Of course Roy got into a few scrapes in his time and the manager did give him a bit of latitude because of the player he was.
Roy didn’t get on with all the players. There were clashes of personality – with Teddy Sheringham, among others. Occasionally he went too far. He went for Phil at Middlesbrough one day. Phil had made some small mistake and Roy went up and shoved him. But at least he apologised afterwards. Roy could say sorry. He was seriously intense but never arrogant or overbearing.
He’s one of those rare characters you meet who is like a pan of boiling water, constantly simmering for twenty years. It’s like they are constantly on the bubble. The manager is similar. I look at men like that in awe and wonder how they aren’t having heart attacks. You’re exhausted just looking at them, but they are the highest achievers.
The manager has said that he saw Roy as an incarnation of himself out on the pitch. But it would be selling both short if you limited the comparison to eruptions of anger. They are both bright, sharp men who have never stopped changing and learning. They are quick-witted. Their minds are alert.
Roy’s got a great, dark sense of humour. You never knew what was going to come out of his mouth. He kept you on your toes. He used to make me laugh all the time. One day I was texting around a new mobile phone number. Roy replied straight away, ‘So what.’ Typical.
People say he overstepped the mark on occasion; he criticised our own fans with the prawn sandwich remark, he slaughtered his own teammates on a few notable occasions. But if people found that shocking, it’s only because it is so rare to find anyone in football willing to speak his mind. I didn’t always agree with the way Roy was but I had huge respect for the footballer and the man. He is one of the true greats of this, or any, era.
A few weeks later the manager sat me down and offered me the armband. Captain of United. I’ve never been one for overstating the importance of captaincy. It wasn’t going to make me a better player, or a different person. But it was a massive honour for a lad who’d spent his youth sitting in the K-Stand.
There’s no particular task that comes with being captain. It’s not as though you have to make a pre-match speech. That’s the manager’s job. Mostly it’s just an honour, a great honour. My only regret was how I got it.
So we moved on, like we always do at United. Another legend out of the door. It happens even to the very best of them.
Things would get worse before they got better. My first game as captain was in December, away at Benfica in the Champions League, and it couldn’t have been more traumatic. We needed to win to stay in Europe, but in that big, noisy stadium we went down 2–1. Ronaldo was hauled off after a stinker.
It was our worst performance in Europe since I’d been in the youth team. People were openly questioning whether the manager had finally lost it. The doubts were getting to all of us. Giggsy and I chatted about whether we would ever find our way back. We weren’t panicking, but it wasn’t easy to see us winning another title, never mind a Champions League.
Further embarrassment followed in January 2006 when we drew 0–0 at Burton Albion in the FA Cup. The manager had to throw on Rooney and Ronaldo in the second half as we struggled against no-hopers.
About all we had to celebrate was a victory over Liverpool, with a late goal from Rio, which is why I went berserk in my celebrations, running towards the travelling supporters over in one corner at Old Trafford. It was a release of so much pressure – a respite from all our problems. The FA saw it differently, and charged me with misconduct.
It was ridiculous. Since when had celebrating a goal become a crime? As I wrote in my column in
The Times
, ‘Being a robot, devoid of passion and spirit, is obviously the way forward for the modern-day footballer.’
The whole thing became even more laughable when I ended up giving evidence to the FA disciplinary panel via video link from an office in Manchester. I couldn’t believe my ears when some old blazer asked me whether there had been any ‘sexual connotations’ in my pumped-fist gestures to the Liverpool fans. Sexual connotations?
I was fined £5,000.
The punishment was a joke, but I’d pay the money again and again to have that feeling. That’s what I played the game for, those moments when you erupt in joy. A last-minute winner for United gives you the most unbelievable high.
The FA could fine me all they like but I’d never lose the edge that came with playing against Liverpool and I never wanted to. I know the manager felt that it had affected my game in a couple of matches, believing I’d made mistakes trying too hard. In one team talk before we went to Anfield in February, he went out of his way to tell me to chill out. ‘It’s all right this “Gary Neville is a Red and he hates Scousers” stuff but it’s no good if you make mistakes, if you give goals away. Relax, do your job, and play it like it’s any other match. No one’s going to die out there.’
A month after my goal celebration, we walked out at Anfield. I expected plenty of abuse but I hadn’t foreseen Harry Kewell, of all people, clattering into me almost straight from the kick-off. Kewell was trying to get in with the Liverpool crowd who’d never warmed to him and he’d decided to get stuck in for the first time in his life.
