Another week, another pair of wins for José Mourinho’s all-conquering Red Army. Or something. Ed & Paul look back on victory against Crystal Palace and West Bromwich Albion, and forward to Sunderland on Boxing Day, while shaking their heads slowly at the thought that anyone ever thought it was a good idea to give David Moyes the United job.
Football serves an odd function – and if you are reading this there’s a good chance that you really care about it. I am endlessly fascinated by what football represents to those of us who become so invested in the outcome of a few men kicking a ball around that it is transformed into drama, beauty, frustration, sadness, joy, love, hate (more’s the pity), escape, togetherness. Family.
Manchester United are often called a family club – a massive global enterprise, at the centre of which, administratively at least, are a bunch of the same people that have been around long enough to remember the first Sir Alex Ferguson title win.
[Of course, United are literally a family club, in the worst possible way, given that the club is run by a family of financial parasites, leeching millions away to line their own nest eggs, where presumably they nest their next generation who will grow up to do a leveraged buyout of a club in a developing market somewhere.]
Like all football clubs, United are also something families share, passed down from mother or father to son or daughter, from your uncle who cares about football when your dad doesn’t, or your best friend’s dad’s wife, since this is the modern age. Football has long been regarded as a place where it is acceptable for men to show emotion, letting out the tears that are borne of a deeper loss, but that manifest in the delight or devastation you experience because of the good or not-so-good kicking of a ball.
Somewhere in this mix, where the human unconscious is given an escape valve for emotions that can’t be expressed elsewhere, profound attachments form. And there can’t be many sporting attachments greater than that between United fans and Alex.
Forget the Sir, not just because it’s a weird relic of the feudal age, but also because it’s a latter day addition, it’s a millennial thing, arriving in time to make a handy three letter acronym for the internet age. Before he was Sir Alex, he was Fergie or Alec, and he represented something to me, to us. He was our family club’s dad.
It started straight away. Alex came in and replaced ‘Big Ron’, an avuncular, friendly figure (how little we knew…), and he was quite scary. I was nine, so I didn’t have a drinking culture, but United did and Ferguson put a stop to it, making the club professional, hitting some stumbling blocks, but building, always building.
I never lost faith in him, but I was only 12 when there were “three years of excuses” and living exiled in Zimbabwe, climbing rocks and preoccupied with working out if I could design a hoverboard. By the time I really really cared about football, he became the best dad ever, buying Eric Cantona and winning the league in the year I started sixth form college.
Ferguson brought through a whole generation of kids, and the surrogate father bit was given a whole new dimension. Those of the class of 1992 who became the heart of Ferguson’s team must surely be the players with the deepest relationship with him – David became the black sheep, Ryan, Paul and Gary stayed loyal. Little brother Philip was sent to live up the road with Uncle David so he could come back a few years later and tell us it would all be ok.
Then came the knighthood, and with it the passage to grand-parenthood. Cristiano Ronaldo certainly needed a father figure, and another generation removed, Sir Alex became one. We all watched on, as Fergie became an elder statesman, this great manager becoming the greatest of all time in front of our grateful eyes.
Like all families, there was betrayal and tragedy. He sided with the Glazers rather than the supporters, perhaps because he felt it was in the fans’ best interests to act as a buffer between them and us. Perhaps for less noble reasons. Fergie said that if we didn’t like it we could go and support Chelsea. (Or – we could go to our rooms without any supper, as it were).
Like all dads he embarrassed us, not with his bad dancing – the fist pumped goal celebrations were joyous, not cringeworthy – but his ruthlessness could grate on those with a more sensitive bearing. Jaap Stam, Ruud van Nistelrooy, the weird goalkeeping blind spot. But as you grow up you learn that your parents aren’t perfect, and nor is your football manager.
I’m in my 30s now, and I try to keep the level of emotional investment in men, with a certain colour top, who kick a football, to a manageable level. But Fergie pre-dates my attempts to do that.
I’m so sad that he’s not United’s manager any more, even though I’m happy he gets to retire. I didn’t cry at the montages or the announcement, but I did cry when I recorded Rant Cast and I tried to list all his positive qualities as a human being. A day later, I realise why that was the trigger for me
It’s because it’s complicated. Fergie has been ruthless, and leaves our club registered in the Cayman Islands. He hurt a lot of people. But that’s not the full story.
