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 of the Greatest Premier League players, no amount of Liverpool fans could prevent Giggs from being 1, Henry 2.

In any case, widespread sourness towards Giggs is perfectly reasonable. Wales fans don’t love him (or at least didn’t til recently) and fans of not behaving terribly also revel in despising him.

So, I can recognise how that has bled into his footballing legacy. Also, he is not, nor was ever, a lovable, inspirational, fairytale figure – he’s no James Milner, he’s no Gianfranco Zola or Son Heung-Min.

So, what’s my continued issue? It’s that I still feel like most people don’t really, truly, understand Giggs’ career. They talk about his longevity, his list of achievements, his footballing brain, his place in the Class of 92, the FA Cup goal against Arsenal. Which is all fine, but there’s more …

I think it really helps to have been a football-mad teen when the Premier League first came along. To be old enough to truly remember how good the likes of Rush and Barnes were in the 80s, to know what football was about before Year Zero, but young enough not to be in thrall to the past, to have been truly excited by the leap forward that the Premier League was.

So, here’s the first key point - none of what happened with Man Utd was inevitable. When I first got into football in the mid-80s, for ages, Man Utd was just another team. Lots of people supported them, they won the odd Cup, but Liverpool, Arsenal and Everton were the real top teams. Utd were on a level with the likes of Spurs, Forest, Villa, Sheffield Wednesday.

Alex Ferguson had been manager for almost 5 years in March 1991. That’s a long time to be a manager - by today’s standards, it’ an aeon, but it’s even a very long time to manage a top club by the standards of the time while mainly finishing mid-table. He’d done ok, but results-wise he hadn’t transformed Man Utd. Something had to change.

So, if, in training, on 1^st March 1991, while Ferguson watched on, impressed by the 17 year old and planning to put him on the subs’ bench for the following day’s match vs Everton, Steve Bruce had become enraged at being nutmegged and launched himself wildly at Ryan Giggs, shattering his left tibia in a horrific, career-ending impact, what effect would that have had on British football? Or rather, what effect wouldn’t that have had on British football …

There is nothing that comes close to the complete split in reality that would have entailed … not involving Cantona, not Keane, not Bergkamp, not Abramovich, not Abu Dhabi, not Klopp … not even Ferguson himself. Well, maybe Ferguson, ok …

Rather like when people argue that “Tendulkar is as good as Bradman” and you just stare at them and think “do you know the difference between 99 and 54, do you know that no amount of context can bridge that gap”, it’s rather like when people suggest anyone but a United player is the Premier League’s greatest … 13 is a much bigger number than 5, 4, 3, 1 or indeed 0. Too big a gap to bridge.

But, then, ah ha, my imaginary adversary says, you’ve mentioned an individual achievement, surely Shearer’s goal figures are what are Bradmanesque in this context? But football is not cricket. The way greatness should be measured is very different. You have to be a monumental disruptive element (late KP) or monumentally good captain (eg Brearley) for your personal numbers not to pretty directly correlate to your value to a team.

The way we measure greatness in football is, I accept, subjective. People do have different criteria for what they consider “great”. Steven Gerrard plays to a certain idea of greatness, with his pursuit of a cause just out of reach, his one-man show, his leadership, his peaks of glory, his badge-kissing, his all-round game. Dennis Bergkamp plays to another, with his uncommon aesthetic beauty, his sense of bringing a whole new way of playing into the league.

Shearer plays to another, with his big, empty, individual numbers. And some will ascribe greatest importance to concentrated periods of exceptional quality, they'll say because Cantona/Henry/Ronaldo/Aguero were so good for a period time, that is worth more than someone being almost as good as that for a longer period of time (I'm talking about "in the Premier League, obviously", I know Henry and Ronaldo were very good for a very long time in total).

Henry, straightforwardly and clearly the best player in the league, or among the two or three best, for several seasons in a row, in a way that entirely and coherently enhanced his team and defined the league, is the strongest challenge to the notion that Giggs is the league's greatest player. I agree, Giggs was never as individually superb as Henry was during that period. If someone chooses to define greatness in those terms, so be it.

The thing is, it has always been acceptable to measure footballing greatness in different, somewhat nebulous ways, but Messi and Ronaldo have somewhat ruined that.