‘Fuck me, you’re a right hard-man now,’ I said, picking myself up off the floor. ‘Has someone given you a courage pill?’
Defeat to Liverpool that day knocked us out of the FA Cup. We’d been kicked out of the Champions League before Christmas for the first time and Chelsea were waltzing away with a second title under Mourinho.
We were reduced to the Carling Cup if the season wasn’t going to end trophyless. For a club of United’s stature and expectations, this was a long way to have fallen in a couple of seasons. But history would show that the green shoots of recovery sprouted with that 4–0 victory over Wigan Athletic in Cardiff.
For Rooney, who scored twice, it was his first taste of silverware. It might not have been the trophy he’d dreamt of, but it was a step towards building a new team. And there were more signs of improvement when we won eight of the next nine matches. It was a return to the sort of form we’d come to expect at United.
Lads like Fletch, O’Shea and Wazza were becoming noisier. They were throwing their weight around, and they’d come to take over the dressing room. Old ones like me and Giggsy would have to take a back seat.
There was another important indicator that the young brigade was taking over when Ruud departed. The manager had left him out of the Carling Cup final, preferring Louis Saha, which signalled the beginning of the end.
Ruud had been unsettled for a while, getting angry in training. He was having a go at a few of the younger players, and he was certainly having a negative effect on Ronaldo. Ruud had often been frustrated at Cristiano not delivering an early ball. He’d throw his hands up in the air. One day the final straw came when he gave Cristiano a shove in training. However justified his complaints about this young, erratic talent, you could see it affected Cristiano.
He’d always had this selfish streak, Ruud. He’d tell you straight himself: if the team won 4–0 and he didn’t score he’d be pissed off. That was part of his make-up, part of what made him such a great striker. But Ronaldo was the coming man.
Ruud was the greatest goalscorer I’d played with; I rated him better than Shearer. Both of them were superbly accurate, rarely wasting a shooting opportunity, but I thought Ruud had better feet. He could tie up a defence even when he played in isolation. Knowing Ruud, he probably preferred to be on his own up front so no one could nick his chances.
But now he was gone, in the same season as Roy, marking a massive shift in the team. The manager, once again, had shown that he was willing to make the big, brave decisions that kept the club moving. He’d cleared the space for Rooney and Ronaldo to thrive. But whether we’d improve enough to catch Chelsea and end a run that now stretched to three seasons without the title remained to be seen.
Sven
IT’S GUTTING TO look back on the 2006 World Cup finals as my last international competition. This was no way to go out, at a tournament that will always be remembered more for WAGs than for football. And for yet more penalty misses.
How we allowed the WAGs stories to dominate I will never understand. It was the one farcical issue of Sven’s reign. What people overlooked was that this situation had been brewing in 2004. Wives and girlfriends had been regular visitors to the team hotel in Portugal. If it was a minor irritation to me then, it had grown into a monster by 2006.
The whole issue of celebrity wives was something I couldn’t get my head around. There were people who saw a tournament not as a series of football matches but as a photo opportunity. Sven wanted a relaxed atmosphere, and that’s how it started, but by the time we arrived in Germany it had become ridiculously carefree.
I’d never exactly been a fan of the whole
OK!
and
Hello!
culture, and here we were right in the thick of it. Particularly for someone brought up at United, where the manager always insisted on private and professional lives being kept well apart, to walk around Baden Baden was a joke. The families were staying in the same hotel as some of the press, which was ridiculous to start with.
I went round there to visit on the first day and saw a dozen paparazzi hanging outside. I swore then I wouldn’t go back. I wasn’t in Germany to have a lens shoved in my face when I was trying to have a sandwich with my family.
The more I saw, the more annoyed I became that my own family were there. I made them aware of my concerns, and my reservations about the motives of quite a few of the travelling party. As the manager, Sven had to take the blame for allowing this situation to get out of hand. But it didn’t say much for the players, or their families, that it had gone so far.
It’s hard enough playing for England without distractions. You need to be clear-headed. At the end of the day it’s not a bad life with all the perks that come with the job. There are downsides, and one of those is spending a lot of time away from your family, but the rewards are huge for the top players. That’s the compensation for being on the road all the time.
It put me in a bad mood every time I heard players talking about how they had to catch up with their wife or girlfriend or kids. I hope many of them are embarrassed looking back. You are away for a month, and it’s not easy. I can understand people missing their kids. But there is a time and a place during a tournament for visiting families, and I’d say strictly for one afternoon only after each match.