There has been so much human goodness – the generosity to those in need, the support to other managers in hard times. He is a trade union man, after all. The thousands of letters of condolence and congratulations, done without fanfare.
And whilst there have been times of apparent obstinacy, and masses of footballing frustration, Sir Alex has brought joy to those of us lucky enough to be United fans that no other club anywhere in the land has been even nearly slightly close to experiencing.
I love my dad, even though he is not perfect, and I love Ferguson, even though he is not either. So, thank you, Alex, for dedicating your life to doing something which has made the fans so happy, so often. It’s been absolutely amazing and I honestly cannot believe that it is over.
I understand that impermanence is the fundamental nature of the universe, but I sort of thought you’d be the exception. I am going to remember the joy you brought for the rest of my life, and the pain will fade.
Most of all I will try to remember a mantra I try to live by, something which gives perspective when that inevitable impermanence shows itself: don’t be sad that it is over, be glad that it happened.
I don’t actually know what the weather is typically like in Bulgaria, but I’m going to guess that the winters are chilly. And a good job too, because Dimitar Berbatov will have had some practice at being out in the cold; his position in the Manchester United pecking order is a solid fourth choice.
Rooney’s season has been an odd one. Full of output, with – at the time of writing – 20 league goals in United’s chase for a 20th league title, he has suffered from patches of less impressive form, and his all round game has perhaps not hit the peaks of his ability. Whilst he is part of the conversation for the coveted position of “World’s Third Best PlayerTM“, few would argue that he has made it his own.
Chicharito is, well, Chicharito. He’s a goal machine – in a season where injury prevented a proper run in the team, he looked sharp and effective in patches – his first goal in the 5-0 win against Bolton Wanderers, for example, was a masterclass of how to lose a defender and get on the end of a cross. When it works, Chicharito is an absolutely perfect foil for Rooney, creating huge gaps in defences using the ancient hidden art of “running.”
After a debut season packed full of vital goals and excitement, this season has been slightly less explosive, but still effective – 11 goals, of which several have been absolutely key. Chicharito scored the only goals in 1-0 wins against Everton and Swansea, and the 84th minute equaliser against Chelsea. The Mexican’s build up play has been slightly lacking, although his first touch was much improved against West Bromwich Albion last week. And – whisper it – he seems to be missing the birthplace he shares with Pipo Inzaghi slightly less, being more prepared to spend time in the foreign land of ‘onside’.
Danny Welbeck is that most treasured of players – a local lad who looks like he belongs in United red at the very top of the game. In our slapstick three-all draw with ‘FC Basil’ – if it’s good enough for Gary Neville, it’s good enough for me – Welbeck looked assured and effective as a solo front man in a 4-5-1 formation. But in the 3-0 win against Tottenham back in August he had a very poor game, until he scored, at which point he appeared to turn into SuperWelbz, a version of himself with outlandish powers.
As the season has progressed, few could doubt Welbeck’s contribution to the campaign. So much so that Welbeck is probably Fergie’s first choice of foil for Rooney – although his finishing is still not quite as clinical as we would all like it to be – his nine goals in all competitions reflect a decent return for a player who adds so much to United’s all round play. Chich and Welbeck are very different players, a wonderful asset to Sir Alex Ferguson in terms of versatility, and a challenge in terms of picking the right player for the right game.
Which brings us to Dimi. Ah, Dimi. If I was as good at football as Dimitar, I would not want to be a fourth choice striker. He is an outrageously gifted footballer whose entire United career has been dogged by huge ebbs and flows of confidence, effectiveness and appearances. When he didn’t make the Champions League final bench, I was sad, but not surprised – Berbatov is many things, but he is clearly not an impact player.
