Mourinho to return to Chelsea

Originally Posted by Fountz

Really fancied Mo at United. I think he fancied it !

However, my gut feeling was that it never stacked up.

There is not a chance that The Ferg would want to be outshone by his immediate successor, and the cynic in me thinks he will want to hang on as long as possible to ensure he hands over when it suits him...

...ideally to a grateful prodigy who won't make wholesale changes to his backroom staff.

I'd imagine this would also suit our esteemed owners as well. Lower salary, no promise of a warchest... and, at long last they'd be in a position to exert some power and influence over their manager.

Agree with Fergie not wanting to be upstaged but the business model of the gimps doesn't work well under a period of mediocrity either.

Love Ole but don't think he'll be ready for a while and he would certainly be a high risk option in the next few years.

As Fergies No2 for a couple of years - now we're talking.

How would Fergie be upstaged by his successor?

Originally Posted by Zorg

How would Fergie be upstaged by his successor?

There's a few empty spaces in the euro trophy cabinet we shouldn't really have.

I think it plays big time on his mind and he'd rather not have it rubbed in when he packs it in.

Originally Posted by skcollob

There's a few empty spaces in the euro trophy cabinet we shouldn't really have.

I think it plays big time on his mind and he'd rather not have it rubbed in when he packs it in.

Intertoto?

Originally Posted by skcollob

There's a few empty spaces in the euro trophy cabinet we shouldn't really have.

I think it plays big time on his mind and he'd rather not have it rubbed in when he packs it in.

I know he wants another European Cup or two (I know, I know), but surely if his successor wins shit he'll just take all the credit anyway? Whereas it would reflect better on him if we stay successful than if he's left us in the lurch.

Originally Posted by andyroo

I know he wants another European Cup or two (I know, I know), but surely if his successor wins shit he'll just take all the credit anyway? Whereas it would reflect better on him if we stay successful than if he's left us in the lurch.

You, me and all the world might see it that way but I don't think he'd personally see it that way - don't forget he's Scottish for a start.

Originally Posted by skcollob

There's a few empty spaces in the euro trophy cabinet we shouldn't really have.

I think it plays big time on his mind and he'd rather not have it rubbed in when he packs it in.

You have a point regarding the european cups, but read this article and it dispels that myth that he has underachieved in Europe. The Porto match and Leverkusen game were unlucky. We should have beaten Munich in the semi a few years back! Barcelona are an incredible team,

Anyway here's the article. Well worth a read, the best anaylsis of united in Europe I've ever read.

£#%&! off all you NRATers'



http://soccernet.espn.go.com/blog/_/...d/1262?cc=5739

Ferguson's quest for the holy grail
Posted by Miguel Delaney

Sir Alex Ferguson was, really, just being Sir Alex Ferguson. Drenched by rain but also the sensation of success after Manchester United had finally lifted the European Cup again in the early hours of May 23, 2008, he still wasn't satisfied.

"I'm proud of winning it because, as I've said many times, we should have won it more."

In repeating a customary speech of his, Ferguson was illustrating the kind of drive that has kept him at the top for so long. He was also, however, fortifying the one single remaining criticism of his managerial career: his overall Champions League record remaining underwhelming.
At the very least, despite so much success and his status as one of the greatest managers of all time, that is open to debate.

Essentially, there are two sides to the argument.

The first is that he should have gone a lot further more frequently and thereby won more Champions League titles by simple virtue of the resources and platform he has enjoyed at United. Two trophies and two runners-up spots are not, it is argued, enough for 18 seasons in the competition with the club.

What's more, Ferguson's most regular round of elimination has been the quarter-finals, while he's been knocked out of the competition at the last 16 as often as he's got to the semi-finals. Examined another way, United have failed to get past the group stage more often than they've won the tournament. More damningly, Ferguson's team only won a solitary knock-out tie between May 1999 and February 2007. In 25 two-legged eliminators overall, Ferguson has successfully navigated a small majority of 14 (56%).

The other, more favourable side, however, has a few stats of its own and offers a lot more context.

