THE new Freeman of Aberdeen had spent an unusual week, starting with the city's ceremony to honour him for having put its name on the European map, and finishing on Friday evening in a room with the executives of the plc which employs him. If British football has travelled a considerable distance in the past 13 years, then so has Alex Ferguson - from Aberdeen, a club bound tightly to its locality, to one where football's axle turns as fast as the wheels of big business.
Ferguson takes no public view on the rights and wrongs of Manchester United's proposed takeover by BSkyB, except that the sooner the club knows who owns it the better for his planning. Nor is he a particularly sentimental man, though his return to the north of Scotland to be officially given the freedom of "the beautiful city" had stirred fond recollections. "You see at times like that how you've progressed in your life," he said. His latest honour is one granted to few, demanding a certain gravitas. Aberdeen gives its gatekeys only to a particular sort of person: Ferguson has joined a very short list which includes Nelson Mandela and Sir Winston Churchill.
It had been "very gratifying," he said. "I suppose I try to make light of it, but I actually felt really chuffed. I couldn't believe they'd offered it to me. After all, it was 12 1/2 years since I'd left. I suppose, coming to the millennium, it was something they felt would be right." Ferguson's achievement - winning a host of Scottish trophies plus that European Cup Winners' Cup at the expense of Real Madrid - is hardly reduced by time. For modern Aberdeen, European silverware seems as far from their immediate ambitions as Madrid is from Pittodrie.
The architect of their 1980s triumphs, meanwhile, looks back on his first great European adventure in the perspective of dates such as next Wednesday's European Cup game between Manchester United and Juventus at Old Trafford. If there is a thread that joins his Aberdeen days and his United tenure, then it is the desire for continental success and the "strong character" of his players, past and present. Most of the Dons class of '83 attended last week's ceremony conferring the freedom of the city, and it would be safe to assume their reunion broke up well after the last bus home. Ferguson enjoyed it thoroughly.
He was happy to indulge in a little recent reminiscence, too, as he considered the immediate challenge of United's European Cup semi-final. United's approach to the game could be usefully informed by remembering how they fared at the same stage in the competition two years ago, how the same young men who lost against Borussia Dortmund have since grown up in European football, how their maturity might now match the desire of the club to regain European football's top club trophy after a 31-year wait.
The difference between the semi-finalists of 1999 and 1997, believes Ferguson, was not in the names on the teamsheet, but the facts and figures next to them. They are two years older and many, many European nights the wiser. "Players like Gary Neville, Paul Scholes and David Beckham have matured," he said. "They're young men now. They look to me like they're coming to the period in their lives in which the next few years will be their peak."
"They've played in over 20 European matches, some of great significance," added Ferguson, leafing through the last two seasons in his Champions League log-book. "Four games against Juventus means something, plus two against Bayern Munich, two against Borussia Dortmund, two against Barcelona, two against Inter, two against Porto. In anybody's language those teams would be in the top 10 in Europe. There's good evidence there that we're not far away. And I don't think we are far away."
"Two years ago, I felt as good as I do now," he said by way of comparison. "What I didn't know was how we could handle such an important game, and, looking back, there was some evidence from the Dortmund game that we really should have been in the final. At the time, you found yourself asking 'Why do Germans seem to get all the luck?' " It was the wrong question, he concluded: "We had enough chances ourselves. It was down to our finishing. They didn't carry the luck to get them there. You couldn't really blame luck."
If he couldn't blame luck for past shortcomings, he could happily ride it. Ferguson touched wood just the once during our conversation at a west London dining club. "It's good wood, too," he remarked, running a hand over a polished oak table.
As Ferguson has stressed, United enjoyed one or two strokes of good fortune during their quarter-final against Internazionale, and if that should spread to the other knockout competition where they have an interest - they play Arsenal in the FA Cup semi-final a week today - then all the better, although he would happily concentrate all of the stuff on Europe and let the Premiership race look after itself, three points at a time. "The treble is just media talk," he insisted. "We're doing the right thing, we're attacking every game with vigour and energy."
