Live Sport 6: Captain of Team GB
In light of recent sporting endings, the next couple of posts are pretty inevitable. I watched my favourite footballer play in the flesh, just once. I watched him score a goal while captaining his country in the biggest sporting festival of all.
It sounds great, doesn't it, though in truth, for Ryan Giggs, one imagines that playing for Great Britain against the United Arab Emirates at the 2012 Olympics was approximately the 465th most significant football match he ever played in.
I'd almost watched him playing at Wembley more than 20 years earlier - just got the wrong year! I watched England Schoolboys at the old Wembley in 1988, when Lee Clark scored a hat-trick. The 1989 England Schoolboys team was captained by Ryan Wilson - captaining a country, just not his country.
Within a couple of years, he'd made his Man Utd debut and now, a lifetime later, he's called it a day. He and the other greatest British team sportsperson of our lifetime announced their retirement on the same day, one left-footer to universal acclaim, admiration and love, the other to a fair bit of acclaim but also a fair bit of ambivalence, a lot of sly brickbats and contempt. The latter part is his own fault, of course. It's a drag when your favourite footballer turns out to be such a rogue - it's all very well saying, honestly, we shouldn't make moral judgements on famous people, and that it doesn't affect my view of his standing, but I accept that's a little disingenuous and hypocritical. Why do I loathe John Terry so much? It's not just because he plays for Chelsea and he plays football in quite a rugged fashion and acts as if he's played in European finals. I've made a judgement on him, of course I have.
But my admiration for Giggs as professional footballer has survived. The rest is irrelevant. He kept his retirement low key, combining it with a sense of continuity and other big news. He'll no doubt be pleased that, for his last 20 minutes of football, bringing himself on as sub against Hull City on 6th May, he was the best player on the pitch by a mile. Just as he was the best player on the pitch by a mile for 20 minutes of the match I saw him play in.
Team GB in the football at the Olympics, eh? Fun while it lasted, though it could have been more fun. If Stuart Pearce hadn't disgracefully (and I mean that) botched the only aspect of his job which was at all important, namely to pick David Beckham. What kind of self-important, humourless bellend ... anyway, we got Giggs at least.
Captain of the young lads. Bale was injured, which was a shame, and to be honest, it was an ok team, not fantastic. Bellamy, Giggs, a few young guys who've come on since then - Sturridge, who looked class, Aaron Ramsey, Joe Allen etc
For the first few minutes, Giggs drifted off the pace, as he tended to do sometimes in the latter part of his career, seemingly an old man in a young man's game, but then, suddenly (again, as would often happen) the game found him, the ball stuck to him, and he was in a different league.
He started the move that led to his goal and then finished it with a neat header.. Hardly an earth-shaking goal, but a moment to savour for me, whose mental faculties have so often seemed devoted solely to constructing arguments and counter-arguments that Giggs is a far greater figure than he's generally seen as. For a while longer, he was still class, all the tricks and flicks, then began to fade a little. Pearce took him off on the hour, which angered me no end, but to be fair, the young lads did well from that point, and won 3-1. As I recall, that team went out of the tournament in a penalty shoot-out in the quarter-finals (sound familiar?) on the same night of Ennis/Rutherford/Farah's glory, so no one really noticed.
I've made the arguments before, but the (as far as i'm concerned) faint praise that has greeted his retirement has restoked them. If you'd asked me in 1997 who was the most important player of the Premier League, I'd have said Cantona and Giggs, in 2002 Giggs clearly, in 2007, no comparison, in 2014, what kind of moron would even ask it?
And yet some still do. Roy Keane, who thinks Giggs "underachieved" and wouldn't put him in his own top United XI (there's a place for Roy Keane, of course). Liverpool fans, who insist their Steven Gerrard (with his zero Premier League titles) is a better player. Pele included the likes of (this list will be fun) Javier Saviola, Juan Veron, Ivan Zamorano, Brian (yes, Brian) Laudrup, Michael Owen, David Trezeguet, Francesco Totti, Hidetoshi Nakata, Patrick Kluivert, Rui Costa, El Hadji-Diouf, Luis Enrique, Emre Belezoglu, none of whom were a patch on Giggs then and certainly not now, in his list of Greatest Living Footballers in 2004.
