On the eve of the 10th anniversary of the London Olympics, Sebastian Coe is reminiscing about the one that got away. “We got so close to giving Sir Alex Ferguson the job to coach the football team,” he says, sighing, and his mind is catapulted back to the time he asked Sir Bobby Charlton to discreetly sound out the Manchester United manager.
“I came up with the idea because we were having a bit of fragility around our Celtic cousins,” says Lord Coe, the London 2012 organising committee chairman. “It was ostensibly an English team, although there was a smattering of Welsh players. But it suddenly occurred to me that the one unifying influence would be having a not necessarily English coach. And I couldn’t imagine any club having a problem with their Under-23 players having a four, five or six-week tutelage – a masterclass – from Alex Ferguson on the training ground.
