David Moyes is alone. The morning of 22 April 2014 is beginning to lighten and he contemplates the wreckage of an unfinished season, a career rocked, a dream soured. He is in the manager’s office at Carrington, the training ground of the world’s most famous football club, Manchester United.
On the door, in white capital letters on a black border, the name plate reads: David Moyes. He remembers his first official day, 1 July 2013, and being photographed by the door, next to his name. Then the picture of him sitting where he sits now, new in the job – he is still new in the job – the desk bare, before settling into the challenge many other managers of reputation might have balked at: being the immediate successor to Sir Alex Ferguson.
He had taken a moment when no one else was around to try his predecessor’s chair for the first time because “I thought I would have to see how it feels in case anybody thought I looked stupid”. He looks around the office now and it is bare once more. The room is spacious and there are large windows looking out on to the training pitches of the rebranded Aon Training Complex. He sits in the black leather chair at the long, angled desk and gazes at the computer screen, the HD TV, the SKY+ remote, the Manchester United mouse-mat cut in the shape of the club badge.
Soon the building will come to life with people arriving to start their daily routine at British football’s most successful club. The twenty-times champions. The defending title-holders. Winners by a street last season. With an irresistible swagger. This was the legacy bequeathed by Ferguson, the greatest manager in domestic football history, perhaps anywhere.
Now United stand seventh in the Premier League. They are sinking and everyone is laughing. Not to his face, but he knows they are. A lot of people have waited a long, long time for this. The decline and fall of the great Manchester United Empire after nigh on three decades of Ferguson’s rule. Finally it has happened. Not gradually, this is a collapse. A sickening freefall, a public disrobing. It is David Moyes’s fault, they say. All his fault. The players don’t believe in him any more, if they ever did. Neither do the fans. And the media, well, they have no loyalty, but who does? This is football in the twenty-first century.
This is where David Moyes wants to be. In this office, where he sits now, having left Everton after 11 years of good, solid, consistent management. This office that was Ferguson’s: The Great Ferguson who personally anointed him, drove his candidacy, rubber-stamped him to the owner, the Glazers. This office inherited from a bona fide managerial genius. And it is his, David Moyes’s, though not for much longer – an hour or so, but not much more.
Then Ed Woodward will come. Eight o’clock, he said. By then the statement will already have been drawn up in a much smaller office elsewhere at Carrington by United’s media department. Meet at 8am at the training ground, Woodward ordered, and nothing else. This was all the executive vice-chairman needed to say. The story had leaked to the websites of the national newspapers the day before. At 3pm, Easter Monday, this was how Moyes found out. Not from the club. Not from Woodward, man-to-man, but from journalists. Bloody hacks. The Manchester football correspondents’ latest splash. Moyes could not believe he would not be told first. “This is Manchester United we’re talking about,” he will say later. But it was true. He had been utterly humiliated by Manchester United.
In the end, he had been forced to believe it. Forced to go to bed and endure a listless, sleepless night, knowing that when he awoke it would be ended. Now the desk is cleared, it is bare again, and David Moyes is showered after a final run around the training pitches. In the dark, alone, running over the grass that should have been his domain for six years, at least. He is still a fit man, the hands-on tracksuit manager who insisted on taking training sessions. But the photographic evidence of these past 10 months is unavoidable. In three days he turns fifty-one, but he looks a decade older, gaunt, the face more lined, the bright blue of his eyes dimmed, and he is pale-skinned and skeletal. He needs a break but he does not want one. Not when it is enforced by what is about to come this morning.
Then David Moyes, ever dignified, will address the players, speak to a group who let him down so badly. From champions by 11 points to seventh position with only four games left, 23 points behind the leaders, Liverpool, who are back on their perch again.
The players who in this traumatic season – in this difficult, soul-searching year of David Moyes’s life – went to the press behind his back to voice their doubts while failing to do what they are paid small fortunes each week to do: perform and win football matches. He will say goodbye and wish them good luck for the future. Then drive away. Drive away from Carrington, for the last time.
This is an extract from A Season in the Red by Jamie Jackson, published by Aurum Press (paperback, £8.99)
