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of him, we should draw comfort that we were lucky to have lived in an era that saw this great magician at work.

I was a Form Three schoolboy when Alex Ferguson became manager of Manchester United. My daughter Mimi, born exactly 10 years after Fergie became a Red Devil, is a Sixth Form schoolgirl as the great Scot walks away.

Back in those days there was no SuperSport, our connection to live pictures of the English top-flight league only came via a programme called Big League Soccer on ZTV, and Merseyside was the capital of the game, a thriving football city where our icon, Bruce Grobbelaar, plied his trade.

So much has changed since those gloomy days of the old English First Division, where hooliganism was rife, players drank as much beer as the fans, including someone called Five-Bellies who became a drinking pal of Paul Gascoigne, and would not leave the pub until all his five reservoirs were full with alcohol.

But the more that things have changed is the more they have stayed the same.
When Ferguson arrived at Old Trafford on November 6, 1986, the teams occupying the three bottom places on the table of the English top-flight league were, in that order, Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea who were rooted at the bottom.

When Ferguson announced on Wednesday that he was leaving his job, the same three clubs, Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea were bundled together, in exactly the same order, as was the case 26 years ago.

The only difference was that, while they occupied the bottom three places on the table, when Ferguson walked into Old Trafford, the three clubs now occupied the top three positions on the table as the great Scot walked away.

When Fergie arrived at Old Trafford, it was just two months before United marked the 20th anniversary of the last time they had lifted the league championship in 1967 when they finished four points clear of Nottingham Forest, and just a year from their European Cup victory that helped wipe away tears from the Munich tragedy.

Everton won the league championship, in Ferguson’s first season in charge of United, and in the year that the great Scot finally decided to walk away from the dug-out at Old Trafford, the Toffees are playing a big part of the puzzle by providing a coach, David Moyes, to succeed his fellow Scot.

In January 1990, with United struggling badly in the league after six defeats in eight games and a 1-5 thrashing at rivals City, the writing was on the wall for Fergie and a loss, in an FA Cup third round tie away to high-flying Nottingham Forest, would certainly have ended his stay at Old Trafford.

Then 20-year-old Mark Robins scored a priceless goal, which won United the match and changed the course of English football history, and three months later the Red Devils secured their first trophy under Ferguson, the FA Cup, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Ferguson’s impact on Manchester United has been awesome and for him to keep winning so much, both at home and on the continent for so long, is remarkable but what I found incredible was his ability to adjust, as the times changed, and to build different teams that would rise to meet the brutal challenges.

If Eric Cantona was the catalyst of the dynasty that Fergie built, he ensured it would not be destroyed once the Frenchman had left, at the young age of 30, and he kept finding pillars on whom to build his teams – Peter Schmeichel, Roy Keane, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs and Cristiano Ronaldo.
Noone was bigger than the club and the same way the stars came is the same way they went.

But the indomitable spirit, a defining character of a manager who never believed the game was lost and always told the globe this was the best club in the world, remained and there were trophies, a lot of them, and we had days of our lives whose memories will still be with us when we breathe for one last time.

Such was Ferguson’s impact that, in the last 22 seasons, Manchester United never finished outside the top three, in the league championship, and only on three occasions did they finish outside the top two, which means they have either been champions, or runners-up, in 19 of those seasons.

Fergie has had this incredible ability to reinvent himself, even at the ripe age of 71, to face the new challenges of the day, and to understand, and possibly appreciate it, you need just to realise that 17 players, in the current Manchester United squad that he turned into champions this year, were not even born when he became manager of this team.

Ferguson’s impact at Old Trafford should not be seen just in terms of trophies won but also the way that he was the catalyst who helped turn Manchester United from a club that was loved by the world, in the wake of the Munich tragedy, to one that became a global corporate brand as powerful, and as visible, as Coca-Cola.

Four years before Fergie’s arrival at Old Trafford, United signed their first shirt sponsorship deal with Sharp and was worth £500 000 but by the time the Red Devils signed their next shirt sponsorship, with Ferguson’s revolution well and truly underway in 2000 with Vodafone, it was worth £30 million, AIG came in September 2006 with £56,5 million, Aon came with £80 million in 2010 and General Motors with £559 million, over seven years, from next season.

