Martin Amis's Blog, page 2

The Downing Street door has nearly closed on Tony Blair. Martin Amis has been shadowing the prime minister on his farewell tour, watching him preen in Belfast, share bonbons with the Bush administration - and get it badly wrong in Basra. And all the while the Iraq protesters are hovering ...

Watch our video and pictures of Blair's last days, narrated by Martin Amis here

No 1, London

It isn't bad, driving through town with Tony. The car's steel cladding, as the PM points out, is almost comically thick - so thick, indeed, that the interior has the feel of something like a Ford Fiesta rather than a Jaguar; and it takes nearly all your strength to tug shut the slab-like door behind you. But then we're away. The crouched policemen, in their Day-Glo yellow strip, buzz past like purposeful hornets to liberate the road ahead. We barely brake once between Downing Street and the Westway. The power is ebbing from him now; but for a little while longer we can luxuriate in the present tense. And, yes, it's a bit of all right, driving through town with Tony.

Last week in the Guardian Ronan Bennett accused Martin Amis of racism. Here the writer rejects the charge, insisting his views on Islam are a question of ideology, not ethnicity

I want to talk about the discourse, and about the kind of public conversation we should be hoping to have. But before I do that, I will pay my Islamic readers - and I know I have a few - the elementary courtesy of saying that I DO NOT "ADVOCATE" ANY DISCRIMINATORY TREATMENT OF MUSLIMS. AND I NEVER HAVE. And no one with the slightest respect for truth can claim otherwise.

On November 19 the arrival of "the new racism" was eagerly heralded on the cover of G2 - tricked out, for the occasion, to resemble some scabrous, illiterate hate-sheet of the 1930s (Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer, for example). Well, this is what's new about the new racism: it isn't racist. Ronan Bennett writhes and toils in the coarsest of category errors. The question before the house is not about race. It is about ideology.

He said he had four studies in his house so we can imagine him writing a poem in one of his studies before breakfast, then in the next study writing a hundred pages of a novel, then in the afternoon he writes a long and brilliant essay for the New Yorker, and then in the fourth study he blurts out a couple of poems. John Updike must have been possessed of a purer energy than any writer since DH Lawrence.

I've seen it suggested that such prodigies suffer from an enviable condition called 'pressure on the cortex'. It's as if they have within them an underground spring which is always on the point of eruption. He has produced an enormous body of work. He is certainly one of the great American novelists of the 20th century.

Of the great postwar American writers, John Updike, who died last week, was the most controversial, for his sexual candour and unblinking portrayal of adultery in middle-class suburbia. In 1987 Martin Amis travelled to Boston for this paper to meet his hero - then near to completing his acclaimed series of 'Rabbit' novels - to talk about wives, literature ... and mortality. Here we reprint the interview in full

I met up with Updike at Mass General - that is to say, at the Wang Ambulatory Care Centre of Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston. The brilliant, fanatically productive and scandalously self-revealing novelist had been scheduled to have a cancerous or cancer-prone wart removed from the side of his hand at 9.30 that morning.

It was 10.30 when we eye-contacted each other in the swirling ground-floor cafeteria. "You know what I look like," he had said on the telephone. And there was no mistaking him (apart from anything else, he was the healthiest man there): tall, "storklike," distinctly avian, with the questing curved nose and the hairstyle like a salt-and-pepper turban.

JG Ballard, who died this week, asked what effect the modern world - concrete highways, shopping malls, pornography, technology - has on our psyches. The answer was perversity in various forms, all of them extreme. Martin Amis remembers a savage, sinister writer who was also an unusually lovable man

I first came across Ballard when I was a teenager. He was a friend of my father's, and my father championed his early work, calling him "the brightest star in postwar SF" (all purists call science fiction SF, and have nothing but contempt for "sci fi"). Ballard was a beautiful man, with a marvellously full, resonant face and hot eyes, and talked in the cadences of extreme sarcasm with very heavy stresses - he wasn't being sarcastic, merely expressive. The friendship between the two did not survive Ballard's increasing interest in experimentalism, which my father always characterised as "buggering about with the reader". But I was always delighted to see Jim later on. Funnily enough, he was an unusually lovable man, despite the extraordinary weirdness of his imagination.

