Scary Sven Thought For The Day

Apologies if this has already been discussed and I missed it, as I assume others have read the recent reports about United director Maurice Watkins leaving the club. The players will have to get new legal help extricating them from the minefield of secret, damaging liaisons with women, men, animals and vegetables. Not to mention clearing up after the Christmas party.

However, it's something he was dealing with for SAF that raises my scary thought for the day, or rather re-thought of the day as some will be aware of this from a decade ago... Sven could well have been within a whisker of being our manager. This certainly makes me shudder.

Rather than re-write much of the article that has brought this back to the front of my mind here's the key part.

In February, 2002, Watkins knew he was privy to another massive breaking Old Trafford story when Fergie told him the reason why he was so desperate to see him and that it couldn’t wait.

Maurice recalled. “He’d told everybody about it and it became public. So we had to do something about making plans. “You can’t just wait until the end of the season and then sit down and say who shall we get? We had to start looking for a replacement. A lot of work was done on that and it was very well advanced. “Then, out of the blue, he contacted me in the February and said he wanted to see me. I said well, actually, I have got quite a lot on today, when do you want to see me. “Alex replied: ‘Now’. I realised then the urgency of it. I twigged immediately by the urgency in his voice what it was going to be about. “So we met up and he told me that he had decided that he didn’t want to leave."

The new man was within a whisker of the appointment being rubber-stamped. Watkins refuses to give away the secret of the man chosen to succeed Fergie. “Nobody has ever confirmed or denied who it was, so I am not going to say anything," he explained. So how close was the mystery new boss from penning the Old Trafford agreement? “Let’s put it this way, it was a good job Alex had rung up then. It was that well advanced! We are certainly not talking weeks. It was pretty close," said Maurice.

It is widely speculated that the new United manager the board had settled on was England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson. The Swede would take England to the 2002 World Cup in Japan and then return to take on the task of sitting in the Old Trafford hot-seat.

Does this fill you with as much dread as it does me? Did SAF feel the same dread? How do you think the club would have faired under the stewardship of Swede Sven? If Sven was going to be the key man back then, what if anything does it tell us about who will be the new man when SAF does call it a day over a decade later?


Read more at: http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/sport/football/manchester_united/s/1582799_manchester-united-special-the-day-sir-alex-ferguson-did-u-turn-over-quitting-reds