Sir Alex Ferguson celebrates his sixty-seventh birthday on Dec 31. He will look back on more than twenty-two years at Manchester United and prepare for the New Year with his determination to win more trophies burning as fiercely as ever.
Nobody knows when the Godfather of management will finally call it quits — even Ferguson himself keeps pushing the retirement date back, to the point where nobody even bothers asking anymore.
But when he does walk out of Old Trafford for the final time, who will be left standing to take his place and fill one of the best jobs in the world?
Well, Roy Keane is now damaged goods following his exit from Sunderland earlier this week and Paul Ince, another former United old-boy, is desperately clinging onto his job at Blackburn with the club’s fans calling for him to be sacked less than six months after his arrival.
Bryan Robson was once tipped to succeed Ferguson, but his managerial career has crashed and burned, while Steve Bruce and Mark Hughes are hardly setting the world alight at Wigan and Manchester City respectively!
The initial association with Ferguson probably helped many of his former players get a foot on the managerial ladder in the first place.
But as soon as it becomes apparent that they are not Fergie clones, the association becomes toxic and the likes of Keane, Ince and Robson can simply never match up.
When your managerial own record is linked with Ferguson’s, it’s pretty much time to pack up and go home because nobody is ever going to match the United boss.
Although it was Keane’s decision to quit Sunderland, the reaction to his departure by Per-Magnus Andersson, who represents the company that owns Sunderland, suggested that the Irishman might well have jumped before he was pushed.
Andersson said: “He is not an Alex Ferguson, which many people think. He is a bit of a maverick. He had the outlook as a player that said, ‘If you knock me down, I will kick you and then we can see who is still standing at the end of the game,’ and that is the way he was as a coach as well.”
Ouch! But look into those comments again and the comparison to Ferguson smacks you right between the eyes — ‘He is not an Alex Ferguson.’
That’s the big problem — nobody is an Alex Ferguson apart from the man himself.
Roy Keane has never been anybody but Roy Keane, yet as soon as he entered the world of management, he instantly found every move and decision judged against Ferguson.
The same goes for Ince and all of those managers who have worked under Ferguson as a player at United.
There is no room for error in the pressure-cooker environment of Premier League management, but the young guns will never be allowed to learn the ropes like Ferguson, Harry Redknapp and Arsene Wenger.
Having to live up to the Fergie billing just makes a difficult job pretty much impossible.
The remarkable thing is that Ferguson’s first job in management ended with the sack at Scottish minnows East Stirlingshire.
But he rebuilt his reputation at St Mirren and Aberdeen before landing the United job in 1986 — more than a decade after he started out in the business.
And his early days at Old Trafford were not without trials and tribulations. Had Mark Robins not scored a winning goal in an FA Cup tie at Nottingham Forest in January 1990, Ferguson would probably have been sacked after three and a half years without a trophy.
But Robins scored, United went on to the win cup that season and the rest, as they say, is history.
Nowadays, however, the long and winding road to the top has gone. Keane jumped straight in at the deep end at Sunderland, but he won promotion in his first season.
And Ince saved tiny Macclesfield from relegation to the non-league and then guided MK Dons to promotion and the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy before being head-hunted by Blackburn in the summer.
Both Ince and Keane have enjoyed much better starts to management than Ferguson, but the impatience of the modern game means that they will be out of a job once a winless streak stretches past six or seven games.
Ferguson said: “There are very few managers that last more than three or four years at a club nowadays. It’s getting shorter and shorter, the life-span of a manager at a club.
“They can move on of course to other jobs and challenges, but it’s a very precarious industry and I think it’s to do with the emotions in the game.
“It’s greater than ever and crowd participation has increased in terms of volatility. You are in a very emotional industry and those emotions can get to everyone. If you lose two or three games in today’s world, you could be in trouble.
“Football people like myself are fortunate that we have been so long at one club. We haven’t had to go through that emotional turmoil.”
Ince’s position at Blackburn is becoming perilous after a nine-game winless run in the league. Rumours of dressing-room unrest have been dismissed by the fiery Londoner, but the fans are losing patience rapidly.
The former England captain has all the qualities required to succeed in management and if Blackburn chairman John Williams pulls the trigger, Blackburn’s loss will eventually become another club’s gain.
But Ince pretty much summed it up by claiming that his United past has made it so much tougher for him to succeed.
He said: “I think there are people out to get us. They look at Roy Keane and me in our United days and see us as snarling people, but we not like that.
“But people are envious and they don’t want us to succeed. That has always been the case.”