His imagination was formed by his wartime experience in Shanghai, where he was interned by the Japanese. He was 13 at the time and took to the life in the camp as he would "to a huge slum family". But it wasn't just the camp that formed him - it was the very low value attached to human life, something he saw throughout his childhood. He told me that he'd seen coolies beaten to death at a distance of five yards from where he was standing, and every morning as he was driven to school in an American limousine there were always fresh bodies lying in the street. Then came the Japanese. He said "people in the social democracies have no idea of the daily brutality of parts of the east. No they don't, actually. And it's as well that they don't."

When it comes to women, I give you up, Kingsley Amis wrote to Philip Larkin. Although the poet bald, peevish and apathetic had several romantic relationships, most enduringly with the indomitable academic Monica Jones, his private life was ultimately a failure, reflects Martin Amis

The age of the literary correspondence is dying, slowly but surely electrocuted by the superconductors of high modernity. This expiration was locked into a certainty about 20 years ago; and although William Trevor and VS Naipaul, say, may yet reward us, it already sounds fogeyish to reiterate that, no, we won't be seeing, and we won't be wanting to see, the selected faxes and emails, the selected texts and tweets of their successors. Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica, published by Faber, covers the period 1945-70, and passively evokes it: digs and lodgings ("I have put in for a flatlet!!!"), pre-decimal currency ("I owe you 21/1d I think 24/11 plus 1/2 minus 5/-"), The Archers, Pickford's Movers and myxomatosis; its settings are remorselessly provincial, mainly Leicester and Hull (and Belfast, true), with so-called holidays in York, Sark, Lincoln, Poolewe, Bournemouth ("I hope you got my card from Pocklington"). The volume will be of vital interest to all admirers of Larkin's work, and to all students of the abysmal mystery of Larkin's life, with its singularly crippled eros. Much of the time, though, readers will be thinking that the "literary correspondence" is something we're well shot of a postwar embarrassment, like child labour, meat rationing and outdoor toilets.

Sexual intercourse, as everyone knows, began in 1963 (which "was rather late for me"). But what preceded it?

From his early struggles at Manchester United to the glory days of the treble and beyond, Alex Ferguson has never been out of the headlines. Here is a selection of articles from our archive

The honeymoon is soon over for new manager Fergie as he loses his first match: Bob Houston is at the Manor Ground for Manchester United's 2-0 defeat by Oxford United

Martin Amis, AS Byatt, Kathyrn Hughes and John Mullan reflect on how Middlemarch has changed for them as they have got older
• Read Rebecca Mead on life lessons from George Eliot

'A novel without weaknesses, it renews itself for every generation'
Martin Amis

It is interesting that during her life Middlemarch wasn't George Eliot's greatest achievement. Daniel Deronda, which came after, was an enormous worldwide success, but it is very hard going and is hardly read at all now. Meanwhile, I don't think there is much argument about Middlemarch being the novel of the 19th century. I would say that it is the central English novel. It's a novel without weaknesses, except perhaps Will Ladislaw is a little too light and romantic – he's a bit underweight for a novel so ample and deep.

I first read it in my late teens and both my sons have read it recently. Neither read English at university and both thought it was amazing. So another proof of greatness is that it renews itself for every generation. I reread it in my 30s with completely undiminished admiration. Dorothea's sexuality is very interesting, as her marriage to Casaubon is clearly unconsummated. When she goes to the art gallery in Italy and someone asks her about it she says she finds the paintings frightening. It is clear that it is the sensuality of the paintings that alarms her – she is about to experience some fulfilment with Ladislaw. Eliot's book came at the time that writers were trying to suggest something about sexuality with a very limited vocabulary. In Hard Times, when Gradgrind is fixing up for Louisa to marry the middle-aged Mr Bounderby, she looks out at the industrial landscape – "see those chimneys father, at night fire comes out of them" – an attempt to imply the very obvious image of sexuality. Mr Gradgrind says he does not understand the relevance of the remark. So that is the Dickens way of implying sex. Eliot is, of course, much more subtle.