Because they are such extraordinarily good and successful footballers, alongside the fact that their personal statistics also belong to another stratosphere. Because they’ve been the best players playing for the best teams and so it has been impossible not to define this era’s football in terms of their individual rivalry, as if they were Federer and Nadal, devoid of team-mates and context.

A few years ago, I made a list of the best players of this century and I put Xavi above Ronaldo and it didn’t seem that absurd. Now it would be, of course. But also, so much of the discussion of Messi vs Ronaldo is about their stats – “how can you say Leo’s the best when CR7’s headed goal-per-booking ration is 4.6% higher? Cristiano’s clearly the GOAT’ etc …

And, with those two, all that stuff, is fun and by-and-large, a valid way to compare them (as long as you come to the conclusion that Messi is a substantially greater footballer, of course …)

But individual stats have never, in football,  told the full story – even now, I’d venture, when the stats are so extraordinarily detailed and all-encompassing, there is something of the nature of what makes the body of a great football team that they cannot quite capture.

This is something I’ll get back to, but the nature of sporting greatness within a team sport can be confusing. Usually people point to the likes of Michael Jordan, Steve Waugh, Martin Johnson, captains who grab a unit by the scruff of the neck, bully and cajole them into being better. But not all sports are the same and not all units are the same. Football can, very occasionally, be a captain/playmaker-centred sport (Argentina 86), where everything centres around a dominant individual, but, really, it shouldn’t be (this, of course, gets to the heart of why Messi is better than Ronaldo).

People like to describe that Man Utd era in terms of its alpha males [I’m a little loath to use these biological terms, I’m not using them in that strict sense, but I think they work fairly well for the implied make-up of a sports team] – Ferguson first - Cantona, Keane, Van Nistelrooy, Ronaldo. Beckham was, interestingly, a natural beta who made the mistake of wanting to be an alpha. Giggs was the great beta – the great team player, who gave over the idea of storybook individual greatness in the service of his team winning titles.

A common criticism of Giggs is that he was never Man Utd’s Number 1 player, he was always in someone else’s shadow. Firstly, that is very much not true (as I’ll get to), but even for the periods that is was true, where Cantona or Ronaldo were the star man and undeniably the great influence and playmaker, being one of the two or three most influential players in that team is an incredible feat.

How influential was Giggs? Let’s start with the obvious undeniable facts – In 1991, Man Utd had not won the league for 24 years. In Ferguson’s first four seasons, they came 11^th, 2^nd, 11^th, 13^th, then 6^th in 1991 itself (Gigg’s first, when he played two games, let’s call that the first transitional season). 

Then, in the next 22 years, when Giggs was a mainstay of their squad, playing somewhere between 22 and 41 league games each year (usually 30+), they finished 1^st 13 times, 2^nd 6 times and 3^rd 3 times. Then, in the next, his last, when he played just 12 league games (Moyes’ first, let’s call it the second transitional season) they finished 7^th. Then in the next five, it’s been 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, 2^nd and 6^th.

There has not, of course there has not, in British football nor, that I can see, in World Football, been such a vast yet concentrated coincidence of player/team success surrounded by such immediate drop-off in the years before and after. It applies to no one else, not Ferguson himself, not Cantona or Schmeichel, Scholes, Irwin, Keane, Henry, Terry, Aguero …

The Man Utd we know and grew so thrilled/tired by, the juggernaut of perpetual success, only exists when Ryan Giggs is playing. That would be amazing if it was 10 seasons, let alone 22.

So when people talk grudgingly about Giggs’ “longevity” making him a significant player, or talk about him as “part of the Class of 92” it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the chronology.

Giggs was British football’s brightest star a full four years, a title, a double, before Scholes, the Nevilles, Butt and Beckham were establishing themselves as first-team regulars. He isn’t so much a part of the Class of 92 as the reason for the Class of 92, the reason the others believed they could also make it.

People talk about Keane as the driving force – Keane joined a Champion team, left a team struggling, only for it to immediately pick up and win the league three times in a row. Do me a favour.