Ferguson's debut season with United in the Champions League was 1993-94, when the remodelled and restructured competition first began to announce itself as a marketing behemoth. Famously, the competition has never been retained since then. There's been an era of variety and competitiveness among champions that is unprecedented in European Cup history.

The roll-call of winners in that time is revelatory. Since 1993, it reads:

3 – Barcelona, Real Madrid, AC Milan

2 – Manchester United

1 – Marseille, Ajax, Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Bayern Munich, FC Porto, Liverpool, Inter Milan, Chelsea

Only three teams have won the competition more times than United in that time and when it comes to managers in that period, Ferguson has no superior:

2 – Ottmar Hitzfeld, Vicente Del Bosque, Carlo Ancelotti, Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho, Pep Guardiola

1 – Raymond Goethals, Fabio Capello, Louis van Gaal, Marcello Lippi, Jupp Heynckes, Rafa Benitez, Frank Rijkaard, Roberto Di Matteo

Indeed, the only manager to have ever lifted more European Cups than Ferguson is the great Bob Paisley.

The legendary Liverpool boss, however, never had to truly build his own empire. He made Bill Shankly's regular winners into relentless winners, but didn't have to put the same structures in place. At a time when repeat winners and successions of European Cup triumphs were characteristic of the tournament rather than rare, Paisley maximised the effect of the Liverpool trophy-accumulating machine. For that, he obviously deserves huge credit. But the dimensions of his spell in charge are not really comparable to Ferguson's.

In fact, part of the problem with properly analysing Ferguson's European record is that, really, there is no other manager who has stayed in the competition for so long with such a prominent club. The only coaches that otherwise come close in European Cup history are Arsene Wenger at Arsenal (14 seasons), Miguel Munoz at Real Madrid (12 seasons), Jock Stein at Celtic (nine seasons) and Giovanni Trapattoni at Juventus (six seasons).

Their records read as follows:

Munoz at Real Madrid – two victories, two finals, two semi-finals, two quarter-finals, three second rounds, one first round

Wenger at Arsenal – one final, one semi-final, four quarter-finals, six last-16, two group stages

Stein at Celtic – one victory, one final, two semi-finals, two quarter-finals, one second round, two first rounds.

Trapattoni at Juventus – one victory, one final, one semi-final, one second round, one first round.

Wenger, evidently, barely compares. The other three, who are all considered in Ferguson's tier of legendary managers, actually have similar, mixed records and went out early on a surprising number of occasions. Even Paisley, in fact, saw Liverpool go out in the first round twice.

This undoubtedly has a lot to do with the United manager's theory, articulated during the Wayne Rooney transfer saga of October 2010, that "a four-year cycle is probably the most you can achieve in terms of success".

The relevance here, in essence, is that it's very difficult to reach the latter rounds of the competition relentlessly because teams go through necessary periods of refreshment and transition. Of course, the counter-argument to that might be that certain Ferguson cycles should then have seen more success; particularly, 1992-95, 1995-98 and 2001-06.

The exact length of Ferguson's career, however, means that there are naturally a number of caveats to all this.



GettyImages
Arrigo Sacchi's AC Milan were the last side to win the European Cup back to back, a feat Ferguson nearly achieved in 2009
For a start, his first few forays into the European Cup came in the aftermath of the Heysel ban. As English clubs endured a difficult isolation between 1985 and 1990, football on the rest of the continent enjoyed a quantum leap, mostly due to events in Milan. On the pitch, Arrigo Sacchi's pressing game altered the way sides approached matches. Off it, Silvio Berlusconi's business model completely altered the way clubs approached marketing.

After almost four decades in which the European Cup had enjoyed different eras of dominance by individual teams, and in which Milan actually became the first side to win the trophy again after more than a six-year gap, the era of the monolithic super-clubs was upon us.

In every sense, then, English teams had an awful lot of catching-up to do. Among some of the more embarrassing results in this period were Leeds United getting torn apart by PSV Eindhoven, Aston Villa being eliminated by Trabzonspor, Liverpool going out of the UEFA Cup to Brondby and - most comically - Blackburn Rovers' frustrations leading to David Batty and Graeme Le Saux turning on each other away to Spartak Moscow.

