Tangling with Sir Alex Ferguson, Pep Guardiola and the Raging Bull - the inside story of 24 years on the MEN sports desk

Monstered by Fergie, mauled by the Raging Bull and called “Yoda” by Pep Guardiola. The last 24 years as a sports writer at the Manchester Evening News have been surreal at times.

But as Geoffrey Chaucer said, all good things must come to an end. And for me, as Daffy Duck said,“That’s All Folks!”

Covering Manchester United, Manchester City and boxing for a newspaper with which I grew up has been a blast, but it was not without the odd baptism of fire. And the formidable Sir Alex Ferguson certainly handed me one of those, a few weeks after I had been made number two on the Reds’ coverage back in 2000.

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That was when the MEN still had the privilege of ringing the United boss every morning to get updates, to try to eke out a “line” for that night’s paper. When our number one Reds reporter Stuart Mathieson took a week off, that job fell to me. The last thing I wanted to do was upset the apple cart on day one so I rang Fergie at 8.30, on the dot, with a few easy questions prepared in my mind.

I never stood a chance. Little did I know that he was still seething from the MEN coverage of the Manchester derby, the second-to-last one at Maine Road, when David Beckham’s free kick won the game but the Blues had pushed their old rivals all the way.

The feisty United boss did not like the fact that Paul Hince, our chief sports writer, had taken the line that we learned nothing new about United in victory, stating we already knew that they can grind out results when they don’t play well and that Beckham’s setpiece delivery was a frequent match-winner for the Reds. Hincey went on to say that we HAD learned plenty about City - principally that