“Only now, looking back at it, [United chairman] Martin Edwards was always asking me about Sir Alex,” added Strachan in our latest episode. “He was quizzing me about your man. And he was still ringing me at that time, Sir Alex. Again, I didn’t know he was quizzing me. ‘What are the boys like?’ A wee bit different. ‘Do the guys like a drink?’ Oh yeah, wonderful. They like a drink.
“I didn’t know at this time that he was taking all this information down. Sorry lads! I didn’t know at the time. Then he came in and it [the culture] didn’t just change, no. It took a while to change, trust me. It took a while for him to get the players he really needed in the team, to carry out exactly what he wanted.
“Not that the guys were being disrespectful, far from it. The other guys were just their own people. It was hard for them to change and they weren’t going to change their lifestyle, that’s for sure. Again, it’s not a negative thing, that they said they were against it, far from it. They were open minded, come in and try the new ideas but they were not going to change their social life.
“It took four or five years to get it done. He needed to get rid of me, Paul McGrath, all these kind of guys. They needed to go and that’s not a problem.”
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