Apprentice
MAKING LOVE TO Clayton Blackmore was one of the worst things about being an apprentice at United. Not the real Clayton Blackmore, obviously. He was sat in the dressing room pissing himself with laughter like the rest of the first-teamers.
No, this was a lifesize picture of our pin-up defender which would be stuck on to the treatment table by a senior player with a vicious sense of humour. As Barry White music played, I, or whichever unlucky apprentice had been chosen, would have to dance around the table and pretend to get off with Wales’s right-back. I can’t tell you how excruciating that is for a sixteen-year-old in front of an audience of his heroes like Mark Hughes and Bryan Robson.
Young players breaking in at United these days don’t know how lucky they are. They might have to endure an initiation rite like being ordered to stand on a chair and sing a song. They might face some embarrassing questions in front of the squad if they haven’t done their chores properly, like pumping up the balls or filling the drinks fridge. But in our day it was brutal.
Refuse to make love to Clayton properly and a second-year apprentice would smash you over the head with a ball wrapped up in a towel. God it hurt. Be late for training and the second-years would line up while you sat on the massage bed and give you a dead arm. You’d ache for days.
Giggsy was one of the chief tormentors. He was only a year older but he’d broken into the first team at seventeen which gave him exalted status. He was leader of the pack among the second-year apprentices. ‘Chatting up the mop’ was one of his favourites. He’d pretend to be a girl in a nightclub, hiding his face behind a mop. You had to talk to the mop and try to get ‘her’ home.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Who wants to know?’ Giggsy would say from behind his mop in some daft girly voice.
‘What’s your phone number?’
‘Don’t I even get a drink?’
Everyone would slaughter you for not doing it well enough. You’re trying to do this as a teenager with all these first-team legends telling you how crap you are. Robbie Savage, who has never lacked self-confidence, was a showman who could pull it off. He couldn’t wait for his chance to stand up in front of everyone and make a fool of himself – like he carried on doing for the next twenty years. He’d have everyone screaming with laughter. I wish we’d filmed some of his performances.
Being a bit of a show-off, Sav was up there all the time, but the rest of us had to be forced at gunpoint. The older lads might say you had to do it for two minutes, but I’d try to sit down after twenty seconds and hope I got away with it. Scholesy was the same and he never got pushed too badly. The digs lads from out of town, like Becks, would get it worse. Becks never liked being dragged up in front of a crowd but if you were called, you had to get on with it. There was no soft way out.
Perhaps the worst of these punishments was being stripped naked and having the whole United kit – the shorts, the shirt, even the number on your back – rubbed on to you in dubbin with a wire wool brush. I can still feel the sharp bristles ripping my skin. Then it would be into an ice-cold bath and stay there for two minutes. Sometimes, just to finish things off, you’d be thrown into a tumble dryer and the machine set on spin.
This was the introduction to apprenticeship at United, and even if these tests only lasted the first few months, they were the hardest months of my life. At the time I was a quiet, conscientious sixteen-year-old. I preferred to keep my head down. I’d been brought up a United fanatic and the last thing I wanted was to be humiliated in front of players I worshipped.
I dreaded going in the changing room between morning and afternoon sessions in case I got picked on. I worried that they might make me go skateboarding – another little initiation rite involving a training cone on your head, shin-pads on your arms, then standing on a rolled-up towel pretending you were skateboarding down the street. Other players would try to knock you off. And, yes, if you did fall off the towel, it was another flurry of digs.
They used to test our nerves by making us stand on a bench, right arm fully extended, holding a full pint of water. Some players would be shaking so much there’d be half a pint left by the time they were allowed to step down.
I think the coaches must have seen it as part of our education because they would look out of the windows at the Cliff and see an apprentice running round the pitch in the freezing cold in nothing but his boots, yet they’d just turn a blind eye.
It eventually stopped when things got a bit out of hand. We’d had a mock trial, complete with senior players as judge and jury. It was another little ritual if a player stepped out of line. The punishment was called ‘the lap’ which would involve the guilty party – you were always found guilty – having his head held down over the wooden treatment table and a ball kicked in his face.
Once, Butty and Steven Riley left a first-team game early to grab the bus home and someone dropped them in it. Riser got so annoyed by all the punishment whacks that he started swinging back and it all got a bit rough. Kiddo got wind of it and summoned all the second-years together. They were told to cut it out.
