Ferguson: 'Defeat has made us stronger'

Ferguson: 'Defeat has made us stronger'

The pretender to the title crown has spent a frantic week constructing new contracts for his players but Sir Alex Ferguson yesterday demonstrated the benefits of a taking a loftier position than Rafael Benitez, emerging emboldened and invigorated from a week in southern France, and armed with a rationalisation of why it all fell apart in the previous two weeks of Premier League competition.


Manchester United's capitulation to Liverpool and Fulham on successive March Saturdays was, Ferguson reflected, a consequence of his younger players believing too much of what they had read about themselves. "Everybody likes to read good things," he said. "We do. It's a natural thing to do. So it can have an effect. And there are a lot of young players in our dressing-room." The satisfying part of this line of thought for Ferguson is that he can kick the press for it. "What it's done is get rid of all that nonsense about us being untouchable and unbeatable, and all the talk about five trophies I've had to try to dampen down," he added.

"We're into a situation where we can concentrate on playing football and not reading newspapers. There's never been a game won in a paper yet." The conclusion he extrapolated was that United's 2-0 defeat at Craven Cottage arrived just in the nick of time. "Maybe it was a good time for us to get that defeat at Fulham in particular. Fulham was the best one."

On a day when the United manager also cited Rhyme 'N' Reason as one of the few Grand National winners he has backed over the years, there seemed precious little of it in this thesis, not least because it was Arsène Wenger who deemed United untouchable; because individual errors and indiscipline from players who should know better proved them to be anything but that; and because the consequences of that bad-tempered defeat down by the Thames will include the loss of a suspended Wayne Rooney and injured Dimitar Berbatov against Aston Villa at Old Trafford tomorrow.

Instead, Ferguson will be depending for dear life on Carlos Tevez (right), who did not make it back from Argentina's 6-1 defeat in the uplands of Bolivia – or "Mars", as the manager described it – until 4pm yesterday.

Rafael Benitez's own journey to Fulham, where Arsenal and Chelsea have also mustered one point between them this season, looks a more forbidding task this weekend than Ferguson's, against a Villa side who have lost their last five league matches at Old Trafford. But while Benitez was flourishing new contracts yesterday for his captain Steven Gerrard and Dirk Kuyt, Ferguson also has Real Madrid circling again for one of his own prime assets, Cristiano Ronaldo.

Florentino Perez, a near certainty to win Real's presidential elections at the end of the season, will bring in one marquee name and though Kaka looks the best bet, there is a growing feeling that the verbal agreement reached between Ronaldo and Real last summer may reach fruition. The Real-affiliated Spanish paper Marca trotted out Ronaldo's godfather Fernao Sousa a few weeks back to say "Real Madrid need to sign Ronaldo" and though the paper is anything but the gospel on such matters, Sousa may actually have put his finger on Real's stealth. "The error of last year was to talk too much about it," he said of the prospective move.

Ronaldo has been at United for six years now but at the moment of truth in a season which has provided petulance and style from him in equal measure, Ferguson is looking elsewhere for the new leaders that Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville and Paul Scholes have always been. "Players like [Rio] Ferdinand, [Edwin] van der Sar, [Nemanja] Vidic and [Patrice] Evra, who have been here a few years now, they're very important and have developed that winning mentality," said Ferguson, whose side have not lost three successive league games since December 2001. "They know what it takes for us to do what we want to do." Ferdinand will make tomorrow's side but, with a groin strain troubling him, may struggle to make the United side who face Porto in the Champions League 48 hours later.

Berbatov's ankle injury is even more of a problem and likely to see him out for another two weeks, therefore missing both legs of the Porto tie. With Anderson returning, with a thigh strain, on the same flight as Tevez, and Park Ji-Sung not restored to United's ranks, from the historic South v North Korea encounter until yesterday morning, it was easy to see why Ferguson had asked to face Villa at 4pm tomorrow, rather than the scheduled lunchtime kick-off today. Television scheduling continues to madden him.

But the United manager, at least, is fresh. Another of those National winners he tipped was Team Spirit and Ferguson returned to an old familiar metaphor to lay out the nature of the challenge ahead. "It's a very appropriate thing, that it is Grand National weekend," he reflected. "You go round those 30-odd fences, hit a fence, a horse falls in front of you, you get obstacles. Our championship is about obstacles: you have a draw, a defeat, play badly and win sometimes, play great and don't score the goals you should have and that's because it is the toughest league in the world."

Time alone will tell us whether the open-top bus carrying the championship trophy, come late May, will be navigating streets a comfortable distance from Aintree.