There was one player a couple of days before the quarterfinal against Portugal saying that it was his daughter’s birthday and he had to go to the family hotel because she’d made a cake. Two or three other players took that as an opportunity to sneak out too. It got so bad that a couple of us went to see Sven and said, ‘Look, we’ve got to stop this, we’ve got a World Cup quarterfinal coming up.’ The mentality was ridiculous. It would never have happened at United.
My worries about the focus within the squad were confirmed in the massage room one morning when I heard one player whining about a harmless piece in a newspaper that had criticised him. I had real misgivings. If one of our best players was fretting about some stupid article, what chance did we have when it came to the real business?
As well as the WAGs, I was worried that the team had become stale under Sven. I’d thought it was right to continue with him after Euro 2004. We’d been through a few managers in quick succession with Venables, Hoddle and Keegan. None of them had lasted more than one tournament and the FA were looking for stability. Right up to the moment when Rooney broke his metatarsal against Portugal at Euro 2004, there had been only positive momentum.
But we were still way too reliant on an automatic first XI. The big names were guaranteed to play rather than the best team. The experiment during qualifying, when Becks was used in the ‘quarterback’ role in central midfield against Wales and Northern Ireland, proved the point. The team was put out of shape to accommodate the big players. I had no problem with a three-man midfield – in fact I wanted it – but this seemed to me like a fudge to get around the issue of how to keep Becks, Gerrard and Lampard in the same eleven.
I missed those qualifiers through injury, but I was watching on telly and I could see the frustration among the players. None of the performances leading up to the tournament were great. Too many players were concerned about their own role rather than how it all gelled together.
We had a midfield quartet of Beckham, Gerrard, Lampard and Cole, with Owen and Rooney up front, and they all wanted to be the match-winners. They probably didn’t realise it themselves. But the problem wasn’t being addressed because there was a first XI, and that was how it was going to stay.
I expressed my concerns to Steve McClaren, Sven’s right-hand man, in the run-up to the tournament. ‘We need to build a team. We need to get players in there that are going to gel this together. We can’t all be generals.’
Our over-reliance on an established first XI was summed up when the whole country fretted over Michael and Wazza as they both raced back from injuries. Michael had barely played for five months while Wayne, who’d broken his metatarsal as late as April, was never going to be able to start the tournament. It was understandable that the manager should give two big players every chance to recover, but it did emphasise how little faith he had in their understudies.
When Sven named his squad, there was another problem, this time self-inflicted. He left out Jermain Defoe – an odd decision that looked foolish when he was superb in pre-tournament training. In Defoe’s place was Theo Walcott, a kid I’d barely heard of. He was seventeen and hadn’t even played a game for Arsenal. Part of me was excited about the idea of a precocious kid with explosive pace, because that’s exactly what the team needed. But at training it was clear that he was still just a kid. The World Cup wasn’t the place to throw him in.
Sad to say, most of my fears were realised. We played poorly in the opening victory over Paraguay, slow and laboured. Next we beat Trinidad and Tobago, but the team was ponderous, with Rooney still racing to be fit.
I injured my calf in training, which gave Sven a problem at right-back. It showed alarmingly muddled thinking when he considered Becks at full-back. The plan struck me as a halfway house. He wanted to get more pace on the right flank from Aaron Lennon, which was the right call, but he didn’t want to drop Becks.
Sven was clearly worried about leaving out one of his big players, whether that was Becks, Lampard, Gerrard or Owen. But it had to be done if it would benefit the team, and I definitely believed it would help keep the side on their toes. But because we’d become so used to this first eleven playing all the time, to leave out one of the stars had become a big deal.
I thought we needed to freshen up both the line-up and the formation. Playing three in midfield, and using the whole squad, would have meant seeing more of Michael Carrick. He’s a player who rarely gets acclaim even from his own supporters at United, but I felt he could have made England tick. He’s unselfish that way. People will argue about his calibre until the day he retires but I’ve played with him and I know he could have done a good job for England. He’s like Darren Anderton, the type of player who can take to international football because he is not hurried in his game. Of course many people valued Lampard and Gerrard more than Carrick, but as a pair they’d rarely performed well together. We had to be adaptable and find a functioning team.
