“Sir Alex Ferguson’s final victory was not the 2012-13 Premier League title, his 13th in nearly 27 years as Manchester United manager. The last triumph was against his own fear of retirement, idleness, isolation: an anxiety that stalked him throughout his later years as British football’s greatest autocrat. The laughter coming down the corridor of a hotel in Cheshire as I wait to meet him has a familiar mischievous edge. The effervescent Govan boy is still detectable in Ferguson’s laugh, and in his eye, which at 71 still bears the glint of youthful energy. As he emerges with a hotel employee he has known for many years, he jokes, ‘We’re talking about hips.’ A painful hip replacement was one of his first engagements after handing the Manchester United team over to David Moyes, who shares Ferguson’s Glasgow working-class roots. …” Telegraph