Sir Alex Ferguson's rant at referee denies Sunderland due credit

Ben Foster of Manchester United, against Sunderland
The Manchester United goalkeeper Ben Foster shows his disappointment at conceding Sunderland's second goal at Old Trafford. Photograph: Matthew Peters/Man Utd via Getty Images

The great shame was that Sir Alex Ferguson's extraordinary allegation about the referee Alan Wiley allegedly time-wasting because he was "unfit" and "needed a rest" was such a powerful and skilfully executed diversion technique it dragged attention away from a Sunderland performance that smacked of a club in the process of being reinvented.

Until that point it had been a story of Sunderland demonstrating every quality that is necessary, apart from good fortune, for a visiting team to succeed at Old Trafford and of a Manchester United side that looked so laboured and flat it felt as if they had misplaced their own identity. Then, like a conjuror, Ferguson misdirected his audience. The newspapers had their story and the focus was shifted.

Only Ferguson will know whether it was premeditated but the United manager has admitted in the past there have been times when he has offered a juicy diversion to the media to distract attention from a bad performance.

 by Guardian Chalkboards Manchester United failed to stifle Sunderland on Saturday. They won just 50% of their tackles while the Black Cats were successful in 52 of their 64 challenges.

In this case he was being asked about Sunderland's second goal and his assessment of the desperately out-of-form Ben Foster. "I will have to look at it again. It was a soft goal for us to lose, whatever happened." A pause, and then the switch flicked inside his head. "Anyway we got back and I was disappointed with the referee. He didn't add on any time for the goal we scored. He played four minutes and two seconds' injury time. There should have been another 30 seconds. But he was actually walking up the pitch after the goal, needing a rest. He just wasn't fit enough for a game of that stature. The fitness of both [sets of] players, the pace of the game, demanded a referee who was fit. But he's not fit. I don't think he's fit.


Job done, you could say. A collective shout of "rewrite" went up in the pressbox and the attention was expertly moved away from United's shortcomings and Foster's implosion since taking over from the injured Edwin van der Sar.

Coming into this game Foster had already been responsible or partly to blame for three of the six league goals that United had conceded. A defence could be made that Darren Bent's seventh-minute goal was struck so quickly and with such power that the goalkeeper should be absolved – not a particularly strong defence, though, if Foster has genuine aspirations to live up to Ferguson's billing as "England's goalkeeper for the next 10 years".

Later, when he jumped timidly at a ball he should have been claiming as a matter of routine, allowing the braver Kenwyne Jones to make it 2-1, the most damning assessment was that it no longer felt like an abnormality. Foster had become a danger to his own team, his confidence so ruptured he could barely deal with a simple backpass.

It would be unfair, though, to dwell too much on United's failures and overlook what had put them on their knees in the first place. "Everyone will say that United were poor but it was our performance that made them poor," Bruce remarked – so poor that Paul Scholes could not even make a 10-yard pass. Ferguson's decision to rest Ryan Giggs despite the following two-week break for internationals looked strange, to say the least. No explanation was offered, nor for the omission of Rio Ferdinand.

United being United, they kept going, looking for that get-out-out-jail card, another feat of escapology. It is a special quality and, briefly, it looked as if they could actually manufacture a third goal once Anton Ferdinand had diverted Patrice Evra's misdirected shot into his own net. That was two minutes into Wiley's four minutes of stoppage time and, for the previous seven minutes, Sunderland had been a man down because of Kieran Richardson, already booked for a first-half body-check, kicking the ball away at a free-kick.

Bruce described Richardson's impetuousness as "stupid" because, until that point, United had looked unusually short of ways to add to the slicing volley with which Dimitar Berbatov elegantly drew them level six minutes into the second half. One can only hope Richardson had the decency to apologise to sturdy competitors such as Michael Turner, Lee Cattermole and Lorik Cana, and clever players such as Andy Reid and Steed Malbranque, who had brought Sunderland to the verge of their first victory at Old Trafford since 1968.

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