They Always Score E-Book

Ryan Baldi

• Herausgeber: Polaris
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 511

Beschreibung

'Fascinating and original ... will tell you things even the most ardent United fan will not know' - Jim White, The Telegraph On 26 May 1999, Manchester United sealed their historic Treble of league, FA Cup and Champions League in the most dramatic fashion imaginable, scoring twice in stoppage time to snatch an unthinkable victory from Bayern Munich at the Camp Nou in Barcelona. The story of what happened on the pitch is well known, enshrined in the annals of football history. But less in known about how this rollercoaster campaign played out behind the scenes. Thanks to unparalleled insight gleaned from hundreds of exclusive interviews, with United players, coaches, opponents, backroom personnel, club staff, journalists and commentators, They Always Score: The Unforgettable, Improbable, Iconic Story of Manchester United's Treble Winners peels back the curtain to give readers the most comprehensive, illuminating and entertaining picture ever painted of one of the all-time great sports teams.

Leseprobe

POLARIS PUBLISHING LTD

c/o Aberdein Considine

2nd Floor, Elder House

Multrees Walk

Edinburgh

EH1 3DX

www.polarispublishing.com

Text copyright © Ryan Baldi, 2023

ISBN: 9781913538958

eBook ISBN: 9781913538965

The right of Ryan Baldi to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The views expressed in this book do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions or policies of Polaris Publishing Ltd (Company No. SC401508) (Polaris), nor those of any persons, organisations or commercial partners connected with the same (Connected Persons). Any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers, or other information or content expressed by third parties are not those of Polaris or any Connected Persons but those of the third parties. For the avoidance of doubt, neither Polaris nor any Connected Persons assume any responsibility or duty of care whether contractual, delictual or on any other basis towards any person in respect of any such matter and accept no liability for any loss or damage caused by any such matter in this book.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

Designed and typeset by Polaris Publishing, Edinburgh

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD BY DWIGHT YORKE

PROLOGUE

ONE: LEVELLING UP

TWO: PRIMITIVE BASE

THREE: THE CONVALESCENT CAPTAIN

FOUR: ESCAPE TO NEW YORK

FIVE: DEATH OR GLORY

SIX: THE BETTER TEAM

SEVEN: MERGERS AND ACRIMONY

EIGHT: EVEREST

NINE: BLUE WEDNESDAY

TEN: BARREN WINTER

ELEVEN: CHAMPIONSHIP FORM

TWELVE: THE STUDIOUS ASSASSIN

THIRTEEN: THE NEW LIEUTENANT

FOURTEEN: FALLEN SKY

FIFTEEN: FAMILIAR FOES

SIXTEEN: A DEALER IN HOPE

SEVENTEEN: FINE MARGINS

EIGHTEEN: RED REDEMPTION

NINETEEN: NOT EVEN TIRED

TWENTY: SUPERSONIC

TWENTY-ONE: THEY ALWAYS SCORE

TWENTY-TWO: THE RED SEA

AFTERWORD BY NICKY BUTT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ILLUSTRATIONS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Members of the Class of ’92 watch a match from on top of the crumbling dugout at the Cliff. Getty Images

Roy Keane lies on the ground after sustaining an ACL tear vs Leeds in 1997. Colorsport

David Beckham is sent off vs Argentina at the 1998 World Cup after kicking a boot out at Diego Simeone. Getty Images

Jaap Stam is beaten by Nicolas Anelka in the 1998 Charity Shield, illustrating his early struggles at United. Getty Images

Alex Ferguson poses with Dwight Yorke as the striker is presented to the media after signing for United. Getty Images

Beckham is jeered by West Ham fans in first away game of the season. Getty Images

Yorke celebrates with Ole Gunnar Solskjær after scoring on his debut vs Charlton. Getty Images

Keane in training at the Cliff after his return from injury. Getty Images

United fans gather outside Old Trafford to protest the BSkyB takeover, 9 September 1998. Getty Images

Yorke and Cole celebrate together during United’s 5–1 win over Wimbledon in October 1998. Getty Images

A frustrated Peter Schmeichel pictured during an eventual 3–2 Premier League victory over Blackburn at Old Trafford on 14 November 1998, two days after he’d announced his intention to leave the club at the end of the season. Getty Images

Cole celebrates scoring vs Barcelona in a 3–3 classic at the Camp Nou in November 1998. Alamy

Brian Kidd (with Jack Walker) presented to fans as new Blackburn manager in December 1998. Getty Images

Steve McClaren, Kidd’s replacement, oversees training at the Cliff. Getty Images

United lose to Middlesbrough at Old Trafford in December 1998. Ferguson missed the match to attend his sister-in-law’s funeral. United would not lose again all season. Alamy

United players celebrate Solskjaer’s last-gasp winner against Liverpool in the FA Cup fourth round at Old Trafford, 24 January 1999. Alamy

Solskjaer scores the second of his four goals in an 8–1 win over Nottingham Forest, 6 February 1999. Alamy

Beckham and Simeone shake hands after first leg of the Champions League quarter-final. Getty Images

Keane scores in talismanic performance vs Juventus in the Champions League semi-final. Getty Images

He then picks up yellow card that keeps him out of the Champions League final. Getty Images

Teddy Sheringham scores in the 1999 FA Cup final against Newcastle, part of a Man-of-the-Match performance after replacing an injured Keane. Alamy

Andy Cole scores minutes after coming off the bench to put United 2–1 up against Spurs and on course to win title. He remembered Ian Walker had a tendency to come off his line from their days together as teenagers at the FA National School and executed a perfect lob. Alamy

Beckham drops to his knees after the final whistle of United’s 2–1 win over Spurs at Old Trafford to clinch the Premier League title. Colorsport

United players celebrate their Premier Legue title. Getty Images

Ferguson wearing a 60s-style United shirt during training at the Camp Nou on the eve of the Champions League final. Getty Images

Sheringham celebrates his goal that brought United level with Bayern Munich late in the final. Alamy

Fresh from the bench, Solskjær stabs in United’s second. Alamy

The baby-faced assassin: Solskjær slides into history with his Treble-winner. Alamy

Ferguson and Bayern manager Ottmar Hitzfeld share a quiet word after the final whistle. Alamy

Suspended duo Keane and Scholes lift the Champions League trophy after being given a guard of honour by their teammates. Getty Images

The party continues in Manchester as the team parade their trophies through the city centre. Getty Images

For Sophie, Dylan and Finlay, my world

FOREWORD BY DWIGHT YORKE

THOSE ELEVEN DAYS

Those eleven days . . .