Of course, there are Cantona and Schmeichel. Schmeichel, who joined at the start of 1991-92, is as important as anyone else, I’m quite sure. If they’d replaced him well in 99 (with van der Sar, say!) I reckon they’d have won one more Champions League at least. He was indeed very hard to replace. But they kept winning titles without him, and did in time find a replacement.

And Cantona - of course, Cantona was Utd’s talisman between 92 and 97. But … two things …

1. The big change had already happened. Utd would have won the 91-92 Football League if, ironically, Cantona had not joined Leeds. They then needed him to go to the next level, of course.

2. Cantona won no Champions Leagues

3. Cantona won 4 leagues, not 13. He was not irreplaceable. He was inspirational, for sure, but not irreplaceable.

On to Scholes … it has become popular to describe as the underrated great influence, the one that made the team tick. Again, not to put him down, he was a fabulous player, but I think this drum is beaten a little too hard

1. He played 200-odd fewer games than Giggs

2. For such a great finisher, he didn’t score that many more goals

3. Scholes could only really play one way – attempts to fit him in elsewhere, for Man U and England, didn’t work. Scholes could never do what Giggs did, whereas Giggs could, and did, do what Scholes did, many times (something I’ll return to)

4. He was a terrible tackler.

Rooney? Ronaldo? Ferdinand? Great, of course, but they’re really only part one of the three great Ferguson teams.

Anyway, don’t take my word for all this … I wrote, at the start, of my frustration that so few people seem to “get” Giggs’ career.

People who do … Ferguson, Cantona, Scholes, Rooney, Evra. Ferguson talks of Cantona, Giggs, Scholes and Ronaldo as the only four “world class players” he managed. 

Cantona has described Giggs as his favourite team mate, the one he always knew was making the run he could play the pass he wanted to. 

Rooney, recently, asked if Keane was his biggest influence on joining Utd, practically scoffed. “No, it was Giggs”. 

Likewise, Evra (who joined as late as 2006, remember) says Giggs was the biggest influence at the club.

It is Scholes himself, though, who is the most insightful and persuasive, and who reminded me of something I’d forgotten. When asked the best he played with, he says Giggs, clearly and bluntly. He also says that Giggs came into his own on European nights, was the one they all turned to and relied on. That’s true, and really important to remember.

When confronted by world class, Giggs was the world class of that United team. Where Cantona had fallen short, Giggs persisted and rose to the challenge. (yes, yes, I know Cole, Yorke, Beckham, Keane, Scholes etc were all very good then too … but it was Giggs, still in his early-mid 20s then, that provided the electricity …)

Giggs was struggling physically throughout the late 90s, picking up hamstring injury after hamstring injury. This is famously at the root of his non-appearances for Wales. Ferguson chose to manage him in a way that was both sensible and occasionally frustrating.

Recently, a minor contretemps erupted when Jamie Carragher said, whilst picking one of those silly “combined team” things, that he’d pick the Sadio Mane of this 2019-20 season in the PL over the Giggs of the 98-99 season. However much Man Utd fans were outraged, it was a perfectly sensible thing to say. 98-99 was not one of the great individual Premier League seasons for Giggs – he played fewer than 30 games. Yet, in the Champions League, the Champions League in which they had to play Bayern three times, Barcelona twice, Inter twice, Juventus twice, all great sides close to their prime, Giggs was superb, utterly superb. I still remember the thrill of those games, and thrill, in particular, being a fan of Giggs, of seeing him at his very best, terrorising world-class right backs, as he was born to do.

From 1996 onwards, when Utd first got the hang of being in it, Giggs was one of the very best players in the Champions League, which was the very highest level of football in the world. That would be true, really, until the end of his career [it is noteworthy that in 40 year old Giggs’ last season, the disaster under Moyes, though Giggs hardly played in the league, he did play in the Champions League, in which they managed to get to the quarter-final]. That is particularly pertinent for the late 90s/early 2000s, as I say, because in some league seasons you could see he was not operating at full capacity.

I remember a FourFourTwo article about him in about 2001 with the headline “Giggs: Have You Forgotten How Good He Is?” That was rather a neat way of putting it. His excellence had become commonplace – Beckham was more of a story, so was Keane, so was van Nistelrooy.

