Ryan Giggs: How good was he?
I’m going to write about Ryan Giggs. What an original thing for me to do. For a large part of my 20s, I fostered an idea of writing a spirit-of-the-times book about Ryan Giggs, wherein I unpacked his undersung sporting and cultural significance. It seems very silly now. It started as nothing, it came to nothing. But I bored plenty of friends with my wounded fanboyish lectures on the topic. Sometimes, it serves a person to imagine they live in a world of even more widespread wrongheadedness than is actually the case. Consequently, in my sensible head, Ryan Giggs remains a vastly underrated footballer, whose cause needs to be fought. Occasionally, something crops up to support that notion – a silly Twitter poll, a throwaway line in an article, a discussion of who should be the first two players in the Premier League Hall of Fame, which gets hijacked by Liverpool fans. The truth is, of course, that Ryan Giggs is not vastly underrated. When the BBC, even recently, did a poll...