I was absolutely knackered. We’d all been tested, physically and emotionally, to the limit. But from somewhere I found the energy to sprint from right-back to the left-wing position to take the throwin.
I’ve wondered a few times since, ‘Why did I do that? What was I doing running all that way?’ And it’s simple, really: it’s what I’d been taught to do since I was a kid at United. You keep playing, you keep trying, you keep sprinting until the death.
Out on the left flank I took the throw, and I was still stuck out there when the ball came back out of the box. In my one and only cameo as a left-winger, I went down the line and crossed, hitting a defender and forcing a corner. And that was my contribution to football’s most famous comeback. From that corner, with big Peter using his size to cause mayhem in the box, the ball was half-cleared to Giggsy. He miscued his shot and Teddy was there to sweep it in.
Pandemonium for a few seconds. We’re back in the game. Now we have to win it.
Forward we go again, and Ole wins another corner. By now we’re fresher than the first day of the season and Becks runs over to whip it in. Teddy flicks and Ole stretches out a boot. I collapse to the floor.
The rest of the players rushed over to smother Ole, who was sliding on his knees towards the fans, but I didn’t go. I literally couldn’t run that far. I was back on the halfway line, lying there on the ground thinking, ‘Oh my God, we’ve done it!’ There was just complete and utter disbelief that we’d won the game – and the way we’d pulled it off.
I was thrilled for myself, thrilled for my club, and thrilled for everyone associated with United. And I was really thrilled for Ole. You couldn’t have picked a nicer bloke to score the winning goal in the European Cup final than him. I sat next to him for eleven years in the dressing room, him on one side, Scholesy on the other, and he’s one of the most genuine guys you could ever meet. Everything he did was for the team, which isn’t true of all goalscorers – and Ole Gunnar was one of the very best. He was so unselfish and he deserved his moment of glory.
I’m honestly not sure how much of the celebrations I actually remember or whether they’re in my mind as a result of watching the highlights again and again. I can see Samuel Kuffour, the Bayern defender, running around like he’d just got home and found his house ransacked. I can see David May clambering above the rest of the players on the podium. I can see the whole squad lining up on the pitch singing ‘Sit Down’ by James. We made a tunnel for Roy and Scholesy to come running down with the trophy, eager for every single member of the team and the staff to feel part of this unbelievable victory.
I definitely remember not sleeping, walking round Barcelona as the sun lit up the city. Who would want a night like that to end? I was still ambling along the streets at six in the morning with some mates, not wanting to go to bed, never wanting the day to finish or the high to fade away. No English team (or Spanish or Italian up to that point) had ever pulled off the Treble, and it had been such an incredible journey, full of narrow escapes and epic victories, that I couldn’t see how any team could repeat it. This was surely a unique feat, not just in terms of trophies but in the twists and turns, the sporting drama that created almost unbearable tension right up to the very last few kicks.
That season was all about never giving in, about coming back from the dead. People talk about the quality of our attacking play, and I think we scored a hundred-odd goals, but it was the fighting spirit that won us that Treble. It wouldn’t have been half the story if we’d thrashed Bayern 3–0.
There are so many memories to cherish: Giggsy scoring his wonder goal against Arsenal; Keano’s heroics in Turin, hauling us back from defeat; the European Cup final itself, which is enshrined as one of the game’s greatest ever comebacks. Were we deserving champions? We weren’t at our best in Barcelona, but I’ve never wasted a second worrying about our performance in the first eighty-nine minutes.
We didn’t win the Treble because it was a substandard season – quite the opposite: the opposition was so tough we knew we had to raise our game. In the FA Cup we’d had to beat Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Newcastle, not Coventry City or Plymouth. In the Champions League we’d had to face down Barcelona and Bayern Munich, and that was just in the group phase; then along came Inter Milan with Ronaldo and Juventus with Zidane. In the league we’d been chased right to the last day of the season by the Arsenal side of Adams, Keown, Petit, Vieira and Bergkamp, as good a domestic rival as I’d meet in my career.
As for the way we won in Barcelona, I’m not sure I would have it any other way. It was perfect. It captured the very best of Manchester United. We never knew when we were beaten.
The Hangover
THERE’S NO DENYING that United failed to build on the Treble, at least where the Champions League was concerned. What a mistake that was – one of the biggest in my time at the club. I can see why it didn’t feel essential to go out and buy more players. We were champions of England and Europe. But we had the chance to build a dynasty, and we squandered it.
We were linked with a few big names, like Gabriel Batistuta and Ronaldinho, but none came, not for a couple of seasons. It’s a great strength of the club that it has rarely bought players at the top of the market where there’s little value for money. But any squad needs competition to keep the players fresh. Roy went public and said some slacked after the Treble. He was probably right. There would have been less chance of it happening if we’d had an injection of fresh blood, a couple of big names to keep us ahead of the competition. It would be another nine years before we were back in the final of the Champions League.
The record books show how hard it is to juggle the twin demands of chasing domestic titles and European success. Not a single team has successfully defended the European Cup in my time. Clubs weren’t winning two or three in a row like they’d done in the past. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t have done more to defend the European title we’d worked so hard to win.
Our goalkeeping fumbles were the most obvious sign of slipping standards. We had an inconsistent few years after Peter Schmeichel departed, who timed it perfectly by bowing out at the Nou Camp. The problems between the posts lasted fully six years, until Edwin van der Sar signed in 2005.
