Ashley Young interview: ‘Fergie? No – you must never call him that’

Sorting through some old memorabilia recently, Ashley Young’s wife came across a Watford programme from the start of his career and so the pair leafed through, alighting upon a feature on goalkeeper Alec Chamberlain, who played in Young’s professional debut – 20 years ago this September.

“We both said, ‘Oh, I wonder how old Alec is now,’” says Young as we chat early before training at Aston Villa’s training ground this week. A quick check online and the answer was a little startling. “Fifty-eight!” Young says. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m old’”. Yet, Young – still a Premier League regular at 37 – is now just one year younger than Chamberlain was when the pair of them lined up for two decades earlier in a Watford team struggling in the Championship.

That teenager from Stevenage has come a long way. Young has captained Manchester United, played in a World Cup semi-final, won a Premier League and a Serie A title. Also, an FA Cup in 2016, although no repeat of that this year after his hometown club scored the shock of the third round by eliminating Villa. It remains an unpredictable game, but 20 years on Young still cannot get enough of it. He is older than Wayne Rooney and Vincent Kompany. Older than James Milner and Sergio Ramos. But Young is still playing at the top and he is a strong contender to start for Villa against Leeds United in a big Friday night Premier League clash.

I read him the list of managers he has played for post-Watford: Martin O’Neill, Fergie, David Moyes, Louis Van Gaal, Jose Mourinho, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, Antonio Conte, Steven Gerrard, Unai Emery. Quite a collection. “You can’t say ‘Fergie’ either,” he says with a smile. “That’s not allowed. He’s ‘The Boss’. Just to let you know!” Young describes them as all winners – which suits his character. A determined kid from Pin Green in north Stevenage who refused to give up on a professional career despite early rejection.

There is one manager he keeps going back to. “I talk to them all,” he begins. “I won’t say the best but the one who has given me the most is ‘The Boss’. Sir Alex. The one I still talk to most is ‘The Boss’. I had a conversation with him a few months ago and he was talking about the changes in football and how he would be in football nowadays.    

“I won’t go into the conversation … I don’t know if he’s impressed by certain changes. But the way ‘The Boss’ was for years, the success he had – he had his way of dealing with players, of dealing with the press, whatever else there was. How he had his team set up. How he knew his team – weeks, months, in advance. The way he was with players. I am not too sure how that would be seen these days.

“We have a WhatsApp group for the old [Manchester United] players and we think there were only two out of the era who didn’t get shouted at. I was one and the other was Darren Fletcher. I don’t know whether that is because he is Scottish.”

That is Young now – an elder statesman of the game. A man who remembers how it used to be and has got the medals and the stories to prove it. He wants to play every last minute on the pitch that he can. He is confident there will be another season after this one, his second in his second spell back at Villa where his career took flight between 2007 and 2011 before the move to United. He says that his 18 months in Italy with Inter Milan was transformative. He is fitter now than he was in his twenties. Was that the Conte effect?

“Oh, he is intense,” Young says. “If you ask any player who has played under him – you either sink or swim. You have to be on board with him and want to work. He is going to test you. But if you can come through that test and you want to win and you want to succeed …”

He leaves me in no doubt of what is required. The tests sound intriguing. “He [Conte] tests you in training, where you are running non-stop. There will be different training times. It’s a different culture. I say that we ran a lot out there … I think I saw every part of that training ground because we ran around it all.

“I say it was one of the toughest pre-seasons [2020] but I think it set me in good stead. From then I have felt the fittest I have ever felt. I know saying that at 37, having gone through my twenties, is crazy. But you get to know your body. I don’t know whether it was being pushed as hard as ever. But it was a crazy amount of running – I know that. You could tell in games when teams would stay with us until half-time and then around the 60th minute you would see them drop off because they couldn’t deal with our fitness. We would kick on again and there were so many times we got late goals.”

He loved life in Italy. He left United in January 2020 as the club captain when Solskjaer told him he would not play the number of games he wanted. Conte told Young, then 34, he would be playing every week and that was enough. United realised their mistake and tried to keep him. “A contract offer was made,” Young says. “It was too late. I had made up my mind. How I saw it was, if United really wanted to keep me, they would have offered me a contract before the interest came in.”

It would have been easy to stay but he wanted to play every week. He still does. He has started the last four Premier League games for Villa under Emery. Young’s philosophy is the same as it was when he was an 18-year-old at Watford: a great career is built day by day, training session by session, match by match. “I have always said I have never been the most talented in the world,” he says. “But if you want someone who will be hardworking, day in and day out – someone who will be in the trenches with you – I will be there.

“I think a lot of the managers I have played under see that. That’s why they can rely on me, why they play me. You don’t go to clubs I have played at, you don’t captain those clubs, if you haven’t got the trust and belief of the manager.”

Talking of which, Young is adamant he will not be a manager. But I am not quite sure I believe that will be the case. His younger brother Lewis, who recently called time on a good League Two career at Crawley Town, has completed his Uefa Pro License and is ready to get on with coaching after a caretaker stint at the club. A chance, perhaps, for two of the three Young brothers to be reunited on the touchline.

It is easy to see why Young wants to keep playing as long as possible: good things keep happening to him. He was left out of the England reckoning for four years between 2013 and 2017 whereupon Gareth Southgate recalled him. Young ended up playing a major role at Russia 2018. Even in November, at the age of 37, he was on the 55-man long list for the squad for Qatar.

“Age is nothing but a number,” he says, “I look at other countries and in Italy the age of players is so much higher yet they are still playing for their national teams. It is not scrutinised. It is not looked upon as, ‘He is too old’. In England age is a massive thing. If you are fit enough, I don’t see it as a problem.”