The only reason I left Aston Villa and signed for Manchester United was to win trophies. But even so, I didn’t think we could win all three trophies – the league, FA Cup and Champions League – in one season, my very first season with the club. It just didn’t register.

To do it in the fashion that we did, effectively playing three finals in the last eleven days of the season, it was backs-up-against-the-wall stuff. It tested you in every aspect of the game. We had such belief, even when we were on the brink of defeat. Those last eleven days were gruelling. But I loved every minute.

Those eleven days . . .

To have lived it in one go, in my first year, I don’t think words can describe what it meant. It was a game-changer. It changed my life, for sure. To be at the most historical club, where there’d been more famous moments before us – the Munich crash, the ’68 team – and to come and do what we did in my first year there, and then to top it off with me being voted the Premier League Player of the Year and being the top goal-scorer, that’s fantasy stuff. When it becomes a reality, it’s just incredible.

Those eleven days . . .

Being part of that unbelievable moment in Manchester United’s history, it’s just crazy. This little boy all the way from the Caribbean making that kind of impact was unthinkable.

What a year. What an ending. What a story.

PROLOGUE

Present Day – The Cliff, Salford

You walk out to the centre circle. You stop and then slowly turn, taking in the full panorama, and you wonder whether any patch of grass not belonging to one of the game’s great stadia has played as significant a role in shaping football’s history as the one on which you stand.

To the south, you see the indoor training centre. Built in 1966 and apparently subjected to few paint jobs since, it is a relic of a bygone era. Beneath its pointed roof, the grey façade carries bold scarlet lettering: ‘MANCHESTER UNITED FOOTBALL CLUB’; above the door reads ‘THE CLIFF TRAINING GROUND’. On the front wall, a mosaic depicts a smiling Duncan Edwards and the word ‘EDUCATION’.

‘This is history,’ Tony Whelan says. He should know. Your tour guide first travelled here as a fourteen-year-old in the mid-1960s. The great youth coach Jimmy Murphy imparted Whelan’s football education. Upon graduating from the club’s youth system, Whelan trained here as a first-team player, alongside George Best, Denis Law and Bobby Charlton, instructed by Matt Busby. Today, coaches from the club’s community outreach programme are guiding a class of local schoolchildren through basic drills on the indoor centre’s carpet of synthetic turf. Whelan recalls freezing winter training sessions in the same building, only the ground was a slippery, fine gravel in his day.

You picture the ghosts of United’s glorious past. You think of Edwards, the tragic prodigy. He once scored five times as United set an FA Youth Cup record on this very grass by thumping Nantwich Town 23–0. You imagine him, a young Bobby Charlton and the rest of the Busby Babes honing their craft. And you think of Busby’s toil and dedication as he rebuilt the club after the Munich Air Disaster claimed the lives of Edwards and seven teammates in February 1958, constructing a side that would become England’s first European champions a decade later.

To the west, three red steel columns bear the weight of a grey, corrugated roof – a rudimentary stand designed to provide shelter for spectators. A row of trees provides its backdrop and separates it from the River Irwell, snaking its way through Salford. Beneath this uninspiring structure, you’ve learned, Gary Neville, Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes used to strain to decipher the instructions of Archie Knox. Sir Alex Ferguson’s former right-hand man would regularly oversee youth sessions at the Cliff, but the kids struggled to understand his thick Scottish accent any time a typical Manchester downpour clattered against the iron roof overhead. They’d nudge each other to the front of the group, none wanting to be the first in line and thus at risk of being the one to mess up the drill and anger the coach.

You spin south, 180 degrees, and you picture those same boys, only older, almost men. They are joined now by David Beckham, and others – Ben Thornley, Robbie Savage, Keith Gillespie – whose talent might have matched or even exceeded their better-known peers but who, for reasons of injury, attitude or plain luck, never gleamed as brightly beneath the Old Trafford lights.

A battered brick dugout, half crumbled, houses twelve red fold-down seats. In front of this, you imagine the players zipping by. On this pitch they’d play in youth, ‘A’ team, ‘B’ team and reserve matches as they developed and drew ever closer to a senior debut. It would be on this pitch, too – or down the street at a public field on Littleton Road, where they’d dodge dog mess as well as tackles and touchline tirades – that they’d sharpen the skills that would lead them to the 1992 FA Youth Cup. That triumph etched them indelibly with their collective moniker: the Class of ’92. Ryan Giggs, already a first-team regular, was not only their captain on that cup run but a beacon of hope, illuminating a path to stardom that, retrospectively, it feels inevitable these now-household names would follow.

At the top of a small embankment, there stands the Cliff’s main building. With its slim, once-white window frames and rectangular, brown-brick sturdiness, it resembles a thousand 60s-built office blocks scattered around provincial town centres. The large, centre-right window, you are told, belongs to the coaches’ room. That’s where Eric Harrison would stand to observe the youngsters entrusted to his command as they trained. If he spotted anyone falling short of his high standards, that large glass pane would reverberate – a rapped reprimand understood and feared. To the right of that, the manager’s office. Ferguson would watch the youngsters, too, keeping a close tab on the next generation and plotting how to integrate the best into his team. He’d also watch the first team train from this vantage point, leaving the toes-on-the-turf coaching work to his assistants.

You wonder how often, in his tumultuous early United years, Ferguson gazed out that window as he masterminded the club’s resurgence, looking down on his charges; a bird’s-eye view for big-picture thinking. Old Trafford was where his plans came to life, but they were hatched in that room.

As the Millennium approached, United had outgrown the Cliff. They led English football at its vanguard and needed a day-today home that better reflected their status and modernity. A new facility was built in rural Carrington, less than eight miles away but a world apart. Still, there was time for one more magical campaign to be conjured at the Cliff. It would be Ferguson’s finest, United’s greatest and a feat unequalled at that time in England.

‘Let’s see if we can get inside,’ Whelan says, breaking your reverie like a finger snap in the face. He jogs past the decaying dugout and makes for a metal staircase that rises halfway up the main building. You follow behind, alongside Dave Bushell, United’s long-time academy player liaison officer and co-curator of your wander through the club’s storied past.