'Now when I reread it I want to urge Dorothea to stay exactly as she is at the start' Kathryn Hughes

When I first read Middlemarch as a teenager, I was consumed by what deconstructionist critics call "the marriage plot" and the rest of us call the love story. I identified with Dorothea, naturally, and cringed at the idea of having Casaubon's hands all over me. (I was not a sufficiently subtle reader to pick up the clues that Casaubon is impotent, so his hands didn't go anywhere at all.) Like many of Eliot's contemporary readers I longed for Dorothea to get together with Lydgate, whose ardour to do "good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for mankind" seemed the perfect match for her own intense if inchoate desire to make the world a better place. Still, if she couldn't have him, at least she had Ladislaw for her second and forever husband. Although underwritten as a character (he is nothing but a lovely shimmering empty space), the Byronic young man is definitely on the side of angels, too.

Now, in middle age, and still identifying with Dorothea, I find that I couldn't care less about the love stuff. What interests me is the money. Unusually for the heroine of a Victorian novel, Dorothea does not have the threat of governessing hanging over her. Her dead parents have left her a fortune and, again unusually, there don't seem to be any complicated conditions attached to her inheritance. She is free to do as she pleases.

Above all, Dorothea isn't obliged to marry anyone and, increasingly, I think she's mad to have done it not once but twice. Casaubon, of course, is conveniently lost to a coronary. And she certainly dodged a bullet with Lydgate: Eliot tells us at the end of the novel that he soon gives up his high ideals in order to become a society doctor. But the marriage Dorothea actually makes, to Ladislaw, now strikes me as risky, too. He'll rise into the cabinet but something – dodgy expenses, a flirty secretary – will bring him down.

These days when I reread the novel I want to urge Dorothea to stay exactly as she is at the start of the novel, a supremely lucky creature with the resources to do exactly as she pleases (in her case, designing model cottages). Once she attains the age of 21 she can move out of Tipton Grange and buy an equally lovely, but better run, estate of her own.

'Eliot had such power, and she knew she had. And such courage'
AS Byatt

When I first read Middlemarch I loved it most of all for Lydgate – the idea that an intellectual passion could be as powerful as a sexual one. My favourite pages were – and in many ways still are – those in which he discovers his scientific vocation. And his tragedy is more terrible and more inexorable than anything that happens to Dorothea. My next discovery was the wonderful pattern of interlinked metaphors (the web, the makeup of the eye) that hold the novel together as tightly as a poem, while chance and surprise work in the plotting, despite Eliot wanting to observe "the gradual action of ordinary causes rather than exceptional". I taught Middlemarch to many students. Most were uneasy about the narrative voice – the "I think" and "We feel" that introduce many of her observations. Over the years I have come to be almost more excited by this voice – or rather, these voices – than by anything else. The "I" is the authorial voice and we have our relation, as readers, with that voice. The "We" is part of a wonderful ability to move us with generalisations.

"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

I was lecturing recently in Chicago in a conference on Middlemarch and Henry James's The Golden Bowl and got excited by the fierce, sardonic, black humour of the "I", the commenting voice, which I missed, on earlier readings, out of too much reverence. She had such power, and she knew she had. And such courage.

'Eliot seems not to invent her characters but to approach them'
John Mullan

I first read Middlemarch, with relish, in my early 20s. I particularly remember first encountering Dorothea on her honeymoon. We left her 100 pages earlier, setting off for Rome with her new husband, Mr Casaubon. Now Eliot takes us into her handsome boudoir. "I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly." Why is she crying? Eliot does not quite know because Dorothea does not know herself. Disappointment is overwhelming her but she can hardly face up to this truth.

Eliot's treatment of her heroine's dawning recognition of her mistake epitomises the novel's psychological complexity. She is letting us see how her characters delude themselves. I think that this is why Middlemarch seemed the most thickly peopled novel I had ever known. It was not a matter of scale but of characterisation: Eliot seems not to invent her characters but to approach them, listen to their foolish ideas about themselves, and yet leave them with some aspect yet to be discovered.

This means that she is able to jolt our sympathies so brilliantly. We think we have learnt to see through the self-regarding Casaubon but then, far into the novel, Eliot shows us how the desiccated scholiast "had an intense consciousness within him". We scorn the pious superiority of the banker Bulstrode, but when his true hypocrisy is revealed he unexpectedly becomes a person to attract our sympathies.

Eliot's company is one of the great pleasures of Middlemarch. Often she is speaking, yet her narrative manner turns her wisdom into irony or ruefulness. Even when being sententious (which is certainly her temptation) she is wry. It is her genius to use fiction to question even her own intelligence and insight.

