In a distant corner of Manchester United’s training ground a lone figure is running. It is 4am, pitch black, the silence broken only by the sound of his breathing and his footsteps on the perfectly tended grass.
David Moyes is in the dark but he knows what is coming. Nobody from what is supposed to be the world’s greatest football club has told him. But he knows, as he circles the perimeter of Carrington’s pitches one last time, that it is over; knows that in a few hours his players will be training here but he will be gone, no longer their manager.
He knows because the story broke on a number of websites the day before. He didn’t believe it at first. Indeed, when I spoke to him within an hour of the story appearing, he was incredulous. ‘There’s no way you guys would know before me,’ he said in the first of two conversations we had that day. ‘This is Manchester United we’re talking about.’
Moyes was not being naive. Nobody could ever accuse this streetwise Glaswegian of that. But even after a crushing defeat at Everton two days earlier, he was struggling to come to terms with the fact it was ending like this; struggling to believe, having given up the stability he had enjoyed for 11 successful years at Goodison Park, that within barely 10 months his new employers would allow him to be utterly humiliated.
By the time he went to bed on that Easter Monday, he knew he had been. For a start people had not been answering their phones, and when he finally did make contact with Ed Woodward, the club’s executive vice-chairman would only say that he would meet him at Carrington at 8am.
Moyes had no intention of driving in at that time — not when the cameras would be waiting. So he got there four hours early, went for a run, took a shower and then, alone in an empty, eerie building, began to clear his desk. ‘I hadn’t slept a wink,’ he says. ‘But the run gave me a chance to clear my head. A bit of time to think before I started to pack up my stuff.’