I’m sure they have all sorts of initiations at other clubs. It is all part of the process of turning boys into men and, while I cringe to look back on some of the humiliations we endured, there’s no doubt it helped to bond us. We rallied round if one of our mates was getting a hard time, and I can trace that spirit right through our glory years with United. The camaraderie, the friendships and the trust forged as teenagers carried us through many challenges.
*
There’s a continuing bond between all of us who played in the youth teams of 1992–94 because we know we were part of something special. As much as the Treble, the success of our generation will be a part of Alex Ferguson’s legacy because it is every bit as incredible. In fact I’d say it’s even more remarkable than what we did in 1999, and harder to repeat.
None of us will ever claim to have the aura of the Busby Babes, but ‘Fergie’s Fledglings’ have gone down as one of the greatest gatherings of youth talent ever seen, given that the club had Giggs, Beckham, Scholes, Butt and me coming together at the same time, and then my brother a year later. In that group, you are talking about the most decorated player in the history of the English game, the most famous footballer on the planet, the most technically gifted English footballer in decades, the most capped brothers in English history and Butty who matched all our achievements with six champion ships, three FA Cups, a Champions League win and thirty-nine appearances for England.
And even that’s not the whole story. Robbie Savage played thirty-nine times for Wales on top of hundreds of games in the top flight; Keith Gillespie won eighty-six caps for Northern Ireland; Ben Thornley would have been an England player but for injury. And there’s more: Chris Casper, Kevin Pilkington, Simon Davies – they all had professional careers and were really good players in their own right. Simon and Casp would go on to become two of the youngest managers in the league.
So what made us special? Well, the talent hardly needs to be spelt out. Giggs, Beckham, Scholes, Butt – that’s a rare, special crop brought together by the scouting system the manager had put in place. On top of it we had a relentless will to succeed. ‘Practice makes players’ the manager would often say, but we didn’t need to be told. You have never seen a harder-working group of sixteen-year-olds in your life than the class of 1992 at United.
I don’t want to sound like a moaning old pro saying kids don’t work hard enough these days – some do. But there’s no doubt that we had an unbelievable work ethic. At the time we thought it was normal, but there’s no doubt looking back that we were an extraordinary group in our eagerness to practise.
We loved to play and work at the game. It’s no coincidence that we’ve all played into our mid-thirties, and beyond in Giggsy’s case. We’ve wanted to squeeze every last drop out of our careers from first kick to last.
In my case, it was fear of failure that drove me. When I started as an apprentice, my dad said: ‘Gary, make sure you don’t look back thinking I wish I’d done more.’ Maybe everyone’s dad says that – but I took it to heart.
If I thought my left foot needed working on, I would go out on my own and kick a ball against a wall non-stop for an hour. One day after weights, I stayed out on the pitch at the Cliff and started passing the ball against a big brick wall. Left foot, right foot, left, right, left, right, hundreds of times. That’s where my nickname ‘Busy’ came from. It stayed with me for years.
You could see everything out of the windows where the players ate lunch so all the older apprentices started banging on the glass, screaming ‘Busy, Busy!’ They thought I was trying to become the teacher’s pet. Eric Harrison heard about it and called me into the office to ask if I was worried about the stick from the older lads.
‘No, I’m fine,’ I told him.
I was still kicking that ball against the wall six months later, and by then, so were the other first-years.
As part of our warm-up, we ran around the pitches at Littleton Road near the Cliff. One day things felt a bit, sluggish so four of us – me, Becks, Sav and Casp – thought, ‘Sod this’ and started running off ahead of the pack. The next day we sprinted off again, but this time six or seven of the other first-years followed. Soon it was all of our year. Again the second-years just thought we were being busy but, in every sense, we were leaving them behind. When the youth team was picked, there’d be only three of them to eight of us.
People say that Eric Cantona taught the United players about staying behind for extra training, that he changed the culture of the club on the practice ground. Among the first team that was true, but, as a group, we were doing this religiously every day at sixteen. We were desperate to improve. We were desperate to play for United.
I was willing to ditch everything else in my life apart from football and family. So much for my wild teenage years. If there was a game on a Saturday, I was in bed by 9.15 every Thursday and Friday night. I was a robot.
I cast off all my mates from school, never saw them again. I decided, ruthlessly, that I was going to make friends with my new teammates who shared the same goals as me. As far as I was concerned, the lives of athletes and non-athletes were incompatible. Going out to bars, drinking beer and staying up till all hours – well, it sounded like fun, but I couldn’t see how I was going to have that fun and play for United.