He was the joint top scorer in the Premier League last season, but as has been said time and again, those goals came in bursts, and there were long barren periods in between. Berbatov stepped up immensely during Wayne’s calamitous drop in form in the early part of last season, relishing his role as the ‘man’, but his confidence seemed to drain away as Rooney’s returned. Berba did score a hat trick against Liverpool, of course, which you could argue was worth the transfer fee by itself…
That transfer fee – the millstone around Berbatov’s neck for his whole time at United. £30 million plus justified by Berbatov’s talent, and arguably by his vital contributions to a historic season, but he has never managed the consistent contribution expected by players who cost that much. He’s never become a superstar.
The question that interests me here is why? Why has Berbatov never managed to firmly establish himself as a world-beating, first-name-on-the-team-sheet type of player when he is so abundantly talented. He was a star at Tottenham Hotspur, scoring 46 times in 102 appearances, and nudging towards the mythic one in two ratio.
Berbatov was also incredibly effective for Spurs in the Europa league, scoring 12 goals in 16 games. At United, at the time of writing, Berba has 56 goals in 147 games, which is much closer to one in three. In the league for United it’s 48 in 106, which is a very decent output – certainly not one that would set alarm bells ringing. In Europe for the Reds, however, it’s five in 26 – four of which came in the 2008/09 season.
Fergie has completely given up on Berbatov in crucial Champions League games where he has any choice in the matter. The manager has also pretty much given up on Dimi in the big league games too – Chicharito didn’t take too long to be preferred, in a two-man front line, and this season Danny’s been ahead of Chich. Rooney, or indeed Welbeck, will always be a more useful as a lone forward.
I wonder what his relationship with the manager is like. Berbatov has never publicly complained about his marginalised role. If Berba was agitating for a move in the summer, which most of us surely thought would happen given the Champions League final squad, he did it out of the papers.
It must be hard to have that much talent and not be trusted. I’ve heard fans speculate that Berba didn’t want a move in the summer because, somehow, he enjoys the easy life of not playing that often for United and picking up an enormous cheque. I have no way of really knowing, but that just doesn’t sit right with me as an argument. I’ve never really thought that Dimitar looked like he wasn’t trying, just that trying for him doesn’t mean running in the way it does – or, used to – for Carlos Tevez.
“We will be taking up the option on his contract but, having had chats with him, I understand he wants to get first-team football,” said Sir Alex last week.
“It is something we need to consider at the end of the season. For a player of his age and his ability it is disappointing for him that he is not getting first-team football. We will look at the end of the season but until then, he remains at United.”
It is quite unusual for Sir Alex to speak so publicly about a player’s future, and I wonder what that says of their relationship. Certainly the public face of it has always been respectful. Berbatov describes being such a bit part figure in the club as “sad and painful,” but then goes on to talk about the importance of the team as a whole.
I wrote this article not to offer an argument, but to ask aloud the question of why Berbatov’s United career has disappointed, because I just don’t know the answer. I’ve absolutely loved watching the Bulgar ply his trade in red – he’s the kind of player that makes me like football; a magician with the ball on his best days. But maybe Berba’s never had the right assets to be a huge success at United – the capacity to deal with the pressure of the world stage.
Maybe it’s that at United he has only rarely had a team built around him, unlike at Spurs when he was the most important player in the squad. I don’t think it can be that he is lazy – he still seems really popular with the rest of the squad, and surely that wouldn’t be the case if they didn’t think he was a good professional.
Berba’s signing seemed an act of opportunism; a last-minute smash and grab to stop City getting him, so the story goes. If Fergie had his time again, I wonder if he would have decided to save that cash for someone else. Berbatov has been too often the wrong beautifully gifted, hugely talented, option for the way Fergie’s team is set up.
When Berba was signed, Sir Alex made comparisons to Eric Cantona. Sadly many United fans would peg Berba as closer to a different Eric in the pantheon of Ferguson signings. I think the critics are wrong about that, given, especially, Berbatov’s vital contributions last season. But still, he has clearly never reached the heights we would have hoped.
I love Berbatov, but I definitely can’t argue with Fergie’s pecking order. Dimitar makes even less sense in 2011/12 United than he did in those difficult spells in past seasons. I hope Dimi has – and takes – the chance to make some kind of significant contribution before he goes. Even if he does, though, when he leaves in the summer, or even by some miracle after that, the story that is written of him will be that he was at best a disappointment at United.
