do, OK. It would be fantastic to be in the same club for a long time being able to improve the club.

    "I have found him a nice person, you can talk with him without any problems. When I was a young manager travelling around and watching clubs, he was kind and helpful to me and not what you would expect from a famous man."
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    Post by Nightwing Sat Nov 04, 2006 11:43 pm

    S4P wrote:Mourinho on Ferguson: "I think he has an unbeatable recor. I do not believe anybody can do in English football what he has done"

    You damn right biatch - and dont you forget it...record....dddd!!! Doh stupid Porty!!! Laugh

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