Between the ages of sixteen and twenty I dropped women completely (and, I’ll be honest, I might have struggled anyway). They were always going to want to go to the cinema or a bar on a Friday night. They were going to be expecting phone calls and pestering me to do this or that. My only priority on a Friday night was resting up in bed.
It was extreme, and I know others were different. Scholesy and Butty would go for a few pints in the week, sometimes even on a Friday. Becks, Casp and Ben always had girlfriends. But I knew my talent wasn’t at their level. As far as I was concerned, I couldn’t afford even to sniff a pint of lager.
I wasn’t going to let anything mess it up – not even my passion for cricket. Which was a shame because I was playing to a decent standard. A talented Aussie lad called Matthew Hayden had joined us at Greenmount and one day we shared an unbroken stand of 236 against Astley Bridge, centuries for both of us. He’d go on to make more than a hundred Test appearances for Australia, but it was my last big innings. The story of our stand got into the local papers and someone at the club must have pointed it out to Eric.
Straight to the point, he came up to me: ‘What the bloody hell are you playing at with this cricket nonsense? No more of that.’
So that was the end of my career as a batsman.
Eric liked my dedication. Maybe he saw something of himself in me. He’d call us up individually to his office every couple of months just to chat about how we were getting on. I’d not been there long when he said, ‘You’ve surprised me, you’ve got a chance.’
That was all I ever wanted to hear.
Fergie’s Fledglings
WE’D BEEN BROUGHT together from all over the place, and there could easily have been a split between the out-of-town lads like Becks, Sav, Keith and John O’Kane and those of us from Salford, Bury and Oldham. It had always felt like they’d had preferential treatment in the past. We’d heard how Becks had been taken into the dressing room to meet the players when the team was down in London. How he’d been sent a brand-new United kit in the post.
Becks was a southerner, and you’d think we were very different. But there was far more that brought us together and we quickly became best mates, once I realised that a Cockney could love United. We’d both been brought up United fanatics, we loved the game, and we had a desire to do whatever it took to make the grade at Old Trafford. In Becks I quickly recognised someone who shared my dedication, and had bags of talent to go with it. Our families became close, standing on the touchline together on cold nights watching the youth team. Becks’ mum and dad, Ted and Sandra, would drive all over the place to support him, just like my parents. It was the start of a lifelong friendship.
We had a great spirit in the squad. Inevitably there were groups of mates, but no cliques. Among the local lads, I was great pals with Casp and Ben, and the more I got to know the lads in digs, the more I got to like them too. People might think me and Robbie Savage are unlikely pals – even more than me and Becks – and we certainly didn’t share tastes in fashion. He’d go around in the worst purple Ralph Lauren shirts and shell suits with highlights in his hair. I took him to Toni and Guy in Manchester once because I was the one with a car. He had his hair cut too short and when he saw his reflection in a shop window, he burst into tears. He’ll deny it, but it’s true.
We had a good laugh together. We’d pile into my car and go to the snooker club in Salford.
Another place we’d hang out was the bookie’s along the road from the Cliff. Keith Gillespie was a gambler even then. Me, Casp and Sav would sit in there for two or three hours just having a laugh, maybe sticking the odd few quid on, but Keith always had a tip and would put money on every race. For us it was social, but he really enjoyed it.
One day we were in there when a bloke walked in and said, ‘Whoever owns that black Golf, it’s being smashed up by some lads.’ That would be my black Golf. I looked outside and, sure enough, there was a gang of lads on bikes, all shaven heads, smashing the windows and trying to rip out the radio.
I went outside. ‘Oi, what the fuck you doing?’ That’s when two of them started walking over. Now I might have a big mouth, but I’m no Ricky Hatton. Me and Keith legged it back into the bookie’s until they disappeared.
People might think from this that life at United must have been a privileged existence for a teenager. But Eric took it upon himself to make us feel like nothing was ever going to come easy. He made us do every job you could think of, like sweeping out the bogs and mopping the corridors, even cleaning all the staff’s boots, including the manager’s.
On other days you’d be sent over to Old Trafford to shadow the groundsman or help the secretaries in the general office. And that was how Ben and I ended up in Sir Matt Busby’s office one day. We were walking past, going about our chores, when an old Scottish voice called us in. There was Sir Matt sitting behind his desk, puffing on his cigar.
‘Hi boys, you OK? How are you doing?’
I don’t think we managed more than a mumbled ‘Fine, thanks’.