That United have been able to do so with close to a full complement of staff had also kept them a step ahead of previous years, Ferguson argued, when key absences undermined them in Europe's later stages. Pending final fitness reports on those involved in the game against Wimbledon, both Ryan Giggs and Jaap Stam are expected to rejoin full training in time for Wednesday.
United have so far negotiated the tightrope of suspensions, and the maelstrom of the end-of-season fixture list had been cushioned by the depth of his squad and the breaks it had allowed United to grant to certain players. "The endurance factor is the key to it," said Ferguson. "As opposed to last year they're looking very powerful."
To prepare his squad, body and mind, for the season, the United manager in the summer outlined to those involved in the World Cup that they would have to make their own pit-stops in the months ahead. "We've been able to rest players at the right time," he said. "I explained to them that it's a mental thing. We gave Gary Neville a four-week holiday in September; he was knackered. Even Jaap Stam's injury in December may have helped him through the mental challenge that comes from the humdrum of English football when it's still new to you." Most dramatic had been the return to form of Peter Schmeichel since a new-year interval in the Caribbean.
Most rejuvenated in recent weeks has been Scholes who, at the end of last year, confessed to his manager that he was feeling tired. "I think one or two players suffered from the World Cup," said Ferguson. "I thought Scholes dipped in December particularly. I took him off in a game against Chelsea and told him to go away for a break. Three weeks put him back on track. He's been getting better each week, still without reaching the standard he's capable of. Now he's got the benefit of a great result and a great performance for England against Poland I expect him to really take off."
The last point - the England display - he was happy to take on hearsay. Ferguson had not seen the game at Wembley - "I was away" - and, besides, he is a patriot Scot, a fact well known to the citizens of Aberdeen but not, apparently, to the English FA, who only four weeks ago had him at the top of their wish-list as the next England manager. Suffice to say, the contributions of Scholes, Neville, Beckham and Andy Cole to England's cause last weekend had made pleasurable viewing on the edited highlights.
Cole's ability to transport his lively club form into his first England start has been as gratifying to any Sassenach, and to this Scot, as Scholes's sharp instincts. When Ferguson talks of his younger players turning from men to boys, he includes not just the home-grown brigade. Cole is a little older than Beckham, Gary Neville and Scholes, but still maturing none the less. "Players can continue to learn and respond into their late 20s," said Ferguson. "Andy Cole is improving all the time." Kevin Keegan, who sold Cole to United and has inherited a more inventive striker as England manager, says much the same.
With an in-form Cole and Scholes, not to mention United's leading scorer, Dwight Yorke, it all looks rosy enough in front of goal. Cole and Yorke against Dynamo Kiev's Andrei Chevchenko and Sergei Rebrov would make an appealing European Cup final (Bayern Munich and Juventus have respectively lost Giovane Elber and Alessandro Del Piero to injury, and their options diminished accordingly).
Would that it were so simple. "I think at our club," smiled Ferguson. "you tend to accept that somewhere, deep down in the make-up of Manchester United's football, there's something that at times seems suicidal. They can thrill you, and exasperate you. You're never safe even if you're winning two or three-nil. That's the nature of the club, not something you can halt.
"It's ingrained in the fabric, you have to go with the flow. They'll take you right to the wire, they'll wait until the 88th minute while I'm on the bench having three heart attacks, contorted stomach pains. And that's why you need good defenders like Stam, Denis Irwin, good goalkeepers like Schmeichel - a lot of time they're going to be defending one-to-one."
Juventus, who will be alert to every counter-attacking opportunity during the Old Trafford leg, would only be separated from United by "some little break", predicted Ferguson: "It's that close. There's nothing between the two sides. I don't think they've changed a lot since we last played them. They've had a few bad results and Marcello Lippi's quit. But Lippi forged strong relationships with a lot of those players, and, as happens so often, there's been a reaction to that and they've got back on track. We'll have to keep our nerve." Touch wood.