I took each such slight as a personal offence. Because this was my cause, this was my argument, this was what I knew to be true and I wanted other people to know, that Giggs was about more than number of goals scored or dominating games. He was about the incalculable influence in the question "What if there'd been no Ryan Giggs?" What then for Alex Ferguson, for Manchester United, for the nascent Premier League itself as the England national team foundered? Ferguson's pre-eminence is presumed, despite the seven years in the job before he won the League title. Giggs' emergence coincided exactly with Manchester United's period of dominance. He's the piece in the puzzle, the constant piece in the puzzle - all the other pieces could be swapped.
What did he do as a player? He scored goals, a lot when he was younger. He set up goals, more than anyone. He scared the opposition, any opposition, with his pace. He produced at key moments. He gave the club, the city of Manchester, a symbol of its own to rally round and believe in. He kept the shape, always kept the shape. He let his team-mates play their game, be they geniuses like Cantona and Ronaldo or solid dudes like Dennis Irwin, Michael Carrick and Dwight Yorke. He never worsened any of them, like Keane worsened Veron or Van Nistelrooy worsened Ronaldo. And he was brilliant.
The last 23 years of British football have been quietly, but certainly, defined by Giggs the player, mainly in presence, occasionally in absence (whether that's absence from England's ranks - just imagine that!, absence from Utd's XI both pre-1991 and post-2013, as well as those periods of injury which solidified my theory, when United went on a seemingly inexplicable bad run).
Because he didn't play in World Cups (just Olympics!), because he didn't ever completely dominate seasons like Messi or Maradona, it's fair enough that Ryan Giggs won't be seen as one of Top 10 footballers of all time, but don't let anyone tell you he was over-rated, that he was lucky, that he was just one of the Class of '92. He didn't coincide with Manchester United, Manchester United coincided with him.
It sounds great, doesn't it, though in truth, for Ryan Giggs, one imagines that playing for Great Britain against the United Arab Emirates at the 2012 Olympics was approximately the 465th most significant football match he ever played in.
I'd almost watched him playing at Wembley more than 20 years earlier - just got the wrong year! I watched England Schoolboys at the old Wembley in 1988, when Lee Clark scored a hat-trick. The 1989 England Schoolboys team was captained by Ryan Wilson - captaining a country, just not his country.
Within a couple of years, he'd made his Man Utd debut and now, a lifetime later, he's called it a day. He and the other greatest British team sportsperson of our lifetime announced their retirement on the same day, one left-footer to universal acclaim, admiration and love, the other to a fair bit of acclaim but also a fair bit of ambivalence, a lot of sly brickbats and contempt. The latter part is his own fault, of course. It's a drag when your favourite footballer turns out to be such a rogue - it's all very well saying, honestly, we shouldn't make moral judgements on famous people, and that it doesn't affect my view of his standing, but I accept that's a little disingenuous and hypocritical. Why do I loathe John Terry so much? It's not just because he plays for Chelsea and he plays football in quite a rugged fashion and acts as if he's played in European finals. I've made a judgement on him, of course I have.
But my admiration for Giggs as professional footballer has survived. The rest is irrelevant. He kept his retirement low key, combining it with a sense of continuity and other big news. He'll no doubt be pleased that, for his last 20 minutes of football, bringing himself on as sub against Hull City on 6th May, he was the best player on the pitch by a mile. Just as he was the best player on the pitch by a mile for 20 minutes of the match I saw him play in.
Team GB in the football at the Olympics, eh? Fun while it lasted, though it could have been more fun. If Stuart Pearce hadn't disgracefully (and I mean that) botched the only aspect of his job which was at all important, namely to pick David Beckham. What kind of self-important, humourless bellend ... anyway, we got Giggs at least.
