06/11/2011 09:00,
Sir Alex is one of the most quoted men in football: and when the boss speaks, you listen. Here are some of our favourite quotes from down the years...
Instilling a work ethic
"Part of my job is to make sure these lads keep their feet on the ground. I hammer it into them that the work ethic is what got them through the door here in the first place, and they must never lose it. I say to them, ‘When you go home to your mother, make sure she is seeing the same person she sent to me, because if you take all this fame and money the wrong way, your mother'll be disappointed with you'."
"I never give in or give up easily on either a player or a cause. Even if the team have won, I’m not always happy because standards are all-important to me and, if they have dropped, I’m angry."
"We don’t give in, we play right to the end. It’s not an accident: it’s part of the make-up of the team."
"This team might not have the Ronaldo factor, but it doesn’t understand the word defeat."
Letting them know who’s boss
"I can still remember my very first game in charge away at Oxford. I had done my team talk and was going into the dugout when I saw the bus driver sitting there. He was even giving the tea out at half-time. Let’s say that quickly stopped."
"I’m privileged to have followed Sir Matt because all you have to do is to try to maintain the standards that he set so many years ago."
To the assembled journalists trying to predict a team selection in 1998: "Never try to read the mind of a madman!"
"Jock Stein told me there’s nothing wrong with losing your temper for the right reasons – and I think 70 to 80 per cent of the time I’ve done it for the right reasons. Sometimes it would be premeditated to get my point across, to keep players’ feet on the ground, but I’m going back 15 years. I’m a pussycat now – and too old to lose my temper."
Taking on your rivals
"My greatest challenge is not what’s happening at the moment, my greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their perch. And you can print that."
On post-match drinks with Jose Mourinho: "He was certainly full of it, calling me boss and big man when we had our post-match drink. But it would help if his greetings were accompanied by a decent glass of wine. What he gave me was paint-stripper."
Knowing his players
"[Schmeichel] was towering over me and the other players were almost covering their eyes. I’m looking up and thinking 'if he does hit me, I’m dead'."
"If he was an inch taller he’d be the best centre-half in Britain. His father is 6ft 2in – I’d check the milkman."
"Nothing [Eric] Cantona did in matches meant more than the way he opened my eyes to the indispensability of practice."
"David Beckham is Britain’s finest striker of a football not because of God-given talent but because he practises with a relentless application that the vast majority of less-gifted players wouldn’t contemplate."
Classic Ferguson quotes
"When an Italian tells me it’s pasta on the plate I check under the sauce to make sure. They are the inventors of the smokescreen."
"I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. Football. Bloody hell."
On press concerns over Wayne Rooney’s temper in 2004: "What were you like when you were 19? I was trying to start a workers’ revolution in Glasgow. My mother thought I was a Communist."
"Pippo Inzaghi – that lad was born offside."
"It’s getting tickly now – squeaky-bum time, I call it."
source : manutd
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