Although a septuagenarian, Whelan still has the fleet-footedness of the old-fashioned winger he was crafted into here as a young man. He dances up the steps, feet a flash in white trainers and arms pumping outside his club-branded gilet. You can see now how United’s academy programme advisor has kept pace with the youngsters under his guidance for more than thirty years.

He reaches a red door and tries the handle.

Locked.

Your dejection is brief. A member of staff appears in the window. ‘Come round the front,’ he indicates.

You hustle up the hill. Across the car park. Past the red-gated entrance. Fans used to gather there by the dozen for a glimpse of their heroes. Such easy proximity to the watching world fuelled Ferguson’s desire to move United out of the Cliff’s residential surrounds in favour of leafy seclusion.

Bushell points out a house down the road. Semi-detached, mock Tudor. Beckham’s old digs.

And there, Bushell nods, is the gaffer’s old parking space. Closest to the front door. His Mercedes would be there by 7am, without fail.

You push forward. You quicken your step out of a vague, irrational fear that your opportunity will pass if not met immediately.

The brown double doors of the reception entrance swing open.

‘This is history,’ Whelan repeats.

You’re inside.

CHAPTER ONE

LEVELLING UP

February 1998 – Amsterdam

Alex Ferguson walked into the room with the confident swagger of a man who didn’t care at all that he wasn’t allowed to be there.

He greeted Jaap Stam, the imposing Dutch centre-back, with a smile and a firm handshake. ‘I want you to play for Manchester United,’ he said.

Stam was the reigning Player of the Year in Holland. At twenty-five, he was beginning to enter his prime. He’d just helped PSV Eindhoven claim a league and cup Double. Chelsea, Liverpool and several Italian clubs wanted to sign him.

But, crucially, he was still a PSV player. Ferguson hadn’t sought the Dutch club’s permission to speak with the widely desired defender. Had it been discovered, the meeting could have landed Ferguson in hot water with the game’s authorities, levelled with charges of ‘tapping up’ – the commonly practised yet nonetheless illegal act of discussing transfer terms with another club’s player.

PSV were about to lose midfielder Phillip Cocu to Barcelona and full-back Arthur Numan to Rangers at the end of the season. Their manager, Dick Advocaat, would leave for Rangers, too. They did not want a mass exodus. Stam remained part of their future plans. Ferguson likely knew it. There was no point asking for an official audience with Stam when such a request would be unequivocally denied. Instead, Stam’s agent, Ton van Dalen, arranged a clandestine get-together with the United manager. Sometimes it’s easier to get what you want by retrospectively pleading for forgiveness than by asking for permission. Not that Ferguson often did either.

Ferguson’s illicit intentions would’ve been obvious were he to have been spotted in Eindhoven, so the meeting was set for Amsterdam. There might have been too many prying eyes at a hotel, too, so Van Dalen arranged for the use of a private apartment near the airport.

The plan was for Stam to train with PSV that morning, then drive to Amsterdam – about an hour and fifteen minutes if traffic is kind – to meet Ferguson. Just as Stam was leaving De Herdgang, PSV’s training ground, Numan asked him if he’d like to hang out. Stam lied, improvising a story about promising his wife they’d go shopping for garden furniture – plans so banal as to be unquestioningly believable.

Stam arrived at the Amsterdam apartment before Ferguson, but from the moment the United boss walked through the door, he was charm personified. Although Stam strained to decipher Ferguson’s Glaswegian accent, he understood the manager’s mission. They didn’t talk tactics or technique; they didn’t debate the finer points of defending nor the stylistic differences between football in Holland and England. No, the purpose of the face-to-face meeting was so that Ferguson could look Stam in the eye and gauge his strength of character, get a feel for his readiness to not only survive under the glare of the Old Trafford lights but to thrive in spite of that goldfish-bowl existence.

‘I felt I was pitching for the most important job in the world,’ Stam later reflected.

United’s domestic supremacy in February of 1998 was unimpeachable. They were top of the Premier League table yet again, their lead over second-placed Arsenal swelling to a peak of twelve points. With ten matches still to play, the bookmaker Fred Done, a United fan, paid out on bets that they’d secure a fifth league title in six years by season’s end.

Europe was a different story. Early forays into the Champions League had seen United humbled by Barcelona and Juventus, frustrated by the likes of Galatasaray and Gothenburg and, in the previous season’s semi-final, beaten by Borussia Dortmund, a side they’d expected to overcome. Translating success at home into becoming contenders on the Continent was proving a maddening struggle.

In their secret, thirty-minute rendezvous in a nondescript Amsterdam abode, Ferguson laid out his plan – his hope – for Stam.

‘I want you to command our backline,’ he said, ‘and help us take that extra step and win the European Cup.’

***

The confidence Ferguson and Fred Done shared in United’s security atop the Premier League as the 1997/98 season approached its crescendo proved misplaced. Arsenal strung together a run of ten successive victories – including a crucial 1–0 win at Old Trafford in March – to claim the title with two matches to spare.

The bookmaker estimated it cost his firm around £500,000 in erroneous early payouts. Ferguson almost paid with his job.

The United manager was enjoying a summer holiday on the French Riviera with his wife, Cathy, their children and grandchildren when the club’s chairman, Martin Edwards, called to summon him to a meeting in London.

Ferguson knew he risked the wrath of his better half by cutting short their idyllic break in France, yet he assumed Edwards wanted to discuss United’s progress towards securing their summer transfer targets, business he considered of great importance, especially given how the previous season had ended. But when he sat opposite Edwards and Sir Roland Smith, the chairman of the club’s plc board, in a meeting room at the HSBC bank’s headquarters in Canary Wharf on 24 June 1998, he quickly realised they were not there to talk transfers.

Edwards began with platitudes, which raised Ferguson’s suspicions. He praised the work the manager had done in revolutionising the club since his arrival from Aberdeen in November of 1986, how he’d wrestled United from the doldrums and overcome the pressure of his early barren years at the helm, before going on to end a twenty-six-year title drought and make the Red Devils English football’s dominant force.