Nevertheless, dips in United form tended to coincide with his injured spells. A classic example of this is the 1997-98 season, when Arsenal won the title. I have seen that season written as an example of the influence Cantona (who’d left in the summer) and Keane (who fucked himself for the season early on while trying to foul Haaland) had, but if you look closely, you see United had a huge lead over Arsenal (albeit with games in hand) on February 21^st when Giggs injured his hamstring in a win vs Derby. They then suffered a major drop in form which saw them fall out of Europe and collapse in the league before Giggs’ return, too late, towards the end of the season.

All through that era, learning from those injuries, you could recognise that he was learning to be managed and learning to play within himself – the wisdom of that is clear when you look at the careers of the likes of Michael Owen, Robbie Fowler and, indeed, Lee Sharpe (who I’ll get to shortly).

There’d still be moments when he looked like he forgot about his hamstring – I remember a game against, I think Crystal Palace (so that would make it as late as 2004ish) when he picked it up near his own box and just thought ‘fuck it’ and went, like a teenager, and suddenly he was on the edge of opposition box, and it was a vision of what Giggs without dodgy hamstrings would have been like every game for the last 10 years.

And I think this is what a lot of folk don’t remember, even those that think they do. They don’t really, truly, remember how brilliant Giggs was at the start. How there was nothing like him, nothing so fast, so tricky, so impossible, how he made Utd capable of playing a way that no one else could get close to.

There were two players who were close … the early McManaman and the aforementioned Lee Sharpe. Again, it is long-forgotten, and something I’ve only reminded myself of while writing this, how thrilling Lee Sharpe was for a short while.

In 1990-91, that inbetween-land of English football. Sharpe was John the Baptist that season, the foreshadow of what Giggs was going to be. I had never seen a footballer so fast. He was a pure kick and run winger, but that was enough. He played a key part in Utd’s run to the Cup Winners Cup. So, if whatever combination of misfortunes happened to him the next season hadn’t happened, whatever series of injuries and illnesses it was, could he have been another Giggs? Who knows? Probably not, though – stripped of his blistering pace, he was an ok player for a while, whereas Giggs, when he lost his pace, remained a great player for a very long time. He was able to make the transition from brilliant to excellent, which few manage. Sharpe is a footnote now.

But back to the brilliant. Early on in the life of FourFourTwo, so I guess 94 or 95, possible 96, it did a list of The Greatest Footballers of All Time – now I’m not saying it was a Great List. There was some madness in it. Including the fact that Ryan Giggs, barely out of his teens, was ranked Number 30.

Or there was this Reebok advert in 1995 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA7uXXczOLo –at the time, there wasn’t even a whisper of dissent that he’d be in their greatest ever side. The point is, all this was, as I’ve said, before Beckham, Scholes and the likes were even really in the team. Giggs had already done enough for a silly poll to think him the 30^th greatest footballer of all time, he had already done enough to be in Man Utd’s greatest ever side.

He was the footballer people at my school who knew nothing about football had heard of – he filled the gap left by Gascoigne and the England team in general after World Cup 90. He was as famous as Beckham would become. There was a mystique because Ferguson shielded him from interviews. 

Once they started coming, and the Quorn adverts, the stuttering 'Question of Sport' appearances and his Channel 4 ‘Soccer School’, the mystique quickly went of course, when his scintillating lack of charisma was revealed …

But all this is talked down … it became about ‘Class of 92’, it became about longevity.

It also, in a sense, became a narrative of slight disappointment. He has, I think, drawn ideas of a player he wasn’t more than most. My earliest memories of watching Giggs are in the early 90s with my mum’s partner Ed, who’s an old school Best-Law-Charlton Man U fan, and he’d single Giggs out for more criticism than anyone else, I guess always looking at an idealised, version of the player Best was and might have been.

And he wasn’t Messi or Ronaldo. He wasn’t a stat-munching ooberman of football. Nevertheless, it’s funny when people bring up his “stats” in a negative way. Up to 400ish games, he was scoring 1 every 4 games, which is pretty outstanding for a midfielder. That tailed off, of course, as he played deeper. His assists ratio also tailed off. He still has far, far more assists than any other Premier League player.