But that’s not what I’ll remember. I’m going to deliberately and obstinately remember the good times. That thing on the byline against West Ham United, when he crossed to Cristiano Ronaldo; the time he started an epic team goal from left back, and sauntered into the box to finish the move; that time when he scored an amazing overhead kick in the middle of a hat-trick against Liverpool, at Old Trafford; plucking the ball out of the sky and controlling it like he’d received a five-yard Michael Carrick sideways pass; and that glorious 10 minutes in Leeds when Berba pointed and shouted, stood in the right places, and generally did a pretty good job at centre-half.
A version of this article first appeared in Rant Monthly.
The Paul Ansorge column appears each month in Rant Monthly.
Once upon a time the magic of the Cup was a term with very different usage. 2012’s FA Cup will see that phrase used by television marketers to add glamour to ties that see the elite clubs of the land field third string midfielders away to League Two sides, or used sarcastically by those for whom the cup is a distraction from the business of staying in the top flight, or qualifying for the Europa League, or making an extra couple of hundred grand by finishing 11th rather than 12th in the Premier League. Once upon a time, though, the magic of the Cup was real.
In the 1980s, the FA Cup was really the only football I ever saw on television, outside of major international competitions. I was too young to stay up late and watch Match of the Day, and anyway, I didn’t care who won the league. The league was boring – it went on forever and then at the end of the season, Liverpool won it. The cup though, that made sense to my small brain. You won a game, then you got to play another one, until May when you’d play a really, really fancy game, and get to release a pop song.
United were a great FA Cup side. I learned that we had won it a lot, almost as many times as Tottenham! My first memory of watching football is Norman Whiteside scoring the winner in the ‘85 cup final. If I close my eyes now I can see exactly where I was. I was eight years old and immediately after the game I phoned the editor of this esteemed publication. He told me of how he had jumped up and down and cheered when the goal went in, and I told him I had done a backflip.
This was not true, I had been watching perched at the bottom of my dad’s bed and had jumped and flopped backwards. For some reason, I felt justified in calling that a backflip. I can see the goal now, from years of seeing it on VHS (that’s like youtube for old people) but I know that I didn’t understand how it was scored at the time, I just remember who scored, the net bulging and the celebrations.
I remember nothing about the game at all, except the feeling of relief and elation that “my” team had won. Winning the double was an incredible achievement – only the best teams had ever done it. United are often accused of devaluing the Cup because of pulling out to play in the World Club Cup in ’99/00 (as I’m sure most United fans know, this was at the request of the FA, hoping to drum up support for a bid for England to host the World Cup – how did that one turn out?).
However, I think that one of the reasons the Cup has been devalued is that we won the double three times in a span of six years – it just started to look easy. Of the three years we didn’t during that spell, Arsenal did. The FA Cup became a sort of appendage to a league win.
It has played an absolutely crucial role in the Ferguson era. Much is talked about the Mark Robins goal which kept Fergie his job. We went on to win that cup, then the Cup Winners Cup, and the era of success was born.
There is a goal, however, which felt like even more of a turning point – Mark Hughes’ staggering volley, an equaliser just moments from the end of the ’93/94 semi-final against Oldham Athletic. It is another moment in time I remember every detail of. I watched the game at a friend’s parents house and it felt incredibly important. It was such a wonderful goal – Lee Sharpe chips the ball towards the box, it’s headed out by the Oldham defence, Nicky Butt heads the ball towards to Brian McClair who hooks an absolutely perfect pass to Hughes. Hughes’ volley, under significant pressure from the defence, was just vintage Sparky.
The Red Issue caricature of Sparky, even, attempting flying volleys given the slightest opportunity to do so. Although we finished the season eight points clear of Blackburn Rovers, the era in which we just assumed we would win anything had not yet begun and I remember so clearly, as soon as that Hughes goal went in, that was it, we would win the lot. It showed incredible spirit, the spirit that became our hallmark in the decade that followed.
My memories of football are by and large formed of a collection of moments – any coherent narrative super structure is added later, further up the cognitive process tree, away from the buried subconscious collection of individual passages of play and heightened moments in time. I think that’s why I loved the FA Cup so much – those moments were so simple and vital.
