Free Alex Ferguson My Autobiography by Alex Ferguson Page B

3 p.m. before a trip to Leicester City, I noticed the press lined up on the road into Carrington. There must have been 20 photographers.
    ‘What’s going on?’ I demanded. I was told, ‘Apparently Beckham is revealing his new haircut tomorrow.’
    David turned up with a beanie hat on. At dinner that night he was still wearing it. ‘David, take your beanie hat off, you’re in a restaurant,’ I said. He refused. ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ I persisted. ‘Take it off.’ But he wouldn’t.
    So I was raging. There was no way I could fine him for it. Plenty of players had worn baseball caps on the way to games and so on, but none had been so defiant about keeping one on during a team meal.
    The next day, the players were going out for the pre-match warm-up and David had his beanie hat on. ‘David,’ I said, ‘you’re not going out with that beanie hat on. You’ll not be playing. I’ll take you out of the team right now.’
    He went berserk. Took it off. Bald head, completely shaved. I said, ‘Is that what this was all about? A shaved head that nobody was to see?’ The plan was that he would keep the beanie hat on and take it off just before kick-off. At that time I was starting to despair of him. I could see him being swallowed up by the media or publicity agents.
    David was at a great club. He had a fine career. He gave me 12 to 15 goals a season, worked his balls off. That was taken away from him. And with that being taken away from him, he lost the chance to become an absolute top-dog player. For my money, after the change, he never attained the level where you would say: that is an absolute top player.
    The process began when he was around 22 or 23. He started to make decisions that rendered it hard for him to develop into a really great footballer. That was the disappointment for me. There was no animosity between us, just disappointment, for me. Dejection. I would look at him and think: ‘What are you doing, son?’
    When he joined us, he was this wee, starry-eyed kid. Football mad. At 16 he was never out of the gymnasium and couldn’t stop practising. He loved the game; he was living the dream. Then he wanted to give it all up for a new career, a new lifestyle, for stardom.
    From one perspective it would be churlish of me to say he made the wrong decision, in the sense that he’s a very wealthy man. He’s become an icon. People react to his style changes. They copy them. But I’m a football man, and I don’t think you give up football for anything. You can have hobbies. I have horses; Michael Owen had horses; Scholes had horses. One or two players liked art. I had a lovely painting in my office that Kieran Richardson did. What you don’t do is surrender the nuts and bolts of football.
    A year prior to leaving us, of course, David had taken part in the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea, weeks after breaking his metatarsal in the Champions League tie at Old Trafford in the spring of 2002. That was quite a drama.
    Although David sustained the same metatarsal injury that was to afflict Wayne Rooney four years later, there was a difference in the recovery process. David was a naturally fit type of guy. Wayne needed more work to bring him back to sharpness. So I calculated that David might be fit enough for the World Cup, and said so openly at the time.
    In the event, when England arrived in Japan, he might still have been carrying the remnants of his injury. It’s hard to tell with some players, because in their desperation to play in a World Cup, they tell you they are fine. From the evidence of the tournament, David couldn’t have been all right. The proof that physical frailty was still preying on his mind could be seen when he jumped over a tackle near the touchline in a sequence of play that led to Brazil’s equaliser in the quarter-final in Shizuoka.
    I was surprised at how physically off the pace he seemed, because he was such a fit boy. So he couldn’t have been fit, either physically or