George EliotFictionMartin AmisAS ByattKathryn HughesJohn Mullan
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In a petition to the United Nations, a group of authors agree that democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space

• State surveillance of personal data is theft, say world's leading authors

A stand for democracy in a digital age

In recent months, the extent of mass surveillance has become common knowledge. With a few clicks of the mouse the state can access your mobile device, your email, your social networking and internet searches. It can follow your political leanings and activities and, in partnership with internet corporations, it collects and stores your data, and thus can predict your consumption and behaviour.

The basic pillar of democracy is the inviolable integrity of the individual. Human integrity extends beyond the physical body. In their thoughts and in their personal environments and communications, all humans have the right to remain unobserved and unmolested.

This fundamental human right has been rendered null and void through abuse of technological developments by states and corporations for mass surveillance purposes.

A person under surveillance is no longer free; a society under surveillance is no longer a democracy. To maintain any validity, our democratic rights must apply in virtual as in real space.

* Surveillance violates the private sphere and compromises freedom of thought and opinion.

* Mass surveillance treats every citizen as a potential suspect. It overturns one of our historical triumphs, the presumption of innocence.

* Surveillance makes the individual transparent, while the state and the corporation operate in secret. As we have seen, this power is being systemically abused.

* Surveillance is theft. This data is not public property: it belongs to us. When it is used to predict our behaviour, we are robbed of something else: the principle of free will crucial to democratic liberty.

WE DEMAND THE RIGHT for all people to determine, as democratic citizens, to what extent their personal data may be legally collected, stored and processed, and by whom; to obtain information on where their data is stored and how it is being used; to obtain the deletion of their data if it has been illegally collected and stored.

WE CALL ON ALL STATES AND CORPORATIONS to respect these rights.

WE CALL ON ALL CITIZENS to stand up and defend these rights.

WE CALL ON THE UNITED NATIONS to acknowledge the central importance of protecting civil rights in the digital age, and to create an international bill of digital rights.

WE CALL ON GOVERNMENTS to sign and adhere to such a convention.

Signed by more than 500 writers from around the world

Click on the column headers to sort by first name, surname or nationality

SurveillanceData protectionInternetSocial mediaCivil liberties - internationalHuman rightsUnited NationsMartin AmisArundhati RoyMargaret AtwoodRichard FordHenning MankellGünter GrassIan McEwanOrhan PamukTom Stoppard
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From his early struggles at Manchester United to the glory days of the treble and beyond, Alex Ferguson has never been out of the headlines. Here is a selection of articles from our archive

9 November 1986

The honeymoon is soon over for new manager Fergie as he loses his first match: Bob Houston is at the Manor Ground for Manchester United's 2-0 defeat by Oxford United

Such is Manchester United's plight that when Alex Ferguson chose to leave behind the Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen for the flickering flame of Old Trafford he was certainly under no illusions as to the magnitude of the task on hand.

When the Manor Ground's biggest crowd of the season had cheered their local heroes off after a well-deserved victory, Ferguson's task had certainly not been diminished.

The moments of cheer for the new man were few. And all of them came in a second half spell when Blackmore hit the bar and shaved the wrong side of the Parks' post with a 20-yarder. The introduction of Olsen in place of the sad and utterly disorientated McGrath for the last 15 minutes provided no answers as Oxford's willingness and determination to push wide down the flanks where Phillips was always a source of mischief only served to underline the frailty to United's current defensive framework.

If far from ashen-faced and tight- lipped after the match, it was a far from happy Mr Ferguson who found himself having to adjust to the pace of the English press. He'd expected it to be a difficult game at Oxford, he was happy with the way his strikers, Stapleton and Davenport, had always made themselves available, but he wasn't too happy with the way the goals were lost.

Obviously he must feel that some of the money lashed out for forwards during his predecessor's reign might have been wiser spent on some class defenders, something which United are not overburdened with currently.

He'd be going back to Scotland but he'd be there at Old Trafford for training on Monday morning. No doubt more than a few cards will be firmly marked then.

1 October 1989

Hugh McIlvanney encounters deep feelings in the United manager and finds him defiant amid calls for him to go following a 5-1 defeat to Manchester City

There is no sense of bunker about Alex Ferguson's pleasant, spacious house out in the tranquil greenery of Cheshire. But being there for several hours of conversation with the Manchester United manager confirmed anew just how severely professional sport can put a strong man's spirit under siege.

