Red: My Autobiography Read Online Free PDF

culture of the club on the practice ground. Among the first team that was true, but, as a group, we were doing this religiously every day at sixteen. We were desperate to improve. We were desperate to play for United.
    I was willing to ditch everything else in my life apart from football and family. So much for my wild teenage years. If there was a game on a Saturday, I was in bed by 9.15 every Thursday and Friday night. I was a robot.
    I cast off all my mates from school, never saw them again. I decided, ruthlessly, that I was going to make friends with my new teammates who shared the same goals as me. As far as I was concerned, the lives of athletes and non-athletes were incompatible. Going out to bars, drinking beer and staying up till all hours – well, it sounded like fun, but I couldn’t see how I was going to have that fun and play for United.
    Between the ages of sixteen and twenty I dropped women completely (and, I’ll be honest, I might have struggled anyway). They were always going to want to go to the cinema or a bar on a Friday night. They were going to be expecting phone calls and pestering me to do this or that. My only priority on a Friday night was resting up in bed.
    It was extreme, and I know others were different. Scholesy and Butty would go for a few pints in the week, sometimes even on a Friday. Becks, Casp and Ben always had girlfriends. But I knew my talent wasn’t at their level. As far as I was concerned, I couldn’t afford even to sniff a pint of lager.
    I wasn’t going to let anything mess it up – not even my passion for cricket. Which was a shame because I was playing to a decent standard. A talented Aussie lad called Matthew Hayden had joined us at Greenmount and one day we shared an unbroken stand of 236 against Astley Bridge, centuries for both of us. He’d go on to make more than a hundred Test appearances for Australia, but it was my last big innings. The story of our stand got into the local papers and someone at the club must have pointed it out to Eric.
    Straight to the point, he came up to me: ‘What the bloody hell are you playing at with this cricket nonsense? No more of that.’
    So that was the end of my career as a batsman.
    Eric liked my dedication. Maybe he saw something of himself in me. He’d call us up individually to his office every couple of months just to chat about how we were getting on. I’d not been there long when he said, ‘You’ve surprised me, you’ve got a chance.’
    That was all I ever wanted to hear.

Fergie’s Fledglings
     
    WE’D BEEN BROUGHT together from all over the place, and there could easily have been a split between the out-of-town lads like Becks, Sav, Keith and John O’Kane and those of us from Salford, Bury and Oldham. It had always felt like they’d had preferential treatment in the past. We’d heard how Becks had been taken into the dressing room to meet the players when the team was down in London. How he’d been sent a brand-new United kit in the post.
    Becks was a southerner, and you’d think we were very different. But there was far more that brought us together and we quickly became best mates, once I realised that a Cockney could love United. We’d both been brought up United fanatics, we loved the game, and we had a desire to do whatever it took to make the grade at Old Trafford. In Becks I quickly recognised someone who shared my dedication, and had bags of talent to go with it. Our families became close, standing on the touchline together on cold nights watching the youth team. Becks’ mum and dad, Ted and Sandra, would drive all over the place to support him, just like my parents. It was the start of a lifelong friendship.
    We had a great spirit in the squad. Inevitably there were groups of mates, but no cliques. Among the local lads, I was great pals with Casp and Ben, and the more I got to know the lads in digs, the more I got to like them too. People might think me and Robbie Savage are unlikely pals – even