Fergie speaks (again)

No-one puts Fergie in the corner

We’ve all missed the soundbites and mischief of Jose Mourinho in the EPL, but mercifully, Sir Alex Ferguson has stepped up and become more vocal than usual at this point in the summer.

This is strange for two reasons:

1. Normally, he’s the quiet one in the catbirdseat. It’s all the flounderers around him that are prone to verbal diarrhea.

2. It’s all completely unprompted! SAF likes to play the media game, but only once he’s been provoked. The Citeh posters with Unfrozen Caveman Striker were an appropriate shot across the bow, and he responded in kind. Rafa’s rant in January? Only after the mess was settling with the drunk Scot open his mouth.

So far this summer, he’s always first to speak, which makes me think he’s really worried about his club’s role in the upcoming season and his personal expectations for a squad that’s done nothing but weaken since the Champions League final.

Today’s focus is Real Madrid, you know, that club that bought every player in the world including United’s preening, gel-sporting wunderkind winger for a princely sum. We’ll overlook the fact that they’ve been largely unable to spend that 80m on the open market (but of course, they weren’t really trying to anyway), and look instead at his comments:

“Sunderland spent so much money that they became known as ‘The Bank of England club. They didn’t win anything and in the end they got themselves relegated. I am not saying that Real Madrid will get relegated but they will still have plenty of problems with balance. I do not know how [Madrid coach] Manuel Pellegrini plans to pick his side because it has no balance. I told Ronaldo before he flew out that he will end up playing centre-half because I don’t think they have one.”

So there you have it. Even with Kaka, Ronaldo, Albiol, Benzema and (cough cough) Alvaro Arbeloa, Real Madrid is still nothing to worry about. He has a point (Lassana Diarra and Fernando Gago must be soiling their training kits at the thought of what burdens lie ahead for them in defensive midfield) as he normally does, but it smacks of a particularly sour kind of statement that you make when you’re jealous but don’t want anyone else to know you’re jealous. It’s that quiet, seething envy manifesting itself as nitpicky derision, and it sounds especially pithy considering all the signings they have made in the off-season.

A team like Real will surely struggle for balance, and there is legitimacy in his query as to Manuel Pellegrini’s ability to handle the load. After all, the Chilean boss only managed an Intertoto Cup in 5 years at Villareal, and a sprinkling of league titles in Argentina and Ecuador over the 15+ years of management experience before that. But right now, do you really think they care? Must Florentino Perez immediately rush to La Marca and offer a rebuttal? Of course not. They’re sitting pretty with three World Footballers of the Year in their lineup. They need not say a word.

The point of all this is that it’s not normally Fergie sticking his neck out like this with such provocative, passive jokes at other big clubs’ expense. He’s the responder, the quip-maker leisurely offering a retort to something already said. It makes me wonder how much pressure he’s feeling to keep his team at the top of European soccer when all those clubs around him have rearmed and upped the ante in terms of personnel.

And with that, a poll question regarding Real Madrid and their disturbingly improved squad. How right can one soused Scot be?