“Score now or you’re out”. “Score now and you get to put the top of the trophy on your head during the lap of honour.” Of course it isn’t the same any more, it can’t be. The magic of the Cup is associated with other things of childhood – people and places and a time long passed.
I didn’t pretend to anyone that I did a backflip when Ronaldo scored just before half-time when we beat Millwall 3-0. It’s much more perfunctory nowadays. But one of these days, I would like to see the Da Silva brothers putting the lid of the trophy on their heads and dancing around on the lap of honour.
None of us will ever be a kid again, and the FA Cup won’t ever be really important again, but sometimes it’s nice to remember that stuff, and add to that collection of moments.
Paul Ansorge is co-host of Rant Cast, and he can be found at Twitter – twitter.com/utdrantcast
Football Manager 2012 is absolutely, totally and utterly brilliant. I can’t imagine that surprises you much, dear reader. Football Manager has been absolutely, totally and utterly brilliant since it was called Championship Manager, and there was a Mitre Magma on the cover. What is really such an extraordinary achievement is that they really do just keep making it better and better.
I’m writing this assuming you have a working knowledge of the Football Manager series. In case you don’t, as the name suggests it’s a football management simulator in which you take on and run a club as you see fit. You handle tactics, transfers, the media, keeping your players sweet, hiring and firing backroom staff and trying to stop the board from sacking you and hiring Steve McClaren as your replacement – the ultimate ignominy.
The thing is, they put one of these out every year. This means they ask us to part with our hard-earned £30 or so for what will inevitably be an incremental upgrade on the previous year. Without the demands of a large multiplayer audience (FM does have multiplayer, but it’s far from the predominant pull to the given the time investment required), the need to have the latest and greatest version is based more on the quality of the product than it is on being part of a community who all need to be playing the same version of a game.
Feature creep is a big part of annualised sports video game franchises – every year the publishers of these games need some bullet points to put on the back of the box. According to Sports Interactive (SI), which makes the game, you would need a pretty big box in this case, being as there are apparently more than 800 new features. There’s an in-depth new tutorial system, and having played the best part of a season attempting to do a better job than Steve Bruce of managing Sunderland, I can’t say I could pick those 800 features out of a line up, but I can say that I am having an amazingly good time.
If you want a detailed breakdown of what all the new features are, I’d recommend putting “what’s new in Football Manager 2012” into Google, but what really jumped out at me were three key changes. The first of these is the most visible – the presentation of information has been fairly radically overhauled. The higher the resolution the screen you are playing on, the more information you’re given on each screen. This is particularly useful on the player information screen – having an overview with attributes, positions, contract, training, form, all displayed at once is incredibly useful and saves many a click. Each section can be clicked into for more detailed information. And my goodness, there is an incredible amount of information.
I mentioned that I haven’t finished a season yet. Sadly, unlike when CM 97/98 came out (shout out to Ibrahima Bakayoko), I have a proper job, so I can’t just sit up all night playing Football Manager. It is not just my life that has changed beyond recognition, though – it’s the game too. It takes a long, long time to play through a season. The most time-consuming period, for me, was pre-season. There is such a lot to do. Finding new staff, somehow managing to bring in new players (the improvements to scouting are brilliant), getting used to the squad, and getting used to the new tactics interface – it all takes time, but there is no doubt that it is a very engaging process. Incidentally, I managed to sign Darron Gibson and immediately changed his nickname to “The G Bomb.” This was an important step toward success. I think SI might rate him a bit higher than we do. Seeing the words “click here to view the G Bomb’s profile keeps making me laugh like the idiot I am.
Football Manager 2012
The second of the changes which has had the most impact on my experience of playing the game is the new “Tone” system for interacting with players, and the vastly improved team talks. You instantly see the effect of your overall team talk on a player’s body language, and can make adjustments by then providing a specific talk to your players by position, or as individuals. You can choose the tone you use, and varying this made it feel like you had a good deal more control. In previous years I have found that I essentially said I was pleased if players got 6.5-7.9 and delighted if they got 8 or better, which soon stopped having an impact. It now seems that you have a greater chance to actually influence the morale and performance of your team through the team talk which has made it into less of a chore than it felt before.