Captain of the young lads. Bale was injured, which was a shame, and to be honest, it was an ok team, not fantastic. Bellamy, Giggs, a few young guys who've come on since then - Sturridge, who looked class, Aaron Ramsey, Joe Allen etc
For the first few minutes, Giggs drifted off the pace, as he tended to do sometimes in the latter part of his career, seemingly an old man in a young man's game, but then, suddenly (again, as would often happen) the game found him, the ball stuck to him, and he was in a different league.
He started the move that led to his goal and then finished it with a neat header.. Hardly an earth-shaking goal, but a moment to savour for me, whose mental faculties have so often seemed devoted solely to constructing arguments and counter-arguments that Giggs is a far greater figure than he's generally seen as. For a while longer, he was still class, all the tricks and flicks, then began to fade a little. Pearce took him off on the hour, which angered me no end, but to be fair, the young lads did well from that point, and won 3-1. As I recall, that team went out of the tournament in a penalty shoot-out in the quarter-finals (sound familiar?) on the same night of Ennis/Rutherford/Farah's glory, so no one really noticed.
I've made the arguments before, but the (as far as i'm concerned) faint praise that has greeted his retirement has restoked them. If you'd asked me in 1997 who was the most important player of the Premier League, I'd have said Cantona and Giggs, in 2002 Giggs clearly, in 2007, no comparison, in 2014, what kind of moron would even ask it?
And yet some still do. Roy Keane, who thinks Giggs "underachieved" and wouldn't put him in his own top United XI (there's a place for Roy Keane, of course). Liverpool fans, who insist their Steven Gerrard (with his zero Premier League titles) is a better player. Pele included the likes of (this list will be fun) Javier Saviola, Juan Veron, Ivan Zamorano, Brian (yes, Brian) Laudrup, Michael Owen, David Trezeguet, Francesco Totti, Hidetoshi Nakata, Patrick Kluivert, Rui Costa, El Hadji-Diouf, Luis Enrique, Emre Belezoglu, none of whom were a patch on Giggs then and certainly not now, in his list of Greatest Living Footballers in 2004.
I took each such slight as a personal offence. Because this was my cause, this was my argument, this was what I knew to be true and I wanted other people to know, that Giggs was about more than number of goals scored or dominating games. He was about the incalculable influence in the question "What if there'd been no Ryan Giggs?" What then for Alex Ferguson, for Manchester United, for the nascent Premier League itself as the England national team foundered? Ferguson's pre-eminence is presumed, despite the seven years in the job before he won the League title. Giggs' emergence coincided exactly with Manchester United's period of dominance. He's the piece in the puzzle, the constant piece in the puzzle - all the other pieces could be swapped.
What did he do as a player? He scored goals, a lot when he was younger. He set up goals, more than anyone. He scared the opposition, any opposition, with his pace. He produced at key moments. He gave the club, the city of Manchester, a symbol of its own to rally round and believe in. He kept the shape, always kept the shape. He let his team-mates play their game, be they geniuses like Cantona and Ronaldo or solid dudes like Dennis Irwin, Michael Carrick and Dwight Yorke. He never worsened any of them, like Keane worsened Veron or Van Nistelrooy worsened Ronaldo. And he was brilliant.
The last 23 years of British football have been quietly, but certainly, defined by Giggs the player, mainly in presence, occasionally in absence (whether that's absence from England's ranks - just imagine that!, absence from Utd's XI both pre-1991 and post-2013, as well as those periods of injury which solidified my theory, when United went on a seemingly inexplicable bad run).
Because he didn't play in World Cups (just Olympics!), because he didn't ever completely dominate seasons like Messi or Maradona, it's fair enough that Ryan Giggs won't be seen as one of Top 10 footballers of all time, but don't let anyone tell you he was over-rated, that he was lucky, that he was just one of the Class of '92. He didn't coincide with Manchester United, Manchester United coincided with him.
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