We should have seen more of Owen Hargreaves, too. Carrick and Hargreaves could have provided the platform for our two world-class talents, Rooney and Gerrard. If that meant leaving out others, so be it. Rooney and Gerrard needed to be the focal point of the team. They were our match-winners.
These would have been brave decisions, and that’s what the very best managers like Mourinho, Capello and Ferguson do. They don’t worry about getting it wrong.
I had all these thoughts, and passed some of them on to Steve. Whether he discussed it with Sven I don’t know. That was his call. It wasn’t my job to go banging on the manager’s door despite my mounting worries.
But things just got worse. We finished top of the group by drawing 2–2 against Sweden but lost Michael to a snapped cruciate ligament. Now we’d really pay for the decision to leave Defoe behind.
We struggled to a 1–0 victory over Ecuador in the last sixteen, this time with Hargreaves at right-back, but we were up against it as we faced a quarterfinal rematch with Portugal. I was back in the team, but I wasn’t convinced by the eleven selected. In a 4–5–1, Rooney was isolated up front. Gerrard and Lampard were in poor form and not in great moods by now. Hargreaves had a magnificent game in central midfield but it was another laboured performance. We lacked pace and penetration.
Walcott hadn’t played all tournament, and Sven didn’t think now was the time to bring him on, even though with twenty minutes to go we were crying out for fresh legs, the element of surprise.
Then Wayne was sent off.
He’s not exactly the hardest person in the world to wind up is Wazza. He reacted to a heavy challenge by Ricardo Carvalho and stuck a boot in. There was no arguing with the decision. A big fuss was made afterwards about Ronaldo winking, as if to say, ‘Good job, boys, we’ve got him sent off.’ I didn’t see it, and it wouldn’t have made any difference if I had. No complaints. Wazza had kicked out, wink or no wink.
So we came to penalties, again, and in the light of our poor form and our past record I can’t say I was confident. When you go to spot-kicks, you try to get that sense of whether a team believes in itself. And as a group of players we’d been in this nightmare scenario before and been beaten. I knew exactly what was going to happen and, sure enough, we missed a couple and, inevitably, Ronaldo smashed his in.
It was over. My last shot at the World Cup. I never get too upset at the end of football matches. The disappointment normally hits me later. But I stood on that pitch in Gelsenkirchen feeling desolate. That’s it, another chance gone. It’s never going to happen now. Same old story. Why don’t we ever get it right? Regrets, regrets – and the biggest of all, even more than the defeat itself, was the way we’d gone out in Germany.
It’s the worst possible type of defeat, knowing you could have done more. At United we never leave anything in the changing room. We give our all. We’ve had some big defeats, disastrous nights. But if I have a vision of United losing it is with ten men in the opposition penalty box, the keeper coming up for a corner, guns blazing like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. You might still lose, you might go home in tears, but you’ve given it your best shot. With England it’s a damp squib. I was gutted as I walked off the field in Gelsenkirchen. More than that, I was angry.
It might sound contradictory given the mistakes I’ve outlined, but I was sad to see the back of Sven. I liked him and I would have been delighted for him if he’d enjoyed success with England. His final campaign was a massive disappointment, and he should have made braver decisions. But I don’t go along with the idea that Sven should forever be remembered for blowing a ‘Golden Generation’. Three quarterfinals is a respectable record, and I’m not convinced we ever quite had the depth in our squad to win a major tournament.
Those who have hammered Sven for his mistakes should also give him the credit he deserves for turning us around in the first place. Playing under him, it was easy to see why he had enjoyed success around Europe. The players liked him and respected him. But, like us, he’d just fallen a bit short.
Sven had given us stability and he’d given us decent results. Not great, but acceptable. Three quarterfinals – I’m not exactly proud of it, and I think we did have a squad at Euro 2004 that should have made the final four. But to dismiss Sven as a failed England manager isn’t remotely fair to him.
Sven was a bit wet around the eyes when he gave his farewell speech in Germany. He wasn’t the only man standing down. Becks had decided to quit the captaincy. It was a big decision for him because he loved the job. He adored it, in fact, and it had made him a better player. But things had also reached the point where he needed to get the pressure off his back. He needed to be liberated. People were asking whether the armband made him untouchable. It was detracting from the fact that he was still a great football player who was in the squad on merit.
We’d talked on the coach back to the hotel after the game. I told him to take his time, but I think he’d already made his mind up to stand down.
He had to fight back the tears when it came to reading out his statement. Becks has always cared about his country, passionately.