Tobes And Dan Go Lemon Sucking

Following his 27-year stint at the helm of the UK’s most successful football club, Alex Ferguson retired at the end of last season. Having taken notes in preparation for a number of years, and having finished with football management, he set about compiling his memoirs of those momentous times. Their publication yesterday has provoked some less fortunate to put the boot in.

This man is a winner

And they don’t come much less successful than Dan Hodges, the former Colonel Nicholson of the Labour Party, and the loathsome Toby Young (that’s the Hon Toby Daniel Moorsom Young, folks), who have taken to the bear pit that is Telegraph blogs to tell anyone who will listen that Ferguson was not that great really, and that in any case he was a rotten leftie, so they can be as abusive as they like.

“Sir Alex Ferguson's hairdryer has been unplugged. His autobiography has revealed a diminished man” whines Hodges, who claims Ferguson’s man management was a failure, as he disposed of so many top players. But this can be argued the other way quite easily: he also retained many good players. It was always the ones who wouldn’t behave themselves that were moved on.

“Sir Alex Ferguson is still the most successful manager of an English football team in history. But I’m not sure he’s still the greatest” concludes Hodges, showing conclusively that he does not get football management. And joining him in this predicament is the loathsome Tobes, with “From Alex Ferguson to Ed Miliband, Lefties always stab people in the back”.

“To anyone familiar with Alex Ferguson's politics, his disloyalty to the footballers that won him all those trophies in his autobiography won't come as a surprise. He's a socialist, after all, and socialists always turn on their friends and colleagues” tells Tobes, oblivious to the fact that, as Ferguson is no longer in the business of management, he can write what he damn well likes.

“The personal morality of Left-wingers is notoriously awful, far worse than that of Right-wingers” he continues, which I’ll bear in mind the next time the odious flannelled fool Henry Cole, or one of his pals, gets out the smearing handle and uses it on me, or someone I know. There are many sound right-wing pundits whom I respect highly. It’s just that Tobes is, deservedly, not one of them.

What these two prize chumps fail to notice is that you do not succeed in football management without being ruthless and determined, perhaps even obsessional. That is what yielded 13 Premiership titles, five FA Cups, four League Cups, eleven Community Shields, two Champions League titles, and the rest. That is how clubs, their fans and their owners judge managers. No other criteria need enter.

But this is too difficult a concept for Tobes and Dan to grasp. No change there, then.