Ferguson, of course, suffered his own humiliations. There was the unsavoury elimination to Galatasaray when Turkish football was still weak, the evisceration away at IFK Gothenburg, the UEFA Cup exit to Rotor Volgograd and the three 1-0 home defeats in 1996-97 that ended United's cherished unbeaten home record in Europe.

At the end of that campaign, too, Ferguson tried to make a move for the kind of players that could genuinely transform United. Gabriel Batistuta was targeted, only for Ferguson to find that the marketing of both the club and the Premier League couldn't yet quite match the expenditure elsewhere. They may have been selling shirts aplenty, but United hadn't yet joined the ranks of the super-clubs.

As Ferguson later said: "My hands were tied because Manchester United's policy on salaries gave me no chance of providing the financial package required to secure those great players' contracts. I think the restrictions applied to wages prevented us from being the power in European football that we could have been in the '90s."

At that point, United's wage ceiling was £23,000 a week. When the club were offered Brazilian legend in the making Ronaldo by the player's agent before he went to Barcelona in 1996, they were told they would have to start at £50,000 and likely go higher.

Ferguson laid out the case. "The club has got to get to grips with what actually makes a winning club in Europe. It is not anywhere near that. It is not Barcelona, it is not an AC Milan, it is not a Juventus, it's not a Real Madrid."

Nevertheless, in that 1996-97 season, United still reached the semi-finals for the first time in 28 years. It was evidence that every season in the Champions League was sharpening both the team and the manager. They were growing with the experience of initially painful defeats to the likes of Juventus. As Gianluca Vialli told La Republicca in 2011, "Sir Alex told me he learnt a lot from the games against Italian opponents in the '90s. He changed his style."

All of that actually makes the victory of 1999 an even more remarkable feat. Unlike Aston Villa in 1982 or even arguably Nottingham Forest in 1979 and 1980, Ferguson didn't win the European Cup from an existing elevated platform of English dominance. In the early '80s, the English league was undoubtedly Europe's strongest and it is highly plausible that the risen tide eased those two provincial sides to titles.

To win the 1999 trophy, however, Ferguson had to lift United from much lower down.



GettyImages
Manchester United celebrate with the Champions League trophy as Bayern Munich look on
On the opposite side of that, he does deserve criticism for failing to build on the treble success. That 1998-2001 side, most identified by a core of Dwight Yorke, Andy Cole, Jaap Stam, David Beckham and Roy Keane at his best, never won another knockout tie. In the next two seasons, they went out at the quarter-final stage. It was the first of those eliminations that laid bare Ferguson's most obvious continental failings.

Infamously, a three-man Real Madrid central midfield - driven by Fernando Redondo - comprehensively outmanoeuvred Ferguson's relatively flat 4-4-2. One of the main problems was that Ferguson, although a somewhat underrated tactical strategist, wasn't at that point an innovator. On the whole, he has generally responded to tactical trends rather than led them.

Henning Berg, who was United's back-up centre-half, outlined this superbly in his autobiography. There are very few coaches, Berg said, "as good at practical tactics as [Kenny] Dalglish and Ferguson. There's nobody as concrete as them before and during a match. Nobody that better exploits the opponent's weaknesses. Inside any system there are lots of variables that chance from one game to another. Small details. Dalglish and Ferguson know this better than most. ‘They play like this, so we'll play like that.' ‘He plays like this, so you'll play like that.' They don't wrap it in. They tell us what to do and, if we do it, we win."

Up to that point, as Berg transparently shows, Ferguson's main strengths had been spotting the smaller tactical elements in each game and building up huge reserves of both momentum and mentality in order to maximise that knowledge. By doing so, though, he was never going to truly stay ahead of the pack. He was only ever going to occasionally get his nose in front. Ultimately, United were prone to being outthought by some outlandish tactical variation, as happened against Real Madrid in 1999-2000.