The third big marquee change which has had a noticeable impact on my experience is the vastly improved 3D match engine. I’m old enough to remember the stick figure match engine of the original Football Manager (which came on a tape, kids.) (A tape being like an MP3 player, but in the olden days). Some of my richest childhood gaming experiences came through those stick figures and whilst the actual figures and animations aren’t that really that far removed from their stick figure forebears, what is so impressive is how closely watching an FM simulated game looks like watching a simulated game of football, not in terms of graphical fidelity in a FIFA kind of a way, but in how well the representative figures move, and use the ball. They make the runs you hope they will, make passes which look like real passes and hit every kind of shot. The ball flies like a real ball should. It just feels like football. Sometimes all the players start running on the spot for a bit, and the frame rate wasn’t great on the battered old PC I’ve been playing on, but these are minor annoyances, and certainly not game breaking.
There is a new option – the Director’s camera which mostly uses the up in the stands angle, but cuts occasionally to a different view at key moments – behind the back for a direct free kick or penalty, for example. It’s a view which mostly works well, but does not seem to know the 180 degree rule. If you’ll allow me to quote Wikipedia – “In filmmaking, the 180° rule is a basic guideline that states that two characters (or other elements) in the same scene should always have the same left/right relationship to each other. If the camera passes over the imaginary axis connecting the two subjects, it is called crossing the line” This might seem like an overly technical complaint, but it actually makes a big difference to the experience of watching matches – it’s disorienting when this rule is ignored.
Football Manager 2012
My only other significant gripe is one which has been a problem for a long while with the FM series – it takes a really long time, sometimes, for it to simulate in the background, all the games that you’re not involved in. This is a particular problem in international weeks, it seems. I was running one league with a small database (because of the aforementioned battered old PC) but the game really chugged in those spots. They have tried to moderate this problem by giving you the option to browse the standard menus and information whilst it processes matches in the background, but I still found there was a good deal of downtime.
So it’s not flawless, then, but Football Manager is one of the crowning achievements in the medium of computer games. There is a lot of debate in video game criticism about the real strengths of the medium – especially when it comes to providing a narrative experience, Football Manager allows you to create your own narrative – relationships with players, ups and downs, key games won or lost on the form of a star striker, or a poor offside decision. As a manager you have enormous influence, but not omnipotence. Which, of course, is very much like real football. You need patience, and some time on your hands and be prepared to sift through an enormous amount of information to get the best out of this game. If you do, though, it’s an incredibly rich, deep and rewarding experience and incremental update on last year or not, really fantastic value for money.
Football Manager 2012, developed by SI Games and published by SEGA, is available now.
There are moments in “Red”, Gary Neville’s autobiography, when you are reminded what an absolutely extraordinary career he, his brother and – as he never fails to refer to them – “Butty, Becks, Giggsy and Scholesey” had together. In the second batch of photographs included there is an image, captured in the dressing room before Neville’s testimonial, of the six of them with Sir Alex Ferguson, and I am ever so slightly ashamed to admit that seeing it again made me well up. Six pals who have achieved extraordinary things, many of them together.
That this image had such a profound affect on me is perhaps not a great reflection of the quality of the prose. It feels a bit hacky to compare Red’s functional, consistent and only rarely exceptional style to its author’s playing career, but I am going to do it anyway, because it is just so appropriate.
Gary tells his story in strict chronological order, cataloguing the highs and lows of a career spent living out a childhood dream. The title is not an accident, the song sung throughout his career is true – Gary Neville really is a Red.
Spending a few hours in his literary company is enjoyable enough, because for any United fan it means spending a few hours on a pleasing trip through the incredible successes of the past twenty years. Incidentally, if you are not a United fan and have somehow stumbled across this review, I’m not sure Red is for you…
There is not much in the way of new insight in this book – the United way means being hard working, never complacent, and not knowing when you’re beaten. Sir Alex shouts at players when they don’t play well and occasionally they shout back and that never ends well. Eric Cantona was good.
The few titbits of new information I won’t share here because they are a rare treat to discover yourself. Generally speaking, in spite of the lack of sparkling prose, the momentum of United’s triumphs are entertaining enough to keep the reader engaged.