Then Edwards segued into the disappointment of the most recent campaign. Not only had United lost the title to Arsenal, they’d also been eliminated from the FA Cup in humiliating fashion, beaten by Barnsley in a fifth-round replay, and dumped out of the Champions League by Monaco at the quarter-final stage. While United had finished trophyless for only the second time that decade, Arsenal had rubber-stamped their ascent to English football’s throne by adding the FA Cup to their haul, easily beating Newcastle 2–0 in the final at Wembley.

Edwards’s appraisal continued. He criticised some of Ferguson’s recent signings – such as the underwhelming additions of Karel Poborsky and Jordi Cruyff – before, most galling of all for the manager, questioning his focus. Edwards suggested that United’s on-field success had made Ferguson something of a celebrity, which, the chairman felt, had become a distraction, likewise Ferguson’s burgeoning interest in racehorse ownership.

Ferguson fumed, but he sat quietly and waited for Edwards to finish before offering a retort.

‘Do you want to call it a day?’ he asked.

‘He changed things around,’ Edwards reflects, reiterating his admiration for Ferguson’s work in his early Old Trafford years. ‘He’d revamped the scouting. He felt that, when he first arrived, City had stolen a march on us and were getting the best young players in the area. That was something he addressed. He was always at reserve games. He went to youth games. He was travelling midweek to watch other teams. It was just how hard he was working to improve things.

‘He arrived in ’86. He won the FA Cup in ’90. That’s four years later. Four years without a trophy. And it was seven years to win the league. That cup run in ’90 took all the pressure off. We’d won something. Then we go on to win the Cup Winners’ Cup, then the League Cup. And then we won the league in ’93, the Double in ’94 and the Double in ’96. It was bricks on bricks.

‘Suddenly Arsenal arrived and did the Double. It put us back in our place. We felt in some ways that we let it slip that year. We felt we lost a little bit of focus. We weren’t very happy with things. We had that meeting with Alex in the summer. He wasn’t happy with the board’s feelings towards him. But he knew that we were expecting more that season.’

Two weeks after their London showdown, Edwards sent a letter to Ferguson restating the points they’d discussed. It was delivered to the manager in his office at Old Trafford. According to Edwards, Ferguson walked into the chairman’s office that afternoon and offered to resign. Edwards reluctantly accepted only for, cooler heads prevailing, Ferguson to call him on the phone shortly after to withdraw his resignation.

After his threat to quit was quelled, Ferguson refocused on ensuring the unthinkable – successive seasons without a trophy – would not happen. But he felt hamstrung. Overhauling Arsenal would not be easy, nor would it be cheap. Yet he was told he had to work with a transfer budget of just £14 million, more than £10 million of which had already been apportioned to Stam’s signing.

The most United had ever spent on a single player was still the £7 million signing of Andy Cole from Newcastle eighteen months earlier. That amounted to less than a third of the fee Real Betis would pay that summer in a world-record move for the Brazilian winger Denilson, and it was a full £10 million shy of what Inter Milan had paid to sign Ronaldo the previous year. United’s self-imposed wage ceiling of £23,000 per week was prohibitive to signing the game’s top talent, too. They couldn’t – or, rather, chose not to – compete with the salaries on offer in Serie A and Spain’s La Liga. Even at home, Arsenal, Liverpool and Chelsea had higher earners than United.

‘I operated without borrowing,’ Edwards says. ‘I didn’t believe in borrowing money to fund transfers. I did it out of profit, by creating a successful merchandising arm, by redoing TV deals and things like that. I was one of the five founding members of the Premier League, which started in ’92. That got the Sky money in. That got the basis. My duty wasn’t tactics or teams or whatever. My duty was to make enough money so that the manager of the day – and I think we had the best – was able to use that money to get the best players to put us ahead of everybody else on the field. He had the benefit of that. So, as good as he was, he was also in the best position, because we were the wealthiest club. He could get the best. He could select. And he normally got what he wanted.’

When it came to revenue generation, Edwards is right to be defensive of his efforts. In a report into the revenue of football clubs for the 1997/98 season by accountancy firm Deloitte & Touche, United were top. Their £87.9 million turnover, from a season in which they were trophyless, put them clear of Champions League winners Real Madrid (£72.2 million) who ranked second. Newcastle were the next-highest Premier League club listed, coming in a comparatively distant fifth overall with their figure of £57.9 million. United had come a long way financially from their reported £210,000 annual profit for 1980, the year Edwards succeeded his late father, Louis, as the club’s chairman.

At this stage, though, Ferguson didn’t believe United were conducting themselves like the world’s wealthiest club in the transfer market.

‘We had to invest in the team,’ Edwards admits, ‘and that’s exactly what we did.’

***

The Stam deal was the first United secured in the summer of 1998, with the transfer fee and personal terms arranged before the previous season had finished. If Ferguson had gotten his way, Stam would’ve been a United player a year earlier.

‘When I was at PSV Eindhoven, after two years my agent phoned me and told me there was some interest from United,’ Stam says. ‘At that time, I said to him, “I’m not really ready yet.” I wanted to establish myself first in Holland and I wanted to establish myself in the Dutch national team.

‘Then, going into my third season with PSV, things developed very quickly. I became the best player in Holland. I got the Player of the Year trophy. I got a new contract as well.

‘Again, there was the interest from United. My agent spoke to me. I said, “Yeah, now I feel I’m ready. We need to go into talks with the club about me leaving.” They thought I was mad when I knocked on the door because I’d just renewed my contract over there, but that’s sometimes how it goes. Sometimes you have the feeling that you’re not ready for it, but after a couple of months you make certain steps and you develop yourself as a person and as a player and you feel ready for it. That’s how it went.

‘In that season at PSV, we’d played well and I’d played well as an individual. We also played Newcastle in the Champions League. It was a good test for me to see how I could do against English teams. That helped in making my decision.’

If there were any reservations about Stam’s commitment to becoming a United player after rejecting them just a year earlier, they could be dispelled for three reasons.

Firstly, United’s was not the only offer Stam received. Arguably, it was not even the best.

Inter Milan presented the opportunity to play in Serie A, the richest and most glamorous league in Europe, alongside Ronaldo, the world’s best player. Stam was unmoved.