Talking nearly a week after a 5-1 humiliation by Manchester City shovelled salt into the widening wound created by a lack of success during the two-and-three-quarter years he has been running Britain's most famous football team, Ferguson seemed awed by the depth of his own feelings.

"Believe me, what I have felt in the last week you wouldn't think should happen in football," he said. "Every time somebody looks at me I feel I have betrayed that man. After such a result, you feel as if you have to sneak round corners, feel as if you are some kind of criminal.

"But that's only because you care, care about the people who support you. At Manchester United you become one of them, you think like a supporter, suffer like a supporter. They have been waiting 22 years for a league championship. I've been waiting less than three but in terms of frustration it seems like 22 already.

"There's been a lot of speculation in certain papers over the last few days about my position at Old Trafford, some of it going as far to link Howard Kendall with my job. At the very least it's been unsettling and at its worst it's been really mischievous. But I mean to be here, making a success of things, three years from now. I know I have the courage to deal with all the sniping but you worry about the effects on your family."

27 March 1994

Patrick Barclay looks at the strengths and weaknesses of Alex Ferguson's managerial style and says Manchester United's governor needs to acquire some of the late Sir Matt Busby's diplomacy

A third of last season had passed, with United no higher than fifth because they still scored at too modest a rate, when Ferguson was tipped off by a French friend that Eric Cantona wanted to leave Leeds. He bought the temperamental Marseillaise, and United have never looked back except in the anger that now jeopardises their hopes of a unique treble.

But the mantle of greatness cannot be easily removed from their manager. Many have brought success to a single club. Ferguson apart, one can think of only two – Herbert Chapman and Brian Clough – who have achieved more with separate clubs. And Ferguson has done it in separate countries. To argue that he was lucky to land Cantona would be to ignore the quality of the squad into which the catalyst was tossed. Drinkers and shirkers had been weeded out. The youth policy was mass-producing gems. Ferguson had delivered everything United envisaged when they brought him south. He had built another empire.

30 May 1999

Martin Amis witnesses United's triumph in the Champions League Final at the Nou Camp in Barcelona, with two goals in injury time securing a 2-1 victory against Bayern Munich

Yes, I Was There for the fairytale, glory night on the magic field of impossible dreams. And, true, apart from the odd rumble over the forged tickets, it was a volatile but unviolent occasion (because we won) and the tabloids got their shots of sombreroed lads cavorting on Las Ramblas. For me, though, as I posed as an average United fan, the evening amounted to 90 seconds of incredulous euphoria sandwiched by 30 hours of torment. A few more experiences of that order and I would be down on the high street stoving in the shop windows, and sieving the internet (the herd's new playground) for lots more about Combat 18.

Every time it strikes me, with all the freshness of revelation: going to a football match to watch a football match is the worst way to watch a football match. I had a good seat and a lucky one, not up there in the realms of nosebleed and brain haemorrhage, but down in the corner from which all three goals were fashioned and scored. Still, it's not, or not only, that the more distant action is hopelessly flattened and foreshortened. Whenever anything happens anywhere, everyone stands up, and you're obliged to rubberneck through a shifting collage of hair frizz and earring. But no matter.

The crowd is the engine of this experience. It is asking something of you: the surrender of your identity. And it will not be opposed. It cannot be opposed. The crowd is a wraparound millipede of rage and yearning, with the body heat of 180,000 torched armpits, with its ear-hurting roars, and that incensed whistling like a billion babies joined in one desperate scream.

Five minutes from time a fat red shirt stalked past making the tosser sign and, for emphasis, yelling: "Fucking wankers!" No one followed him. And how unforgettable it was, in those last minutes, to be caught up in the fabulous lurch of emotion, when hatred and despair became their opposites. Stranger turned to stranger with love and triumph. All were lost in the great red sea.

3 December 2000

John Carlin found Sir Alex Ferguson to be full of surprises when he interviewed him for Observer Sport Monthly in the wake of United's treble win in 1999

The first factor over which a manager can exercise some control which Ferguson mentions as key to his success, especially in that Treble season, is team spirit. "You could sense that we were not going to lose games because of that team spirit. They've," (he searches for the word, he often pauses to search for the right word) "they've enshrined that team spirit. It's a marvellous thing for a manager because that is what you try to create, because you're always looking for signs of a player's motivation, how they are reacting under pressure. Everyone was up."

