From The Scotsman:
In explaining that he'd given him the idea, Brian McClair was not seeking the credit for Sir Alex Ferguson's actually rather tame attempt to turn the air blue on Sunday.
Instead, the former Manchester United striker, who next year takes over as manager of the Old Trafford club's youth academy, was revealing the calm which had existed at their Carrington training ground last week. This is despite reports it had turned into a battle-zone stalked by a brooding skipper called Roy Keane, who ate under-performing players for breakfast.
McClair and Ferguson had spoken with each other at the end of last week against a backdrop of countless newspaper thought-pieces which aimed to portray a club in meltdown and a manager who'd become unable to rely on even his own captain. They spoke eloquently but, as probably even they themselves suspected, they spoke too soon.
We all did, save for characters like McClair, a player whose undoubted talent experienced a power surge under Ferguson. He brings unique insight to any analysis of a man who refuses to adopt the characteristics of someone meant to be performing a last, elegiac walk towards an immense sun that hangs quivering in the sky.
McClair thinks Ferguson will thunder on for years and years to come: "I honestly cannot see him ever retiring," he says. "A setting such as Old Trafford on Sunday was made for him."
The bow Ferguson performed as he approached the mouth of the players' tunnel on Sunday evening was not one which acknowledged a coming final curtain: it was, instead, a grand-standing gesture, one which promised further tricks to come. Who's to say the season won't now end with the conjuring of a Premiership title, a task that had seemed as wretched as the one that lay before them in the early hours of Sunday afternoon, as Chelsea circled towards town?
But the sound and the fury of Old Trafford helped change all that, and Ferguson was the compelling figure at the heart of it. Keane sat behind the manager, heavily stubbled and perhaps only marginally less arresting. But the chain of authority had been re-asserted.
McClair, a keen student of his own career, mentioned to Ferguson that the club had come through more testing times, and reminded his mentor of one 13-match run without a win. "It wasn't the bollocks thing he learned from me, but I did mention how pressure was only relative.
"We have been very, very successful but it wasn't always like that. I remember it vividly. We had gone 13 games without a win and we went to Millwall in a game we had to win. Like against Chelsea, we had a lot of experienced men out, and we won 2-0. I mentioned it to the gaffer last week."
Ferguson returned to the theme in the moments after Sunday's Darren Fletcher-inspired victory, when his racing heart had yet to settle and the language of the shipyard flew into his mouth. "That's absolute bollocks," he admonished the Sky reporter, Geoff Shreeves, live on air when asked whether last week had been his most difficult in 19 years' worth of them.
Ferguson then directed listeners to McClair's definition of pressure. Although a club like Manchester United shouldn't lose 4-1 to Middlesbrough, and nor should it accept the lame performance which followed in the Champions League, the point remains that such a solidly constructed empire is unlikely to be undermined by a series of poor results combined with minor evidence of revolt.
It means Ferguson has become one of the few 63-year olds currently relishing the winter, and the challenges which lie therein.
http://sport.scotsman.com/football_english.cfm?id=2210062005