Chelsea were a particularly luring option when they first made their interest known during the 1997/98 season. The Blues were quickly becoming the Premier League’s most cosmopolitan side1. They were paying big money to persuade some of Europe’s most revered talent – from Gianfranco Zola to Gianluca Vialli to the following summer’s marquee arrival, their ill-fated club-record signing Pierluigi Casiraghi2 – to swap the glitz of Serie A for the glamour of west London. The imperious French defender Marcel Desailly had even rejected United, with whom he’d initially agreed a contract, to join Chelsea from AC Milan in 1997. What’s more, Stam’s compatriot Ruud Gullit was their manager. The prospect of playing for an icon of Dutch football held a unique appeal. ‘I’m building a team here at Chelsea that I think can go on and win the biggest prizes in football,’ Gullit said when he placed a direct call to Stam. ‘I would love you to be part of that.’ Still, Stam was not swayed.

The biggest financial offer, both in terms of the fee PSV would receive and wages for Stam, came from Liverpool. But Stam was a boyhood United fan. He’d grown up watching the Red Devils on Match of the Day (he was able to pick up the BBC’s television signal where he grew up in Kampen, a small, provincial city in central Holland). After deciding the time was right to leave PSV, there was only one club he wanted to play for.

‘I said, “My decision is done. It’s been made,”’ he says. ‘“United, for me, is the club to go to.”’

The second reason why Stam’s dedication to joining United was unquestionable is that, after the deal was finalised, he and his then-pregnant wife, Elis, arranged for the birth of their first child to be brought forward so that he would not miss any of United’s pre-season tour of Scandinavia.

That bears repeating.

They brought forward the birth of their child.

Not for a cup final. Not for a league-deciding showdown with a title rival. No.

For pre-season.

‘We needed to, because we were going back to Holland after the World Cup and I only had ten days before I needed to report for United in Norway,’ Stam says. ‘My wife was pregnant with our oldest, Lisa. We needed to plan. When can we have the birth? Is it healthy to induce the pregnancy? We spoke to the doctors about it. They said, “No, it’s okay to do it.” I wanted to be there when our first child was born. We planned it in the agenda.

‘Normally you don’t do it like this. It’s not the most ideal way, but we needed to do it like that. Afterwards, when Lisa was born, I could go to Norway without the thoughts in my head of, “What’s going to happen at home?”’

And the third reason why Stam’s commitment to becoming a United player could be considered nothing short of absolute? He gave up over £1 million to make it happen.

Negotiations between United and PSV hadn’t been smooth. The player was desperate to leave, but the Dutch club were obstinate. ‘We’re not going to let you go and that’s the end of it,’ the chairman Harry van Raaij had told Stam.

That stance softened as the weeks passed and as United’s determination to secure the man they considered the world’s best defender only hardened. Van Raaij gave a television interview in which he reiterated PSV’s desire to keep hold of Stam, but he admitted the club would have to listen if an offer of 50 million guilders – around £15 million – were to be tabled. A benchmark was set.

Ferguson was never shy to splash a significant portion of his transfer budget on the non-glamour positions if he saw value. The previous year, he’d spent £5 million to sign Norwegian centre-back Henning Berg from Blackburn, a British-record fee for a defender at the time. The same was true in 1989, when he bought Gary Pallister from Middlesbrough for £2.3 million. Pallister went on to provide almost a decade of excellent service, helping United end their title drought in 1993 and becoming a bedrock of the Old Trafford club’s subsequent dominance. Ferguson wanted Stam to replace Pallister, who, aged thirty-three and plagued by back problems, would soon be allowed to return to Middlesbrough to see out the final years of his career.

Still, not only would a £15 million outlay double United’s largest single transfer spend at that point: it would equal the world-record fee Newcastle paid to sign Alan Shearer in 1996, which still stood as British football’s biggest-ever deal.

United and PSV eventually came to an agreement at £10.75 million. But there remained one potentially deal-killing snag. The contract Stam had signed with PSV after snubbing United’s first approach the previous year included a clause that entitled him to a fifteen per cent cut of any future transfer fee. PSV wanted Stam to waive his right to a slice of the deal in order to maximise their profit. United were not willing to raise their bid to cover the clause. The deal was dead unless Stam personally sacrificed the £1.65 million due to him.

Stam travelled to Old Trafford to watch United in their final league match of the 1997/98 season, against Leeds. He was intoxicated by the atmosphere inside the stadium, the relentless, roaring passion that gushed like a waterfall from the stands. He felt it stood in stark contrast to the average Eredivisie matchday experience. The next day he completed a medical and made the necessary arrangements to conclude the transfer. ‘Money wasn’t the key to the move,’ he later reflected. ‘Success was.’

***

Jesper Blomqvist, it’s fair to say, was less enthused to be joining United. As with Stam, Ferguson’s interest in Blomqvist pre-dated the player’s move to Old Trafford in the summer of 1998. And like Stam, he initially rejected the Premier League side’s overtures. As a young player with IFK Gothenburg, he’d shredded United in the 1993/94 Champions League group stage meetings between the two clubs. Ferguson had tracked him ever since. When the winger was preparing to depart Swedish football for a new challenge in 1996, United were at the front of the queue of suitors. But Blomqvist wasn’t interested.

‘I only had one club in my mind and that was AC Milan,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have an agent at the time. I told all the agents that came to me that if they got me a contract for AC Milan, I would sign for them and I would sign for you. They were the biggest team in Europe at the time. The club also spoke to Ferguson. Kevin Keegan phoned from Newcastle and Sven-Göran Eriksson from Sampdoria. Barcelona even came to Gothenburg with a contract in their hand to tell me to sign for them. They more or less gave me the pen to sign the amount that I wanted on the contract.

‘I’d set my sights on Milan a couple of years before. That’s where I wanted to go. I wrote an essay in school talking about becoming a professional football player at AC Milan. It’s quite amazing to read.’

Milan were the reigning Serie A champions and had won the Champions League just two years earlier. But they finished a lowly eleventh in what would be Blomqvist’s only season at the San Siro. He was sold to Parma the following summer. He settled there quickly, thriving on the left side of manager Carlo Ancelotti’s 4–4–2 system, but he would soon reluctantly be on the move again.

‘I was starting to speak the language, starting to get some friends and really enjoying Parma,’ Blomqvist says. ‘But Ancelotti got fired. They hired a new coach, Alberto Malesani. He wanted to bring in his players. I got a call from my agent, telling me, “The bad news is they don’t want to keep you. The positive thing is we have Manchester United and Alex Ferguson still interested in you.” But it was a difficult and sad moment. Italy had started to feel like home.’