The momentum is only broken by the chapters covering Nev’s England career. Much like actually watching England’s underachievement on the pitch for the last 20 years, reading about it is pretty dull. If I’d played 85 times for my country, I’d probably devote a fair chunk of my career memoirs to it, but there are few surprises in his recanting of his time with the national team. Venables was good, Hoddle was tactically astute but a terrible man-manager, Sven’s reign started promisingly but then the indiscipline around the squad got out of hand. There is a chapter for each England manager – this could have been the work of a single chapter, and I would have been satiated.
Red is a perfectly decent sporting autobiography, rather than an excellent one. Still, because of it, I have spent the last five days with a song stuck in my head. Altogether now…”Gary Neville is a red, is a red, is a red! Gary Neville is a red, he writes boo-ooks.”
“Red: My Autobiography” by Gary Neville is published by Bantam Press and available in hardcover now.
“Life With Sir Alex” by Will Tidey
Tidey’s book, published in paperback by Bloomsbury, benefits and suffers from all chronicles of supporter experiences. Tidey’s prose draws readers into the action as if not solely recalling the experience but reliving it. The book is, after all, Tidey’s personal experiences of supporting the club since childhood.
These are emotions – the highs and lows of supporterdom – with which all Manchester United fans can identify. The preface to ‘My Life’ is a case in point, describing the explosion of passion and joy as Ole Gunnar-Solskjaer’s flicked winner lit the fires of joy at Camp Nou in 1999. It was the seminal moment of Sir Alex Ferguson’s time in charge of United.
But Tidey’s work also is recollection of events over the course of 25 years of Ferguson’s tenure at Old Trafford, and in strict chronilogical order at that. There is much to enjoy in the many victories; plenty to rue in the defeats. Each has made Ferguson’s time at Old Trafford so memorable. Tidey’s work is also a remembrance of the minutiae, as well as the improbably glorious. There are moments that the reader will simply have forgotten, or placed in the deep recesses of memory at least. There is joy in that too.
And yet for all that there is nothing particularly revelatory here. Why should there be? Tidey’s work, almost a personal diary over a quarter of a century, was never intended to be. Passionate, witty and smart, Tidey neatly sums up the fans-eye view of Ferguson’s time at Old Trafford. For that, it is well worth the read.
“Life with Sir Alex” by Will Tidey is published by Bloomsbury and available in paperback now.
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This article originally appeared in Rant Monthly Issue 3, October 2011.
Rant almost always refers to itself in the third person, but when you’re attempting to critically appraise a work of art or entertainment, there really is no room for the third person – none of this is “Rant’s” opinion – it’s all mine. For the purposes of establishing credentials, I have a long history with video game versions of the football.
Me and the esteemed editor of this very website once had an actual 90 minute game of Match Day 2 on his Amstrad CPC464 – the scoreboard broke after 10 goals, and I think I may have won by infinity to infinity minus 3.
We’ve all come a long way since then and FIFA 11 from EA sports will be in many a video game playing football fan’s Christmas stocking next week.
That imaginary video game playing football fan will have much cause to be please with their gift because, with the exception of a few hold-outs waving the Pro-Evo flag, most people acknowledge that FIFA, long the slickest and best presented football game going, is now also the one with the richest, deepest and most satisfying game-play engine. That this is an uncontroversial position to hold is a remarkable turnaround for a franchise long dogged by accusations of style-over-substance.
The difficulty in reviewing annualised sports franchises comes in asking the question “who is this review for?” If it is for people who are getting their first 360 or PS3 for Christmas then there’s absolutely no question that if they have any interest whatsoever in playing football on it, they should run out and buy FIFA 11.
In return for their hard-earned they will be getting a product chock full of features – licensed leagues from across Europe, some startlingly accurate player likenesses (and some not quite so accurate – Darren Fletcher’s hair has NEVER been that colour), wonderful animation, and in spite of a limited number of properly modelled grounds, Old Trafford is replicated in all its glory. So who cares if Fulham, Aston Villa and Bolton all play in identical generic stadia?