We knew we were in the presence of greatness, a United god. I remember telling my dad later; he would have killed for the opportunity. If I’d met Sir Matt when I was older and more experienced, I’d have bombarded him with questions. But, to be honest, it was a moment wasted on two young tongue-tied lads.
Doing those jobs around the club was all good for our grounding, but it was on the pitch that we’d be judged, and Eric tested us in every way there as well. He was brilliant. Standing on the pitch for the first time as apprentices, he’d said to us, ‘You’re all talented players, that’s why you’re here at Manchester United. But you’ve only got one chance and that’s by listening to me. Don’t listen and you’re finished before you’ve started.’
I didn’t just listen, I hung off every word. If Eric had said, ‘Stand in a bucket for two hours a day and you’ll play for United’, I’d have done it.
He could be a tough man. In the first year, he’d rip our heads off during training. He’d scream at me and Casp for losing headers, Becks for hitting ‘Hollywood passes’, Butty and Scholesy for losing control of midfield. Of course he’d praise you at times, and when he did it meant everything. But even that was a test. Could we handle a compliment or would we get full of ourselves?
Eric took boys and turned them into men. He made us better footballers, and, just as importantly, he made sure we would compete. Every second of every training session under Eric had to be treated like a cup final. At an England gathering a few years later some of the other lads were shocked at how hard me, Butty and Scholesy were going into tackles. ‘Come on, lads, it’s just training,’ they said. But Eric’s attitude was that if you weren’t full-on in practice, it was no preparation for Saturday.
He’d make us play heading games, the biggest lads against the smallest, with no allowance made. Be aggressive. Assisting him was Nobby Stiles – European Cup winner, World Cup winner and a good man to have on your side in any battle. Nobby sent us out one day with the words ‘your best friends out there are your six studs’. Of course Eric and Nobby taught us to use the ball, but if they instilled one thing, it was that wearing the United badge meant you had to win the fight.
They made you understand the prestige of representing United at any level. The history was all around you. We went over to the Milk Cup in Northern Ireland once and stayed at a hotel run by Harry Gregg, the great United goalkeeper and hero of the Munich air crash. We sat there as sixteen-year-olds listening to Harry and Nobby’s stories about George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton.
With our relish for practice and Eric and Nobby driving us on, before long we were beating most opponents and playing fantastic football. We always had the beating of the Everton and Liverpool youth teams, though they did have a standout player in Robbie Fowler. His movement around the box was exceptional even then.
There were bad days. The Oldham pair Ian Marshall and Graham Sharpe gave us a torrid time in a reserve team game. ‘Think you’re players?’ Eric told me and Casp afterwards. ‘A million fucking miles away.’
We played one game against Chester as first-year apprentices and were winning 5–0 at half-time. Butty had scored a hat-trick. We were feeling very pleased with ourselves when the boss walked in. ‘Why are you doing this? Why aren’t you doing that?’ Five goals up and he still wasn’t satisfied.
But there was a buzz about the place, about our team, and in the Youth Cup we were on a roll. United had not won the competition since 1964 and, under the manager with his insatiable demands, these things mattered.
We’d play games at the Cliff and there would be more than a thousand people watching us on a Saturday morning. The crowd would include first-team players, which made us feel ten feet tall. We were building the confidence that we could do anything, beat anyone.
My own self-belief was growing. I’d never seen myself as a centre-half but that’s where I ended up in my first year as an apprentice. It was obvious I wasn’t going to make it in midfield with the competition. Eric pushed me back, but with a word of warning: ‘If you’re going to be a defender, you’d better start tackling.’ It’s funny to admit, but I didn’t like putting a foot in then. Laugh if you like, but I regarded myself as a passer.
My first big test at centre-back came in a Youth Cup match against Sunderland. I’d never been as nervous, but we won, and I felt assured. For the first time I felt that I belonged in that company.
Everyone knew we had one prodigy in our ranks: Giggsy. He was such a sensation that he was playing regularly in the first team even as he joined us in those Youth Cup matches. Giggsy’s impact for a seventeen-year-old was incredible. He had this unbelievable balance, the ability to make swaying runs at top speed that would leave a defender on his arse. Quite often that would be me on the training pitch. I spent years having to face him down in practice and there probably wasn’t a day when he didn’t nutmeg me, and then I’d clobber him back. He must have called me a ‘clumsy bastard’ a million times after I’d taken him down rather than let him skip past.