Blomqvist took comfort from the fact that Ferguson was such a long-time admirer, he hadn’t hesitated in meeting Parma’s £4.4 million asking price. But he had one key reservation: Ryan Giggs.

Giggs was also a left winger. Indeed, the Welshman was one of the best in the world in the position. And, at twenty-four, he was the same age as Blomqvist. The Swede wondered where he’d fit in. He’d been a bit-part player in a star-studded squad with Milan. At Parma, he was much more involved. He knew which kind of footballing existence he preferred.

‘We flew up to meet Ferguson,’ Blomqvist says. ‘I wanted to ask him some questions about Giggs, how he saw my role. He had really good answers. I was left-footed and I hadn’t played much in other positions. I was quite limited in that sense. But I asked him about that. He said it was going to be a long season and they needed to strengthen the squad because there was going to be a lot of games. I think that he felt the last year, they were struggling with the depth of the squad. He definitely saw me and Giggs playing together. He could see him playing on the right or up front as well.

‘A couple of days later, I was sitting at Mottram Hall in Wilmslow. I’d just signed for United and didn’t really know what had happened.’

***

One morning late in August of 1998, Dwight Yorke decided to do two things he wouldn’t usually do.

First, he woke early. Famously laid-back and with a penchant for a late-night party, Yorke was not typically singing with the sparrows at sunrise. But on this day, he rose at 7am and set about his mission.

The second thing he decided to break habit to do: he would beg. Plead. Tug on some heartstrings in order to get what he desperately wanted.

He got into his car and made the five-minute drive from his house in a leafy Birmingham suburb to where Doug Ellis, Aston Villa’s chairman, lived nearby. Yorke had been with the club since he was seventeen, when he took a leap of faith to leave his homeland, the Caribbean island of Tobago, to embark on a trial period with Villa. He impressed sufficiently to earn a contract with the Midlands club and, over the course of the next nine years, he established himself as a vital player at Villa Park and one of the Premier League’s most gifted and consistent forwards. But he felt nine years was enough. He believed he’d earned the opportunity to pursue greater heights, to test himself at a level of the game Villa were unable to attain. He’d received an offer from Atlético Madrid that summer, but it was the interest of Manchester United that calcified within him this immediate, aching desire for more than Villa could provide.

Ellis had been playing hardball all summer, batting away United’s initial approach. United tabled an offer of £10 million, but Villa, using Shearer’s record 1996 switch from Blackburn to Newcastle as a benchmark, demanded £15 million. The clubs were at an impasse. The 1998/99 season had already begun and time was running out. If a deal could not be completed before the deadline to register players for that year’s Champions League group stage, United would surely walk away.

So Yorke set his alarm clock.

‘When I found out that it had come to a stalemate and Villa were adamant about not letting me go, I was advised through my agent that it might be a good thing to go and see Doug Ellis,’ Yorke says. ‘I knew the chairman really well. We had a good relationship. With all the rumours that were happening, the only way I felt that I could get it over the line was if I went to see the chairman. So I got up one morning at seven o’clock and went to his house.

‘It had come at the end of the 1997/98 season, that’s when the story broke in the newspapers. I’d had a really good season. I knew United had been interested way before that, but I’d never thought anything of it until the story broke in the newspapers at the end of that season.

‘I just felt that, having done nine years at Villa and having turned twenty-six, I’d got to a level where I needed to test myself a little bit more. Not that Villa didn’t give me that; European football was pretty much guaranteed at Villa in those days. But I wanted to play on the world stage. I didn’t see myself getting the opportunity to play in the World Cup, because of coming from Trinidad and Tobago and the chances of us getting to the World Cup being very slim. I felt that I wanted to test myself in the very top competition in Europe, which is the Champions League, of course. I wanted to play at Manchester United with the best players to see where my game was. I felt like this was an important chance at that stage of my career. I found out about United’s offer through my agent. He was filling me in a little bit. But Villa weren’t keen for it to happen. I understood the reasons behind it. I was their best player. I was a product that they’d taken in from a very young age. But I felt I needed a change and I needed a challenge, most of all. I needed something big to happen.’

Support within the club for a move for Yorke, particularly one shaping up to be so expensive, was not unanimous. Brian Kidd, Ferguson’s second in command, was unsure. He didn’t think Yorke was as good a dribbler as Ferguson believed him to be. He felt a more classic-style number nine was needed and suggested West Ham’s burly Welsh striker John Hartson would be a more suitable target, a notion Ferguson found risible: ‘Are you serious?’ he retorted. ‘Do you think of John Hartson as a Manchester United player?’

United weren’t short of attacking options, but they lacked the kind of electrifying dynamism with which a teenage Nicolas Anelka had emerged to help fire Arsenal to the title the previous season. The dynamic disparity between his own forwards and Arsenal’s was only further emphasised on 9 August, when Arsenal thumped United 3–0 in the Charity Shied at Wembley, with Anelka a scorer.

Cole had enjoyed his most prolific season as a United player, but his return of fifteen league goals didn’t satisfy a growing number of critics. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer had been a gem of a signing when he was plucked from relative obscurity with Molde in Norway two years earlier and he was as reliable a finisher as could be found anywhere in Europe, but he was not viewed as a top, starter-level option. And Teddy Sheringham had experienced a campaign of ups, downs and, ultimately, underachievement after being signed to replace the guile and creativity of Eric Cantona after the talismanic Frenchman unexpectedly retired the previous summer.

Yorke, Ferguson felt, had the pace, creativity and unpredictability to elevate United’s attack while thriving alongside any of their other forwards. But that’s not to say that Yorke was his only – or even his primary – target for a new striker.

The United manager had, according to the Daily Telegraph, ‘made several trips to South America’ over the previous year to track River Plate’s Marcelo Salas, only for the Chilean international to elect to join Lazio in a £12 million deal instead. One player United did strike a deal for was Patrick Kluivert. The twenty-two-year-old Dutch striker had endured a difficult first season in Italy after a 1997 move from Ajax, scoring just six goals in twenty-seven appearances, and AC Milan were ready to cash in. United’s £9 million bid was accepted in August, but Kluivert had no interest in moving to Old Trafford. He refused even to negotiate with United and, after instead signing for Barcelona, quipped that Arsenal were the only team in England he’d consider playing for. ‘Maybe he doesn’t know how big a club Manchester United is,’ Ferguson said.

