By Tom Finn
The now retired former manager of Manchester United Sir Alex Ferguson was known for looking and pointing at his watch towards the end of a match to suggest if the Red Devils were winning the referee should blow his whistle.
If on the other time they were losing it always seemed like the referee gave United that couple of extra minutes to pull level which as it turns out they often did leading to the expression “Fergie Time.”
When asked about it he told BT Sport: ‘That’s why I used to go to my watch. I never looked at my watch, I didn’t know how many minutes.
‘It gets across to the opponents and the referee, which is a little trick.
‘The thing about the last 10/15minutes of a game, particularly at Old Trafford, you’ve got 65k people there. At half time I always stress don’t panic, be patient, wait.
‘In the last 15minutes you can do what you like. I’m a gambler, shove bodies up front, take the gamble, it didn’t always work but a lot of times it did.
‘If you’re in that dressing room after the game and we’ve scored in the last minute the electricity is unbelievable, they’re jumping on top of each other, hand clapping, it’s a fantastic place to be.
‘Most important thing is that those fans are walking out of the stadium desperate to get down to the pub to talk about, desperate to get home to tell their wife and their kids what happened at Old Trafford in the last minute of the game. And that’s my job, to get them home happy.’