I’ll return to this idea of “narrative” idea of sporting greatness. People are talking a lot about this in relation to Michael Jordan at the moment – the seizing of the moment, the clutch, the elevation from the crowd. Giggs has plenty of missed moments – the 2009 Champions League final, the 2005 and 2007 FA Cup finals, the 2001 Champions League quarter-finals when he put in an absolutely rotten performance against Bayern Munich, a play-off for Euro 2004 when, as captain of Wales, he put a shot an inch past the post against Russia which may have taken his country to its first major tournament in decades.

There were weak shots and poor misses. He wasn’t a perfect footballer, but, what he did, above all, was make sure, for more than two decades, that his team was the best team in one of the toughest leagues in the world. The fact he adapted how he did that speaks truly to his footballing genius.

Giggs had 3 great football careers, and any one of them exceeds what most footballers achieve in a lifetime 

1. The wonderkid who, if he’d been forced by injury to retire in 1995, would now be talked of as the best teenager who ever played the game 

2. The injury-prone king of Europe, from around 97 to 2003, one part of a great side, but essential to their rise to the heights 

3. (2006-2013) the elder statesman, the deeper-lying adaptable midfielder. This is, statistically, Utd’s most successful era – 5 league titles, 3 Champions League finals – there was Ronaldo, Rooney, Ferdinand, there was Tevez, van Persie, Carrick, Vidic, Evra – but still, Giggs was essential.

Another mostly-forgotten tale of when it turned around. The Ferguson era was widely believed to be over in early 2006 – 3^rd in 2004, 3^rd in 2005, Roy Keane had been sourly kicked out and many believed he took the spirit of the great United team with him. Chelsea had already run away with the title, Utd were racked with injuries.

What happened – Ferguson played a makeshift central midfield of Giggs and John O’Shea and they won eight league games in a row, briefly gave Chelsea a little fright, and finished a solid, restorative second. Keane was gone, Van Nistelrooy (a great striker who coincides with Ferguson’s least successful period for years, not by chance) was on his way out. Vidic and Evra were in, Ronaldo was finally ready to fly.

Rather than ruining the club, Keane’s departure galvanised it. If the 2005-06 season had ended miserably, if they’d finished 5^th, would that have happened? Giggs, at that point already considered a faded force by the same people who lionised Keane, stepped up with the unheralded O’Shea as if to say “you know what, this playing central midfield is really not so hard, you don’t have to run around shouting and kicking people like a psycho all game” … setting the template, in the summer, for Michael Carrick to come in and be every bit the player for Man Utd that Keane was, just in a totally different way (check out how similar Keane and Carrick’s records at the club are.)

I’m not saying Giggs, in his mid to late 30s, was as good a central midfielder as prime Keane or Scholes. He was, once or twice, exposed for his lack of physicality and sharpness at the very highest level (the odd game against Chelsea or Champions League final vs Barcelona). But he was better than anyone had any right to expect. He produced some of his most memorable performances, out of position, in those final few seasons.

He could also, still, even more remarkably, do the old job sometimes. One of his greatest performances, now forgotten a) because of how the final went against the Barcelona team that may be the greatest of all time b) because he was about to be exposed for the utter ratbag he was and people were not terribly interested in his football after that, was in the two legs of the Champions League semi-final vs Schalke in 2011 – 37, playing on the wing, tearing the opposition apart.

The best bit of that last era was the 2008 Champions League final penalty shoot-out, which Utd had had much the better of but rather thrown away. Of all the Premier League seasons, that was one where Giggs’ contribution wasn’t the strongest – he was on the bench for the final. He came on for Scholes and had a great chance to win it in injury time which John Terry managed to deflect over. Fucking Terry. In my mind, I wondered if this could be Giggs coming to the end.

Then the shoot-out – Ronaldo misses, Terry has the chance to win it for Chelsea … slips (perhaps my single favourite moment in the history of sport). Then Giggs, 7^th up, rolls up, I’m quite sure he’s going to miss, he’s never been a penalty taker. Scores neatly and calmly. Anelka misses.

Honestly, I feel that moment inspired Giggs’ last five years – he became a regular penalty taker, seemed to gather an extra authority from it.

Again, it’s easy to see Giggs in terms of the things he wasn’t – not English, not George Best, not David Beckham, not engaging, not trustworthy, not Messi, not Ronaldo, not right-footed. In those absences, you can understand why he’s not loved and revered, but respected and somewhat disliked.