The failure to land Kluivert hardened Ferguson’s determination to sign Yorke. Although some eyebrows were raised at the prospect of dropping a potential club-record fee on a player with no Champions League experience and who lacked the international pedigree of past targets, it was the level of Yorke’s past performances against United that assured Ferguson of the striker’s ability.

‘Every time we played him, Alec just liked the look of him and thought you can’t have too many strikers of that quality,’ Edwards says.

‘He said he saw me as a number nine,’ Yorke remembers of Ferguson’s plan for him. ‘I’m not a number nine. I should never have been a number nine. Even at Villa, I played centre-forward but I was never an Andy Cole or an Ian Wright or Robbie Fowler. I was always dropping into pockets, but I still used to get up and score goals and dribble past people. I was never in a million years a number nine – but that’s how he saw me.’

Had United been successful in their pursuit of Kluivert, that would not necessarily have scuppered Yorke’s hopes of joining. Ferguson wanted to pair them. This is perhaps why, according to multiple reports at the time, Cole was initially offered to Villa as a makeweight in negotiations for Yorke. At first, Villa manager John Gregory bristled at the notion of accepting a player United were happy to discard – ‘I’m not interested in any Manchester United cast-offs,’ he said. ‘If they’re not good enough to play for United then they’re not good enough for Villa.’

But Gregory soon reassessed. He became insistent that any Yorke deal was contingent on Cole’s part-exchange inclusion. Once United had missed out on Kluivert, however, it seems Cole was taken off the table. ‘With Kluivert not going to United I would have thought Alex Ferguson would have been more concerned than ever about keeping Andy Cole,’ Gregory said, ‘and that makes any deal for Dwight Yorke dead in the water.’

That comment from Gregory was made on 4 August. There was a little over two weeks until the crucial Champions League deadline, but neither side was budging. Yorke went public with his desire to leave Villa. ‘I want to go to United,’ he said on Monday 17 August. ‘The Champions League deadline is on Thursday and I want to be there by then.’ He told the club that, if they didn’t sell him to United, he was prepared to wait out the final two years of his contract and leave on a Bosman free transfer.

Then Yorke paid an early morning visit to his chairman.

‘I upped the offer to £12 million,’ Edwards says, ‘and said to Doug, “You can either take it or leave it.” Doug was reluctant to take it, but Dwight Yorke went round to his house. I think he felt so frustrated. He said to Doug, “Look, I’ve given you so many years. You got me for nothing. You’re denying me the opportunity to go and play for the biggest club in Europe.” He played on Doug’s heartstrings a little bit. In the end, Doug gave way. We got him at £12.6 million.’

On the morning of Thursday 20 August, Yorke received a call on the communal phone at Bodymoor Heath, Aston Villa’s training ground. It was Tony Stephens, the agent he shared with David Beckham. Yorke’s plea to Ellis had worked, he was told – an agreement had finally been struck.

Still, Ellis was far from happy. He railed against his United counterpart after the deal had been announced. ‘Dwight was being tapped up,’ the Villa chairman said. ‘I’ve made my feelings known to Martin Edwards on how United were operating. United were the last club I wanted any of my players to go to.’

Gregory, meanwhile, focused his anguish on Yorke.

‘A couple of weeks ago Dwight openly stated to me that he wanted to play for Manchester United and not Aston Villa,’ he said. ‘That really hurt me and if I had had a gun I would have shot him.’

‘It’s understandable because I was the best player at Villa,’ Yorke says. ‘If you’re a manager you don’t want to lose your best player. I had a good rapport with John. In the heat of the moment, people say things. If he’d have said it today, he’d have had to apologise for his remarks. In the media today, you don’t get away with those kind of statements. I’m sure he would have come out and said it wasn’t meant in that fashion.’

It wasn’t just his former paymasters who were irate. After going public with his intention to leave Villa in the weeks before the transfer was sealed, Yorke had provoked the ire of the club’s fans – some of whom vented their frustrations on his £90,000 Aston Martin, slashing the tyres. But at the press conference to announce his signing as a Manchester United player, which brought to an end months of uncertainty and anguish for the ordinarily jovial Tobagonian, his trademark smile was restored. He beamed as he entered the Old Trafford press room.

‘I’ve got a new life now, being with Manchester United,’ he said. ‘Hopefully I can win some silverware here as well.’

1 On Boxing Day 1999, Chelsea would become the first Premier League club to field an all-foreign starting XI in a 2–1 victory over Southampton. Chelsea’s managing director at the time, Colin Hutchinson, described the Blues as ‘a Continental club playing football in England’.

2 Casiraghi, a £5.4 million buy from Lazio, managed just ten Premier League appearances and one goal for Chelsea before sustaining a cruciate knee ligament injury in a clash with West Ham goal-keeper Shaka Hislop in November 1998. He never played again. After ten surgeries failed to restore him to the pitch, Chelsea released Casiraghi in July 2000 in order to claim an insurance payout of more than £4 million.

CHAPTER TWO

PRIMITIVE BASE

1996 – Carnago, Lombardy, Italy

Jesper Blomqvist recalls the scene with wonder in his voice. He was part of a unit of attacking players tasked with scoring against one of the greatest defences ever constructed.

It was early in what would be his sole season with AC Milan. The club’s training base, Milanello, provided a picturesque setting. Situated in the small, rural comune of Carnago, around twenty-five miles north-west of Milan, Milanello is surrounded by a pine-tree forest, boasts a lake within its 1.7 million-square-foot grounds and, by the mid-1990s, housed all the mod cons desired of an elite sports-training environment – two gymnasiums, a pool, a press room, a medical centre, offices, two dining halls and six full-size pitches.

On one of those pitches, Blomqvist and his cohort of forwards were being thoroughly frustrated.

‘Paolo Maldini, Mauro Tassotti, Alessandro Costacurta and Franco Baresi – the famous back four – were defending, just the four of them,’ he says. ‘There were seven or eight attacking players. We did the exercise for twenty to twenty-five minutes and we didn’t score a goal.’

