Red: My Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page A

than what we did in 1999, and harder to repeat.
    None of us will ever claim to have the aura of the Busby Babes, but ‘Fergie’s Fledglings’ have gone down as one of the greatest gatherings of youth talent ever seen, given that the club had Giggs, Beckham, Scholes, Butt and me coming together at the same time, and then my brother a year later. In that group, you are talking about the most decorated player in the history of the English game, the most famous footballer on the planet, the most technically gifted English footballer in decades, the most capped brothers in English history and Butty who matched all our achievements with six champion ships, three FA Cups, a Champions League win and thirty-nine appearances for England.
    And even that’s not the whole story. Robbie Savage played thirty-nine times for Wales on top of hundreds of games in the top flight; Keith Gillespie won eighty-six caps for Northern Ireland; Ben Thornley would have been an England player but for injury. And there’s more: Chris Casper, Kevin Pilkington, Simon Davies – they all had professional careers and were really good players in their own right. Simon and Casp would go on to become two of the youngest managers in the league.
    So what made us special? Well, the talent hardly needs to be spelt out. Giggs, Beckham, Scholes, Butt – that’s a rare, special crop brought together by the scouting system the manager had put in place. On top of it we had a relentless will to succeed. ‘Practice makes players’ the manager would often say, but we didn’t need to be told. You have never seen a harder-working group of sixteen-year-olds in your life than the class of 1992 at United.
    I don’t want to sound like a moaning old pro saying kids don’t work hard enough these days – some do. But there’s no doubt that we had an unbelievable work ethic. At the time we thought it was normal, but there’s no doubt looking back that we were an extraordinary group in our eagerness to practise.
    We loved to play and work at the game. It’s no coincidence that we’ve all played into our mid-thirties, and beyond in Giggsy’s case. We’ve wanted to squeeze every last drop out of our careers from first kick to last.
    In my case, it was fear of failure that drove me. When I started as an apprentice, my dad said: ‘Gary, make sure you don’t look back thinking I wish I’d done more.’ Maybe everyone’s dad says that – but I took it to heart.
    If I thought my left foot needed working on, I would go out on my own and kick a ball against a wall non-stop for an hour. One day after weights, I stayed out on the pitch at the Cliff and started passing the ball against a big brick wall. Left foot, right foot, left, right, left, right, hundreds of times. That’s where my nickname ‘Busy’ came from. It stayed with me for years.
    You could see everything out of the windows where the players ate lunch so all the older apprentices started banging on the glass, screaming ‘Busy, Busy!’ They thought I was trying to become the teacher’s pet. Eric Harrison heard about it and called me into the office to ask if I was worried about the stick from the older lads.
    ‘No, I’m fine,’ I told him.
    I was still kicking that ball against the wall six months later, and by then, so were the other first-years.
    As part of our warm-up, we ran around the pitches at Littleton Road near the Cliff. One day things felt a bit, sluggish so four of us – me, Becks, Sav and Casp – thought, ‘Sod this’ and started running off ahead of the pack. The next day we sprinted off again, but this time six or seven of the other first-years followed. Soon it was all of our year. Again the second-years just thought we were being busy but, in every sense, we were leaving them behind. When the youth team was picked, there’d be only three of them to eight of us.
    People say that Eric Cantona taught the United players about staying behind for extra training, that he changed the