Former ManU Manager ALEX FERGUSON's final victory was not the '12-13 Premier League title, his 13th in nearly 27 years as ManU manager, according to Paul Hayward of the London TELEGRAPH. The last triumph "was against his own fear of retirement, idleness, isolation: an anxiety that stalked him throughout his later years as British football’s greatest autocrat." The thought of "vacating the great football stage had terrified Ferguson throughout the final years of his reign." The morning after his final match in charge, a 5-5 draw at West Brom in May, he "woke without regrets." Ferguson: "My reaction was that I knew it was the best thing for me. I knew I’d done my time." Managing change "is the theme" of his new autobiography, "Alex Ferguson: My Autobiography," published later this month. It is an autobiography which Hayward "helped him write." Ferguson decided several years ago "to revisit in print the upheavals of the past decade." Ferguson examined "how he maintained control" in the face of changes in ManU’s ownership, the rise of player power and the new threats posed by Chelsea's Russian Owner ROMAN ABRAMOVICH and the Middle-Eastern wealth of Man City, which he characterized as "the noisy neighbours." In his memoirs he recalls "the great players he has managed, with emphasis on the second half of his United reign," from ROY KEANE to DAVID BECKHAM and CRISTIANO RONALDO, and "shares his thoughts" on ARSÈNE WENGER, JOSÉ MOURINO, RAFA BENÍTEZ "and other managerial adversaries." There is "a hard mystique about Ferguson that conceals his warmth of spirit." For the book, he "talked a lot about the change that came over him on the way to work." The Ferguson "who filled his home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, with old Glaswegian friends, and drove them mad with his singing of old dancehall classics while the house reverberated with laughter, was transformed on the Old Trafford touchline into a demonic presence" (TELEGRAPH, 10/19).