When Blomqvist first arrived at United’s training ground two years later, he found a similar level of technical quality among his new teammates to what he’d experienced in Milan but an altogether shabbier environment.

Milanello, thanks to its setting in an outpost municipality with a population of under 6,000, kept the watching world at arm’s length. The Cliff did not. United’s training centre – and that is definitely too grandiose a term with which to describe the Cliff – was crammed into a dense residential area in Salford, four miles north of Old Trafford, tucked claustrophobically beneath a bend in the River Irwell.

It had just one outdoor pitch and one synthetic indoor surface. There was no pool. No bar. Its car park was cramped, its gymnasium rudimentary. It wasn’t just the luxury of Milanello that stood in stark contrast to the Cliff for Blomqvist. Even Parma’s Centro Sportivo di Collecchio – with its six pitches, 1,200-seat grandstand and plush pool area – put it in the shade. Stam was equally perplexed by his new workplace.

‘The one thing about Manchester that did surprise me was the condition of United’s ageing training ground,’ he wrote in his 2001 autobiography. ‘When I first arrived and slipped my car between the red-brick walls in Salford, it was a massive shock.

‘For a club of United’s finances and stature to train at a facility with one grass pitch and use weathered buildings which suggested the architecturally arid 1960s came as a real surprise. Certainly, the feel of the place was touching on the archaic. What I had left behind at PSV was space-age in comparison, and I could not quite believe United had turned out so many fantastic teams from this primitive base.’

The Cliff had been United’s base camp since the 1930s and was the scene of the Busby Babes’ development in the 1950s. It then played home to manager Matt Busby’s miraculous regeneration of the club after eight of his eponymous Babes were killed in 1958’s Munich Air Disaster. Down the years, its turf had been kissed by the gilded toes of Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and George Best, Duncan Edwards, Bryan Robson and Eric Cantona.

It had prestige, even a certain mystique. But it was not glamorous. It was not comfortable. It was barely fit for purpose. And Ferguson knew it. Construction was about to begin on a £22 million training centre in secluded Carrington. It would be more befitting of the world’s richest club, but it would not open until 2000. For the 1998/99 campaign, the Cliff would have to do.

Still, while it was generous to describe the facilities on offer at the Cliff as rudimentary, there was nothing sub-standard about the work overseen by Ferguson and his coaching staff. The daily atmosphere, quality of play and sheer intensity out on the grass at the Cliff was the equal of any club in the world. This is best explained by the players themselves.

Jesper Blomqvist: In Sweden, we are very focused on training. I was used to that kind of focus. When I came to Italy and I spent two years there, I felt they were really, not lazy, but they had a different approach. I was putting on my shinpads and putting in tackles even the day before a game. I wanted to train as I played every day. But in Italy, the day before a game, they were just jogging around, playing easy passes, never really putting in a tackle. That was frustrating for me. When I came to Manchester, it was much tougher, more intense. It was more similar to Sweden. But the players were much stronger, much better. So the overall intensity in training was much better. For me, I’ve always loved that and looked up to the players who play like that. That is one of the most important things, to train and focus as hard as you play. The players who can do that and keep that standard, they push the other players, they get a little bit angry and others have to raise their standards in training.

Jaap Stam: It was intense in terms of what players are bringing on to the pitch, their quality. We played a lot of games and when we trained, we trained for an hour – sometimes a little bit longer, sometimes a little bit less. So it was not like the amount of drills was intense. The intensity of the sessions and the drills that we did was through the quality the players showed. That was very intense. Every time we did a possession game or a passing drill or a small-sided game, the intensity was good. It gives you the opportunity to become a better player. You’re training against very good players, so you need to show yourself if you want to win these small games. The players we had in that squad, they were testing each other by pinging balls very hard from a short distance, forcing mistakes by others. Everybody was on their toes. Nobody wanted to fuck up, basically.

Henning Berg: It was intense because the competition for places was so great. We had local Manchester players, like Scholes, the Nevilles, Nicky Butt and Ryan Giggs. They were still young and hungry and had a good mentality from the academy. They’re competing every day. Then you bring players with quality from outside into that group, plus with leaders like Roy Keane, who in training wouldn’t accept anybody having an easy day, and Schmeichel was the same, that always made sure that the focus on the right mentality was there in every training session. To be honest, training was at a higher level than the games we played in the Premier League. The quality, the intensity, the tempo was so good that when you came into a game, it was lower a lot of the time. Normally it’s the opposite.

Wes Brown: It was crazy. You couldn’t slack in training. If you give the ball away, Keaney will be at you. It was high intensity, but it was for the right reasons. Everyone wanted to win. We knew we had a good team. We knew we had a good squad.

Nicky Butt: Straight away you knew that every day you were playing against players who were better than ninety-five per cent of the players you’d play on a Saturday. We were very lucky in that sense. Apart from maybe the top three teams, it was an easier day on a Saturday than it was on a Friday.

And no aspect of United’s quotidian practice sessions was more intense, more heated and more demanding than the boxes.

The boxes were essentially a glorified, testosterone-filled interpretation of a schoolyard game of piggy in the middle (the Spanish term rondo has been more commonly adopted for this exercise in recent years). A group of players form a circle, and one or two unlucky souls start in the middle. Those on the outside, usually limited to one or two touches, have to pass the ball to one another while the inside man – or men – hunt them down. If a player in the middle gains possession or tackles an opponent from the outer circle, those players switch roles – into the middle goes the man with the errant touch, often having to accept a fluorescent bib to not only distinguish him as a tackle-chasing insider but also to denote his sloppiness and exacerbate his humiliation.

It all sounds harmless enough. A fun exercise to kick off a hard day’s work. But the complexion of this game changes when it’s being contested by twenty or so of the world’s most skilled footballers who are also famously, fiercely competitive. The percussive pap-pap-pap of the ball echoed around the surrounding streets in northern Salford.

The boxes were hierarchical, too. Divided by seniority and star power, it could be a nerve-wracking prospect for a new signing or a graduating young player taking part in the top-ruling rondo for the first time. The grizzled gatekeepers – Roy Keane, Peter Schmeichel – would deliberately fizz the ball your way with extra oomph. Fail to trap it and you were ripe for rebuke.

‘Cantona used to kill those,’ Keane quipped after firing a pass at Dwight Yorke that the striker, who’d signed for United the day before, couldn’t control.