Ole Gunnar Solskjaer has admitted that his former boss Sir Alex Ferguson still scares him when they talk.
The Norwegian served the Red Devils both as a player and as a manager - but he has spoken about his time working under the Scotsman.
Solskjaer joined the Premier League giants in 1996 despite their attempts to bring in then-Blackburn Rovers striker Alan Shearer to Old Trafford.
Turbulence has prevailed in the near-11 years since the departure of Ferguson, the boss who’d send Solskjaer, his neighbour of “two passes away”, to pick up a copy of the Racing Post, or ask him to pop round and do trick or treat on Halloween with his grandkids.
“They were scared of me, and I’m still scared of Sir Alex now when I speak to him,” laughs Solskjaer. “I don’t want to let him down, but he’s the kindest man. When I was playing, he’d sometimes ask me for a ride home after away games. If we’d lost, that was the worst 10 or 15 minutes. He’d be in a bad mood.
“But I had a great relationship with him, especially after I turned Tottenham down [in December 1998] to stay at United. He brought me into his office and said:" Tottenham and Alan Sugar have put a bid in for £5.5 million, Martin Edwards has said yes and the club want the money, but I don’t want you to go – if you stay here, you’ll play and be an important part of the squad.’ So we agreed for me to stay. Then he said, ‘Please don’t tell anyone’, as he’d just lost the club all that money. I finished that season scoring the last goal of it in Barcelona…”
Ferguson has been a major figure in his life. “I look up to him so much and learned much from him as a manager,” says Solskjaer. “He always stressed the importance of hard work in his team talks, yet at the same time he’d say, ‘You don’t know what hard work is – ask your parents or grandparents what hard work is’. He got us so grounded, even though we were the best team in the world.
“Nowadays, if you say something like that to a player, his parents or his agent would call you. So much has changed in the way you talk to players. Everyone has PR agents. If Sir Alex wanted to speak to me, he rang my phone and he spoke to me, or we spoke on the training ground.
“Now, we have to go through different agents and management. I find that really strange, because football is a game played by people, managed by people, and you need to be able to speak together, to connect, to get the best out of each other and trust each other.”
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