#2Sides: My Autobiography Read Online Free Page A

instinctive thing. Defenders need to be able to
smell
danger. He smelled one type of danger, I smelled a different type of danger, and then we’d just work off each other’s instincts. Somehow I always knew exactly what he was going to do, and he knew exactly what I was going to do so we dovetailed. Some relationships on the pitch are easy to explain, and you can go and talk about them and go into detail. But they’re the ones that don’t flow naturally. My partnership with Vida was very natural, it just kind of happened.
    Part of defending is one-to-one duels. The other part is being aware of the shape around you. If you’ve got 11 players all winning their duels around the pitch, then you’ve got a chance. But you’ve got to be set up in the right way to win your duels. So it’s a bit of both, really. I used to think: ‘As long as I’m beating my two strikers, or the one striker and the number ten behind him, as longas they think I’m too strong and too quick, and too bright and too switched-on for them, we’ve got a chance of winning.’ And that’s what me and Vida used to say to each other: ‘if we do our job, we keep a clean sheet, we’ll win this game.’

Relentless
    Win
    Win
    Win
    Just win
    Some time after Ben Foster left Manchester United he gave an interview saying he couldn’t understand the club or the players. One of the things that seemed to bother him was what happened after we won the Carling Cup against Spurs. Ben was in goal that day, played really well and was named man of the match after we won on penalties. But we barely celebrated and he didn’t get to enjoy it as he might have done. You see, our minds immediately switched to the next important match. We had a big league game coming at Newcastle, and then a Champions League second leg against Inter. So, great, we won the cup. We had pictures taken out on the pitch, and then we came in and behaved much like we would after any normal game of football. ‘What’s next?’ The cup was sitting in the corner somewhere and no one took much notice of it. It seems Ben was upset by this. In retrospect it was one of the big, special days of his career but it passed him by a bit.
    Looking back, I can understand a little how he felt because now I realise we never did much celebrating of
any
of our triumphs. If you’d asked me at the time, I’d have said Ben should have been thinking, ‘I’m going to be here for another five years and I’m going to have loads more moments like this and I’ll enjoy them once I’ve retired.’ Now I think: You know what? I wish we’d taken the time to enjoy that a bit more. On the other hand, maybe that attitude of never being too pleased with ourselves was part of the secret of winning. In that case, we didn’t just want to win the Carling Cup. We wanted to win the Premier League, the Champions League, everything. That was always the mentality. It’s how we trained. Intensity was always really high. It was relentless. We played to win every game and were never satisfied.
    A key part of it, I think, was that we never stood back to pat ourselves on the back. A lot of that came from the manager, but it was in the players too.
    How many cups and titles and trophies did we win? I lost count. How many victory parades did we have? I can only remember one before we won the league in Fergie’s last season. And by then I was able to appreciate it more than at other times because I’d fought back from injury and knew I probably wouldn’t have too many more occasions like that. So I relished it. But the previous times, we never really dwelt on our achievement or soaked them up. We’d win the league and immediately think: Right. Onto the next one. Next season, what are we doing? I fancy us next year.
    That’s not how it is with other clubs. Burnley come second in the Championship and get promoted to Premier League. What do they do? They celebrate with an open-top bus victory parade to the town hall! Arsenal beat