Graeme Souness can't believe Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson will be happy about being in Tokyo for this week's Club World Championship.

Souness was part of the Liverpool team beaten by Flamengo in the 1981 Intercontinental Cup in Tokyo and said: "We treated it as a testimonial and were told not to get injured.

"Sir Alex Ferguson can't say he'd rather not be going because it sends out the wrong message to his players but it's something he can do without.

"Given a choice between being crowned the best team in world and winning the Premier League again I know which he'd choose.

"You spend goodness knows how long on a plane, allowing your body to get into another time zone and then back again.

"We didn't take it that seriously. You can't sleep the first night because of jet lag. We didn't know what to eat and were ordering hamburgers in the middle of the night.

"At 3am the night before the game all the players were on the floodlit golf range because we couldn't sleep."