Signs? What signs, precisely, did he look for?

"You have to be alert to players' behaviour patterns. How they come in every morning, how they behave with each other. Especially with the pressure on, especially in March and April. What I have to look for is if all of a sudden the atmosphere is too quiet and players, perhaps irrationally, lose their tempers, or have an argument about nothing in particular. Or players who keep going to the toilet, things like that."

Going to the toilet? "Well, yes, but then you have to know your players' habits. Some players, actually, like Steve Bruce would always go to the toilet before a game. Just before a game. It came naturally to him. I mean, it was sort of like his superstition, because all players are always superstitious. What you have to look for is a change in the patterns and if you detect that you have to step in and make things smoother."

Ferguson has this reputation for playing mind games, for psyching out opponents. Whether it is deserved or not what becomes very clear very early into the conversation is that understanding and shaping his players' psychology – each and every player's psychology – is a very big part indeed of his notion of what the manager's job should be. Maybe, more than tactics or anything, the principal part.

So, if he saw a player behaving strangely under pressure would he go and engage him in a one to one? "Aye, aye. But you have to gauge things just right. Sometimes the excitement and tension is good for them. Sometimes it's too much. That depends on the personality. It varies from player to player. You have to observe, to know, to judge."

And when, having filtered the question through his refined thought processes, he decides to take a player aside for a chat, what does he say? Ferguson pauses to weigh up the question. Pondering, how much to give away no doubt; but also mindful, as he says, of the perception the players have of him, how some fear him, how some – as he acknowledges with what appears to be an element of sincere surprise – are "frightened to death" of him.

"Well, now, if I am in a situation where I have to go to a player," he says, indicating that this is something he does not do often and, therefore, cannot be taken lightly, "then I would try not to overwhelm him. I would probably say, 'Look', in a general sense, 'look: trust yourself'."

21 February 2010

The United manager talks to Paul Hayward about Rooney, the Glazers and the loss of Ronaldo

Sir Alex Ferguson and Wayne Rooney play a game at the Manchester United training ground. Ferguson says: "He's the best at coming up to me and asking: 'What's the team?' I say: 'You're not playing.' He says: 'Come on, give me your team.' I say: 'No, I won't, I'm still thinking about it.'

"Then he says: 'I'll give you my team.' And he gives me his team. He's brilliant at it. He's never far wrong. He thinks about it, you see. He knows the game."

This is Ferguson in his element, larking about with a world-class footballer whose development he has overseen from the star's late teenage years. Rooney is the great individual delight in a season of immense challenges for the manager, who is hunting down a record fourth consecutive English league title, and a 19th in all for the club, in a season beset by mounting disquiet among supporters over the £700m-plus of debt loaded on to United by the Glazer family's borrowings.

The secret of his durability in the face of Liverpool, Arsène Wenger's Arsenal, Roman Abramovich's Chelsea and now oil-rich City is strategic wisdom, a talent for controlling change. There has been no greater setback since Cantona abruptly retired than Ronaldo's move for £80m to Real Madrid, which has at least allowed Rooney to shine in that void. Ferguson maintains that United fans should not confuse Ronaldo's sale with the £67m paid by the club in interest last year or the Glazers' frantic search for £500m in new bond loans to soften crushing interest fees, though the supporters themselves say the big issue is where most of the £80m went subsequently: to a transfer fund or to the banks.

"Ronaldo was sold simply because the boy wanted to leave. I did well to keep him another year. When we sat down, you could see it in his eyes. He said: 'Boss, I just want to play for Real Madrid, it's nothing against Manchester United. I'm going to go because it will be an experience for me.' The only reason he was sold was because the boy fervently wanted to leave. He played that extra season, did fantastically for us, and after the Cup final [the Champions League loss to Barcelona] came to me and said: 'Boss, I want to leave.' I said: 'Right, you've done another year, let me consider it.' The next day an offer came in for £80m."

Sir Alex FergusonManchester UnitedCristiano RonaldoWayne RooneyPatrick BarclayMartin AmisJohn CarlinPaul Hayward
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