Nike’s £302,9 million pound deal runs until 2015.
While Fergie was at United, there were 25 different coaches at both Real Madrid and Italian giants Inter Milan, 18 at Ajax Amsterdam, 17 at Bayern Munich, 15 at Juventus and 14 at Barcelona and AC Milan.

Ferguson ran his race, and certainly did more than win trophies, he left a legacy for football because he made the position of coach a very powerful one in the game, he helped his fellow professionals gain the respect that they deserve and he left a template for other clubs to follow if they want to have long-term marriages with their coaches.

His initial mission was to make United successful and his greatest challenge was “knocking Liverpool right off their f****** perch” and he did that but in recent years it was clear that Ferguson had evolved from just being a United coach to a global symbol of the game, which was attractive to the eye, and Sepp Blatter agreed and gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

When Ferguson arrived at Old Trafford, he was our man as Manchester United, but along the way he evolved into a global football ambassador and while his mission remained to make us successful, it was clear that he had become something bigger than that, bigger than training sessions, bigger than confrontations with referees, bigger than buying and selling players and bigger than plunging into disputes with other clubs.

United will miss Ferguson, no question about that, but football will also be poorer without the fiery Scot because, after staying for so long and winning so much, he had become a big part of our game, a big part of its sights and sounds, and you have a generation of 27-year-old Man U fans, who knew no other coach than him, suddenly having to adjust to the reality of seeing a new man in the dug-out.

One thing for sure, and it’s irrelevant whether one liked him or not, Alexander Chapman Ferguson was a special breed, a one-off, and as we say goodbye to him, either hurt that he is gone or happy that we have finally seen the back of him, we should draw comfort that we were lucky to have lived in an era that saw this great magician at work.
It’s all that matters.

As World Football Celebrates
We Still Suck In Darkness
The global football family has been toasting the greatness of Ferguson this week, as the great Scot walks away from the game, and all the stuff that has been coming out in newspapers, magazines, websites, radio and television has been pretty positive and created some beautiful sights and sounds.

But while the world has been dancing to the Fergie beat, in Africa something horrible happened in Lubumbashi this week that provided a reminder that the game, on this continent, remains ages behind what is happening in Europe and the spirit of Fair Play exits only in the football books of the associations and the booklets of statutes that come from Fifa.

Ferguson won two Champions League titles, both in dramatic fashion, needing Teddy Sheringham and Ole Solsjaer to score twice in time added on to beat Bayern in ’99 and needing John Terry to slip and miss the decisive penalty, which could have won the game for Chelsea in Moscow, to grab the second.

By his admission, Fergie under-achieved on the continental front but that is the name of the game, others were better in other years, he was unlucky on certain occasions, it just didn’t go according to plan on certain days and the referee made a bad, and defining call, on other days.
But in the week that Fergie said goodbye, we had that awful situation in Lubumbashi where TP Mazembe, former champions of Africa, tried to manipulate the playing field, using all sorts of dirty tactics, to try and gain an unfair advantage over Orlando Pirates in their Champions League tie.

Incredibly, we had referees who tried to aid the TP Mazembe cause and virtually all the decisions went to the home side, two controversial penalties, including one with two minutes of regulation time remaining, were given, and the visiting team’s captain and defensive pillar, Lucky Lekgwathi, was sent off under dubious circumstances.

Given that it was all a shame, TP Mazembe officials didn’t want it to be screened on South African public television and the SABC crew were given a dosage of a time in hell, including detention for some of them, and when the home side scored their first goal, all television and radio coverage from the stadium, for the local community, was cut off.

Roger De Sa, the Pirates’ coach, said he wondered, as his players went through this nightmare, whether this was all worth the sacrifice, whether they should be competing in the first place in this poisoned pool and if it wasn’t better to walk away but, unlike Alex Ferguson, not to take a deserved break but to divorce himself from this shame.

But this is exactly what Lloyd Mutasa said when his brave young lions were not only cheated in Algiers two years ago by an Egyptian referee plucked from hell but also battered psychologically by the traumatic events of that night, where everything went for MC Alger, who eventually found a way to overturn a 4-1 first leg deficit.