But what, actually, definitively, was he? Again, I don’t claim he’s up there with the all-time greats of world football – he had the chance as a player with Wales a couple of times to take them somewhere unexpected, and didn’t manage to. He had the chance to win 4 or 5 Champions Leagues, not 2, and didn’t quite manage it.

But I think he is, as well as being one of the 15 or so best players in the history of the Champions League, the greatest, most important and influential player in the history of English club football. There is nothing like Man Utd’s success from 1992 to 2013 and there is no player so central to it. And though it is not obviously so, I think he is as important to it as Brady to the Patriots, Jordan to the Bulls, Warne to the Australian cricket team.

Everything you know about modern football would be completely different without him.

He is an old-fashioned player in a sense that modern football discussion finds difficult to cope with. I had actually almost written all of this before Curtis Woodhouse's ludicrous take on Giggs being vastly over-rated, wherein he cited suspect stats about his goal and assist ratios per season (god, Xavi and Iniesta were shite as well, weren't they?) ... but even if there were any truth in that, those individual stats were entirely beside the point in that era - Ferguson instilled in that team a commitment and a devotion to the whole, to winning one football match then another football match then another, to playing your role. Giggs's fluidity and adaptability embodies that.

Little throwaway facts - 1. every Liverpool manager except Benitez did better without Steven Gerrard in the side 2. Man Utd had their worst run of 5 seasons under Ferguson while Ruud van Nistelrooy was banging in the goals 3. Man Utd scored 18 more league goals in 2009-10, the season after Cristiano Ronaldo left, than they had in his last season (though they did finish second in the league).

Football is, to the players, or so it should be, only about team results. No, that doesn't mean Darren Ferguson (1 PL) is a greater player than Steven Gerrard (0 PL) but, eg (looking at you at Newcastle, Shearer), if a striker/leader is scoring a goal every two games but his team keeps losing, he is not doing his job as well as a striker scoring a goal every three games whose team keeps winning (of course, assuming defensive record is the same ...)

Think of how many players played their best football with Giggs, then, think, if you can, of any players he didn’t dovetail with, who he overshadowed or limited (the only one I can think of, genuinely, is the young Ronaldo, for a very short while, where you could tell they didn't quite hit it off on the pitch …). Think of the fact that, as a winger, he could go beyond or come short so defenders had no idea where to be, then the fact that he could go on the right, go in the middle, go upfront. 

Remember Giggs linking up with Cantona, Evra, Irwin, Keane, Scholes, Yorke, Cole, Solksjaer, Hughes, Saha, Sheringham, Carrick, Fletcher, van Nistelrooy, van Persie, Ronaldo, Beckham, remember what that looked like, how threatening and effective that looked, then you have the measure of the player.

Remember him tracking back, his sliding tackles, always knowing his role, not diving, not getting sent off, only occasionally giving the ball away in bad areas, passing if someone else was in a better position.

All those things matter. Those are the things which mean a team wins football matches, but are much harder, and less interesting to quantify.

Of course, the main counter-argument to all of this is "Well, it was Ferguson, wasn't it? All of this is purely true cos of Ferguson. Giggs was lucky to be in the right place at the right time and was smart enough to roll with it but never dared to test himself as a true great by going beyond his comfort zone".

But I hope I've made enough of a case that maybe the opposite is true, maybe it's Ferguson that owes the full weight of his reputation more to the player than vice versa.

This is when the argument becomes pretty pointless. They are virtually synonymous. If Ferguson had retired, as he said he would, in the early 2000s, would Giggs have had the extraordinary second act he did? No, probably not. If Ferguson had left at the same time as Cantona in 1997, to be replaced by eg Lippi/Wenger/Hiddink (as in, someone top class), would United have won 9 more titles with Giggs at the forefront. No, surely not.

But then again, I truly  believe the same would be true if Giggs had left at either of those points too.

But that doesn't take anything away from either of them.

Again, to finish, I return to my childhood memories - that sudden sense that, at the start of the 91-92 season, United were the best team, and that was that. The biggest piece in the puzzle had fallen into place, and would stay in place for more than two decades.