Showing the versatility that would help turn Giggsy into a United legend, playing over two decades, he mostly played as centre-forward in the youth team. That was the one position we were short in; there was no truly prolific striker. Sav and Colin McKee were never true goalscorers. Striker has always been the hardest position to prove yourself in at a big club like United. Up front and goalkeeper are the two specialist positions where we’ve always ended up buying players more than bringing through our own. Still, Giggsy wasn’t a bad standin.
Reaching the final of the Youth Cup in 1992 was a very big deal, and it showed how good we were – and how competitive – that Scholesy wasn’t even on the bench as he worked to improve his strength and stamina. A 3–1 win over Crystal Palace in the first leg in London set us up nicely for the return.
In front of 14,681, a team that read Pilkington – Switzer, Neville, Casper, O’Kane – Thornley, Beckham, Butt, Davies – Giggs, McKee (with Savage and Gillespie on the bench) beat Palace 3–2 to make it 6–3 on aggregate. It was Giggsy who lifted the first major silverware of our young lives.
Let no one be in any doubt about how important that moment was. A group of talented sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds had tasted success. And God did we like it.
After all the championships, and even the Champions League, that Youth Cup is still one of my proudest achievements. Not just because we won it, which gave us all a great rush of joy and self-belief, but because it was such a fantastic team to be part of. There was a real togetherness because we were great pals.
It’s inevitable that Giggsy, Becks, Butty, Scholesy and me and Phil are the focus, but to concentrate on the six of us actually undersells the phenomenal success of that squad.
Take Sav. He should count as a success for the United youth system, even if he was eventually released. The fact is, he didn’t have the most natural ability among us, and he was never going to be a United centre-forward, but given his limitations he made for himself a brilliant career out of football. When he left Old Trafford for Crewe Alexandra as a teenager, he could easily have disappeared out of the game. But he battled back and ended up spending many seasons in the Premiership. And I bet his years at United underpinned that career. He had learnt to extract every ounce of ability from himself – a quality driven into us by Kiddo and Eric.
I only have to look at him on telly and I laugh. And I can see why a lot of other people might think he’s a pain in the backside. But he’s not to be underestimated. I have huge respect for his career.
Keith also went on to have a fine career, playing Champions League with Newcastle United. Casp was a classy centre-half until he suffered a terrible injury, and then became one of the youngest managers in the league at Bury. He’s currently working for the Premier League in the youth department and passing on all those valuable lessons he learnt at United. Ben would have been a top-class winger had he not also been struck down by injury. Kevin Pilkington has hundreds of league appearances to his name.
It’s only John O’Kane whose career you can trace and say he should have done better. John was a good lad, a right-back with far more gifts than me. Six foot, great on the ball, quick, and he could use both feet. But he was the one member of the group who couldn’t get his head round our basic ethos: if the coach said run five miles, we’d run six.
In a game against Rotor Volgograd in the Uefa Cup in September 1995, Phil was picked at left-back, John on the right. But John came in after his warm-up, turned to the manager and asked to play on the left instead. Here was a young right-footed defender asking the manager of Manchester United fifteen minutes before a European tie at Old Trafford if he could swap positions. The boss did it, but he took John off after twenty-seven minutes and he never started for United again.
I don’t want to pick on John, but he didn’t come close to fulfilling his potential at his subsequent clubs Everton and Bury. He ended up at Hyde United.
It was unheard of for a whole youth squad to be invited to turn professional, but all of us were given that chance. Only George Switzer and Sav would never play a game in the United first team. Eleven out of thirteen making it into the first XI, however briefly, isn’t bad. It’s sensational.
To have a group which combined our love of the game, our ability and our dedication to practice – well, any club would kill for it. There was no one like us. We were fitter and stronger, better prepared, and possessed more ability as a group than all of our rivals. We weren’t in it for the money, we were in it to become United players.
It shows how rare a group we were that United, despite all the resources it pours into the youth system, has not had a crop like us since. There are dozens of Premiership players who have been through the United academy, like Ryan Shawcross, Phil Bardsley, Kieran Richardson and Chris Eagles, who are all proof that the club still produces very good players. No club in England works harder to bring through its own. But to make it at United in this era is to be among the very best.
We were a rare generation, so much so that I honestly wouldn’t speculate when there will be another group like it. Fergie’s Fledglings – to be honest, it’s not the greatest title in the world, but it makes me shiver to think that I was part of a team that will go down in history.