No one, outside this country, took Mutasa’s outcry seriously and we saw Guthrie Zhokinyi and Archford Gutu, who were sent off in the match to make life easier for the Algerians, being slapped with extended sanctions, in terms of their suspensions, by that horrible organisation which should be called Corruption of African Football.

Because Lloyd is a Zimbabwean coach he could cry forever and no one would listen, after all we didn’t have the powerful medium of SuperSport to take our voices to a wider audience then, we don’t have someone as powerful as Irvin Khoza, who organised a Fifa World Cup as boss of the local organising committee, to make our case stronger.

We didn’t have the powerful medium of Soccer Africa, where the continent tunes in for an hour every week to listen to what is happening in its game, for Dynamos to state their case that they were robbed in Algiers, that the Egyptian referee was as close to a Satanist as referees will ever come and that Gutu and Zhokinyi were mere victims of a grand fraudulent act.

Our club didn’t have the profile of Orlando Pirates, they were not former champions of Africa, their chairman was not Irvin Khoza who sits on a Caf committee, they never had powerful sponsors like Standard Bank, who for 10 years walked with Pirates, and who also sponsor the Nations Cup, until 2015, and the Champions League, until 2016, through Stanbic Bank.

Now that it has happened to a wealthy club, to one whose immediate past sponsors are also the current sponsors of Caf, one with powerful men in the corridors of power in Caf and sympathisers in the corridors of power at Fifa, the shameless robbery that is committed in the name of the Champions League, year in and year out, has suddenly been thrown into the spotlight.

It’s sad that while the world is toasting greatness in this game, in this case the life of Alex Ferguson on the bench at Manchester United, the game in Africa is still trapped in darkness, the man who is supposed to provide light is an ailing and heartless moron called Issa Hayatou who will consider it a triumph, worth tweeting for, if he summons enough strength to remain awake to see the entire match.

The Classic Orlando Pirates Interview
One of the most colourful Orlando Pirates fans, who is always dressed in some crazy female outfits, is called Goodenough Sithole and there is an interview he had with SABC’s Deshi Baktwa, which has gone viral on YouTube:
Deshi: Pushing Passion Fan Of The Moment . . . Goodenough, you dressed today, very, very unusual for a man?
Goodenough: Yes I did, my, you, you, you my your, that’s why, you, you, must, you must like it for the Pirates. I’m very tired for the, always these people, you think, like a people you must show me, what is happening for the, for the Pirates. Pirates is not a one, one, one, one skipper for the, you must know, you show for the five people, five skippers must is not, must always, must put you one short.

Deshi: Ok Goodenough, just quickly tell me will you go to the shop to buy these clothing or this clothing, what do they say?
Goodenough: You must think, you must show, you must show for the, something for the Zulu, Zulu as, as Sotho or what what, you must somebody, now that’s why you must buy him for the, all this shoe, this short, tell us, you must know, you know, you must tell, you must know everybody must.
Deshi: Right Ok, thank you!

Gwindi Faces The Music
Leslie Gwindi lost his father this week and that hasn’t stopped the football leaders from piling on the pressure and threatening him with a ban for allegedly bringing the game of football into disrepute.

Gwindi’s crime is that he criticised the appointment of Klaus Dieter Pagels, criticised David Coltart and also questioned the PSL’s marriage with Delta Beverages.

I also had a fallout with Gwindi on a matter of principle last week.
But when we suddenly catapult the likes of Pagels into demi-gods, whose appointments can’t be questioned, when criticising Coltart turns into a sin and questioning PSL sponsorship deals turns into an act of digging one’s graveyard, you know the game has lost its soul.

Surely, this is too emotional a game to be turned into one for zombies who see no evil, speak no evil and hear no evil because if you say something you will be banned.

If our football chiefs ban young leaders like Gwindi where are we going to get our own versions of the Fergusons, someone who can bow out of the hot seat, after 26 years of service for a giant football institution?

To God Be The Glory!
Come on United!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Chicharitooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

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