Frantic

The day Manchester United’s greatest ever manager (and English football’s too) was rushed to hospital after suffering a brain haemorrhage that almost killed him – emergency surgery revealed large blood clots and the medical team gave him just a 20pc chance of survival – remains a blank to him still. The documentary fills it in.

We hear the frantic call Jason, his voice shaking and cracking, made to the emergency services. Appearing briefly in front of the camera, he recalls his father, who collapsed at home, kept saying, “There better be nothing wrong with my memory”, over and over.

“Then he just started telling these random stories,” he says. “The only connection between them was that they all happened a long time ago.” It was as if Ferguson was trying to convince himself as much as anyone else that he still had a memory.

Memories are important to the documentary – although not primarily the glorious memories he created during his Manchester United reign. If you’re looking for a comprehensive account of Ferguson’s United career, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

His arrival at Manchester United doesn’t come until the 50-minute mark, and the documentary is limited in what it covers, essentially finishing with the spectacular, last-gasp Champions League Final win over Bayern Munich in 1999 – a victory that surely encapsulates the philosophy referred to in the title.

There are segments on Ferguson’s difficult first few seasons, his nurturing of the teenage Ryan Giggs, the signing of Eric Cantona (Giggs, Cantona and Gordon Strachan are the only former United players interviewed), and the painful decision to drop out-of-from goalkeeper Jim Leighton, who’d played under Ferguson at Aberdeen, for the 1990 FA Cup Final replay against Crystal Palace. A crushed Leighton never spoke to Ferguson again.

Never Give In is more concerned with the forces that shaped the young Ferguson, who inherited his mother’s socialist beliefs and his principled father’s strong work ethic.

“Alex was always the leader,” says his younger brother Martin. “He always wanted to be the guy in front.” Inevitably, during the apprentice strike of 1960, it was Ferguson who was the shop steward.

Ferguson recalled going off the rails and drinking too much. When he landed himself in court for fighting, he and his father didn’t speak for two years. It’s clearly something he still regrets.

As a player at St Johnstone, he was on the verge of quitting to emigrate to Canada when he suddenly found himself picked for an away game against Rangers, the club he supported.

He scored a hat-trick, something no opposing player had ever done at Ibrox. After a spell at Dunfermline, he was signed by Rangers – a dream come true, but one that eventually soured badly.

Ferguson recalls a Rangers director asking him if he and his wife Cathy, a devout Catholic, had been married “in a chapel”, and expressing satisfaction when Ferguson told him they’d had a registry office wedding.

“I should have told him to f**k off,” he says now. Cathy’s Catholicism, he believes, was the real reason he was scapegoated for Rangers losing the 1969 Scottish FA Cup Final to Celtic, who hammered them 4-0.

Ferguson had his revenge when his Aberdeen side beat Rangers 1-0 in the 1983 Cup Final. Moments after the final whistle, however, he engaged in an extraordinary rant – on live TV – against his team’s “disgraceful performance”.

“I can’t understand why I did it,” he says here. But after a little prodding by Jason, he admits he was angry they didn’t put the knife even deeper into Rangers. Never Give In is a good football documentary, but it’s an even better character study.