It was this that led to both the appointment of Carlos Queiroz and, in many games, a conservatism and defensiveness never previously associated with Ferguson. As Patrice Evra has stated, "tactically, Quieroz brought something important to Man United."

It did all take time to have an effect though.

First, Ferguson's retirement plans unsettled the team and resulted in the great missed opportunity of 2002. A league was delivered the following year thanks to Ruud van Nistelrooy's goals but Ferguson still realised he needed to restructure. The team endured a prolonged period of transition as the manager introduced a new core, with the ructions of the Glazer takeover hardly helping.

From all that, though, it's no coincidence that the period between 2006 and 2009 was United's greatest in their European Cup history. A number of important elements finally came together: Ferguson's own inherent abilities and experience; a new tactical nous developed from so many long nights of the soul in Europe and, finally, the newly elevated platform of the exceedingly rich Premier League.

With three of the best forwards in the world in Carlos Tevez, Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo, Ferguson and Queiroz honed a revolutionary strikerless formation in which the trio would interchange and exchange gloriously.

That only got them so far though. It shouldn't be forgotten United only scored two goals in the last three games of the victorious 2008 campaign. As such, the difference was a defence that was, statistically, the best in the club's history. Ferguson had added a canny resolve to his old sense of romance. Indeed, the tense semi-final victory over Barcelona in the 2007-08 semi-final was the polar opposite of the rampaging comeback against Juventus at the same stage in 1998-99.

As Evra said: "I remember the semi-final against Barcelona away when [Quieroz] was speaking with everybody before the second half. The tactic was to have the team very compact and to let Barcelona play with the ball. He said possession didn't matter."



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Can Sir Alex Ferguson taste Champions League glory again at Wembley at 2013?
That new balance resulted in a three-year sequence of semi-final (2007), victory (2008) and final (2009), as well as another final again in 2011. In short, it was the sort of true competitiveness in Europe that many had for so long expected from Ferguson's United.

The only problem was that, in the meantime, United's 2008 semi-final opponents made one of the starkest quantum leaps in the game yet. And, given all the elements going in Barcelona's favour, responding to this evolution may even be beyond Ferguson.

Either way, until he does win that legendary third title, some criticism will always remain. But, in terms of his Champions League record, there is at least an argument that Ferguson is being judged by unfair historical standards, rather than for just being Alex Ferguson.

Originally Posted by tetrisblock

You have a point regarding the european cups, but read this article and it dispels that myth that he has underachieved in Europe. The Porto match and Leverkusen game were unlucky. We should have beaten Munich in the semi a few years back! Barcelona are an incredible team...

[SIZE="1"]yadda yadda


[SIZE="1"]blah blah

I have no inclination to read any of that...

unlucky ? ..schmunlucky !

Originally Posted by Fountz

I have no inclination to read any of that...

unlucky ? ..schmunlucky !

Pity, its quite good

Yeah, "bad luck" is for losers - but when you think of the outrageous good fortune Chelski had last year (or THEM in 2005) you do wonder

Originally Posted by Fountz

I have no inclination to read any of that...

unlucky ? ..schmunlucky !

How original! Harri Jaffa wants his joke back!

With regards to RIC, I believe you make you're own luck, but when refereeing decisions go against you, as in the Porto game, very little else you can call it!

Originally Posted by tetrisblock

How original! Harri Jaffa wants his joke back!

bothered ?

reading through thread first before posting... Shmreading Shmoo Shmead Shmirst etc

Originally Posted by tetrisblock

The roll-call of winners in that time is revelatory. Since 1993, it reads:

3 – Barcelona, Real Madrid, AC Milan

2 – Manchester United

1 – Marseille, Ajax, Juventus, Borussia Dortmund, Bayern Munich, FC Porto, Liverpool, Inter Milan, Chelsea

oh look the only 3 above us are those teams i said were bigger than us and everyone went mad.

Originally Posted by Sparky***

oh look the only 3 above us are those teams i said were bigger than us and everyone went mad.

Yeah fine if that's your only criteria.