My sympathy for Fergie over the flying boot

Still, those of us who live in glass houses should not kick football boots around

Those of us who support football teams other than Manchester United – and those of us who don't even begin to subscribe to the loathing of Sir Alex Ferguson and his players that some people think is a concomitant of supporting one of the country's other teams – have laughed our heads off at the story of Fergie and the Flying Boot.

Just to recap, at exactly the same time on Saturday afternoon that roughly a million people were making their way to Hyde Park in the name of peace, Ferguson was firing missiles in the Old Trafford dressing-room. The boot he kicked somehow screamed through the air and hit David Beckham, of all image-conscious people, just above the eye.

Beckham yesterday had a criss-crossed bandage attached to his left eyebrow. And if the thousands of impressionable youngsters who sport his every daft haircut are anything to go by, there could – outside the ground in Manchester where United play Juventus this evening – be a business opportunity for some entrepreneur with a roll of bandages, a pair of scissors and some fake, dried blood.

In the meantime, Ferguson has described the accident as "a freak act of nature". When the sporting quotes of 2003 are assembled at the end of the year, I have a feeling that one will loom large.

Tsunami are freak acts of nature; terrible earthquakes are freak acts of nature; kicking a football boot across a dressing-room, whoever it hits above the eye, is an act of puerile petulance. On the other hand, acts of puerile petulance have done nothing to stop Ferguson becoming, arguably, the greatest British football manager of all time. They might even have done quite a bit to help.

The press has been full, these last couple of days, of accounts of his previous bursts of temper, best of all an incident during his time at Aberdeen when he kicked the laundry basket and a pair of pants flopped onto the head of a young player who was too scared to remove them. "And you can take those fucking pants off your head," roared the manager. "What do you think you're playing at?"

Yet his Aberdeen teambroke the Rangers-Celtic domination of Scottish football and won a European trophy, so even that young player might have thought his humiliation a price worth paying.

Nobody who has admired Ferguson's achievements should condemn his tantrums, for they are indivisible, just as Paul Gascoigne belching into microphones was indivisible from his ability to dribble through a crowded penalty area.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't snigger when Ferguson accidentally damages a £50m asset. But through the sniggering, we should reflect that lots of great football managers have been, essentially, bullies.

Eric Harrison, the former United youth team coach who nurtured the young Beckham, tells some hair-raising stories about the management style of Brian Clough, for whom he played at Hartlepool. And when Clough wasn't getting violent with his players, he liked to hit them where it hurt even more.

"All we were ever doing was organising whip-rounds for the lads who'd been fined," Harrison recalls. "There was one lad who'd been an apprentice at Middlesbrough when Cloughie was in the first team, and he couldn't get out of the habit of calling him Brian. Cloughie kept fining him for calling him Brian instead of boss." Still, those of us who live in glass houses should not kick football boots around.

The newspaper industry is by no means unused to inspirational bosses having violent rages. Kelvin McKenzie was notorious for it when editor of The Sun. And there is a story of another celebrated editor who once, at the culmination of a ferocious show of temper, flung himself on to a desk to evoke a man at the end of his tether.

Instead, he found himself evoking a man at the end of a spike – the name given in newspaper offices to the sharp metal object on which unwanted stories are impaled. Apparently, the editor shed quite a lot of blood, though I don't suppose anyone giggled.

At the end of the day, as football managers like to say, it's about passion. Which is why the other useful analogy is parenthood. I hope I'm not attracting the attention of the social services by stating that in common (I hope) with lots of other mothers and fathers of small children, the intensity of my love for my kids is matched by the intensity of my fury when they seriously misbehave.

I am successful, thank God, in suppressing any physical manifestation of this fury, but I can understand why parents sometimes lash out at their offspring. And I can understand, too, that Ferguson feels the same way about his players as most of us feel about our children. It was still bloody funny, though.

b.viner@independent.co.uk