The control scheme has been incremented upon – last year’s genuine analogue directional movement remains, shooting from range is improved (I scored an absolute belter with Nani the other day), and whilst I still can’t score from or even hit half decent free kicks, that could just be me.
In fact a good few of my criticisms of the game play may stem from the fact that nowadays, as may be inferred from my reference to 8-bit games, I am a grown up and don’t have the time or manual dexterity to truly master everything on offer here. Games occasionally become very bogged down in midfield because I lack the subtlety to implement much of the right stick skill moves which I imagine could cut open stubborn defences in a way my hopeful through ball can’t.
If the review is for someone who has last year’s edition, or even, as is the case for me, 09’s then the value proposition becomes very different. If what the Americans call “The Roster Update” is appealing to you and the nuanced visual appeal that comes from more years of graphical polish and engine refinement then you won’t be disappointed. And, of course, if online multiplayer is important to you, then the new edition means drastically reduced numbers playing last year’s edition.
For me, though, I think if I hadn’t been sent a review copy I would have thought long and hard before parting with the £35+ needed to pick up a new copy of this badboy. The differences are so incremental, and my own abilities so relatively unsophisticated as to render the game play changes of minimal effect. And the big shiny new addition of playable goalkeepers, whilst competent, is hardly earth earth-shattering.
Be a pro mode has been through some pretty serious changes, some very much for the better, some for want of a better word, bizarre. Instead of playing matches and being assigned points based on your performance after the game to improve your dude’s skills, your skills improve as you pull off moves in games – so running with the ball might improve your stamina, making successful short passes may improve your passing, and so on.
You can also use your pro across all modes of play now, rather than only in “be-a-pro” seasons, which is very neat, and the fact that progress made in exhibition games, or even the arena, is a really nice touch. What isn’t such a nice touch is that, as far as I could work out, you no longer get to play in reserve matches when you’re not in the first team squad, and EA Sports have implemented their terrible, terrible, terrible calendar system which “sims” other matches whilst you SIT IN FRONT OF YOUR TELLY HITTING X AND NOT GETTING TO PLAY YOUR GAME!
Fight Night Round 4 had a very similar problem – I’m not familiar with Madden or the NHL games, but I believe they may have this problem too. This is bad enough when you’re playing a season as an entire team, and having to wait in between matches, but when you’re only getting picked once every six games or so, as you are at the start of your be-a-pro career it’s an absolutely disgrace of a design decision. (Hey, this website does have rant in the title). The long and the short of it is – I just want to play the game. I don’t care that you accurately sim the result of Fulham vs Chelsea.
Enough of the griping though, about value and the very silly calendar thing. Playing local multiplayer is a huge amount of fun, as it always is with good sports games. The AI is the best it has ever been and means that when you don’t have friends round, and you don’t want to be pwned by 12-year-old ninjas on Xbox live, you can still get plenty of enjoyment out of this.
I cannot stress enough how fantastic it looks, and the sound design is great – they’ve added some more texture to the commentary, certain fixtures and individual players get extra attention from Martin and Andy, and whilst Andy’s still occasionally a bit on the wooden side, it certainly works well enough that I left it on for a few games before giving up on them.
FIFA 11 is a must buy if you don’t have a football game, and my personal upgrade cycle for sports games means it’s probably a must buy if you have FIFA 08. Even if you do have 10 though and fancy treating yourself, you know that you’ll be getting a pretty fantastic package, just perhaps not one that’s that different from what you’re already playing.
I’m off to level up my pro – I do feel a little guilty though – I’m keeping Berba out of the side.
FIFA 11 is available on PS3
Dimi’s come in for quite a bit of grief lately, which is vaguely understandable, but there’s much to celebrate about the languid Bulgarian. When he scored against Spurs, his apparently nonchalant turn away from the goal masked the massive relief. When he was mobbed by his team mates (surely a sign about the esteem they hold him in) he couldn’t contain his delight any longer and broke out into a massive grin, and gave a double fisted pump of joy. Unless Rooney was media savvy enough to whisper “Berba, you big numpty, at least look like you’re pleased,” I think Dimi might actually have been displaying the commitment to the cause we all want to see from him.