Mark Bosnich was the first to try to fill Peter’s boots, and although I got on fine with Bozzy, he rubbed others up the wrong way. He was just a bit too laid back for the United regime. On the first morning it was obvious he was carrying a few pounds. The manager was straight on to him.
‘Bozzy, what are we going to do about your weight?’
‘Boss, I’m just the weight that I like to be.’
‘Well you’re not the weight I’d like you to be. Lose some.’
I’m not saying Bozzy didn’t work hard, but he trained in his own way, doing his own exercises rather than running and stretching with the rest of us. He was his own man, and you have to be one heck of a player at United to get away with being so individual.
We were flying high in the table but we really missed Peter – any team would, because he was an automatic selection for a World XI at the time. There was no one comparable, and we didn’t just miss his technical ability but the confidence he spread through the rest of the team.
At a top club like United you need a goalkeeper who doesn’t have insecurities. By that I mean a keeper who can stand around for half an hour and not feel like he has to prove himself. There is nothing more dangerous than a goalkeeper anxious to get involved. It makes him rash, reckless. Edwin was happy if he never touched the ball for ninety minutes. That’s a rare quality.
Bozzy had his problems with distribution and concentration. Then came Fabien Barthez, who definitely had that desire to get noticed. Massimo Taibi, Ricardo – they all wanted to do something, to show they were good enough to be number one at United. Any team wanting to win the big prize needs a top-class goalkeeper.
In the outfield positions, Mikael Silvestre and Quinton Fortune were the only arrivals in 1999. In the short-term this wasn’t a problem because domestically we were winning easily. Too easily. Opponents were rolling over. They didn’t know how to mentally cope with the fact that we were on the attack all the time. We stuck five past Newcastle United, five past Everton, seven against West Ham United. Which was all great fun, especially for the forwards, but we weren’t being challenged.
Edge is a massive thing in top-level sport, something you can’t just turn on and off. It comes from having to stretch yourself. In the Treble season we’d had something to prove every game. We were on a lung-bursting run to the finish line. Every match was the biggest test of our lives. Then the next one felt bigger still. But we won the league so easily in 1999/2000, and again in 2000/01, and when you are that far ahead it’s hard not to become a little complacent.
If it is possible to be bored as you win the league, then we were bored in those two seasons after the Treble. In 1999/2000 we finished eighteen points ahead of Arsenal – a ridiculous gap that said more about how far they’d fallen than our excellence. It was the poorest league I ever played in, and my own form suffered. I was still first choice for club and country but I was having my own personal nightmares.
Bizarrely, that season after the Treble was the most unsettling of my whole career. It was the first time I lost my form for a sustained period. And it culminated in Euro 2000, which was the most miserable of tournament experiences for me, my brother and the whole family.
I missed the first few months of the season with a groin problem. All those matches in the Treble season had taken their toll. I’d had an injection soon after the European Cup final and I’d tried to let it settle down, but my groin was still not right when I came back. I was late getting into the season, and though I was initially glad to be back and seemed in good form, it all changed with a trip to Brazil.
It was the season of the World Club Championship, and it was an ill-fated trip from the start. The tournament clashed with the FA Cup third round in January, and it still annoys me that United get accused of undermining the old trophy by flying off to South America. The truth is that the manager sat the whole squad down and asked us if we wanted to put a team in the Cup, even if it was the reserves. We all said, ‘Yes, let’s give it a go.’ The decision was taken out of the club’s hands by the FA because they were bidding for the 2006 World Cup and didn’t want to upset Fifa. They said concentrate on the tournament in Brazil. It came down to politics, so don’t blame United.
Off we went to the sunshine of Rio. It was the first World Club Championship and we didn’t really know what to expect, although that’s no excuse for how poor we were. We drew the first game against the Mexican side Necaxa, when Becks was sent off. Then things got really bad. In the second game we lost 3–1 to Vasco da Gama in what was probably my worst performance of my whole United career.
I made a terrible backpass for the first goal, a real horror, laying it straight to Edmundo who squared to Romario to score. Great Brazilian strikers weren’t going to pass up that sort of gift. Not long after that I gave them another one, chesting the ball straight into the path of Romario, one of the game’s greatest finishers, arguably the best I played against. Two goals, both defensive horrors, and both down to me.
I was all over the place, and just to improve my mood I came off the pitch to find a text message from Scholesy who was back in England recovering from injury. He’d been watching on the telly. His message: ‘Fiasco da Gama’.
The rest of the lads managed to shrug off our early exit and enjoy the sunshine in Rio. We had a few days of hanging around, literally in the case of Butty and Keano, who decided to go for a hang-glider ride off Sugarloaf Mountain. We couldn’t believe it when we heard these shouts from up in the sky and saw two maniacs floating past. The manager was sitting by the pool, half asleep in the hot sun.
‘That had better not be any of my players,’ he muttered.
I managed to raise a laugh, but that was about all I had to smile about. I’d never been the greatest player in the world but I’d always taken the ball knowing I could pass it simple, move and keep the game flowing. But now, for the first time in my life, I was thinking, ‘What do I do with it?’ In some games I just wanted the whistle to blow, for it to be all over. In the past there’d been the odd match like that, but never for weeks and months on end.
I was very conscious of my own anxiety. I would be stood on the pitch thinking, ‘This is what it’s like to be nervous, this is what it’s like to be affected by a mistake.’ And I didn’t have a strategy to cope with that. I’d never experienced a period when I couldn’t trust myself to pass the ball even over short distances.
Steve McClaren knew Bill Beswick, a sports psychologist who’d been invited to speak to the United players as a group and as individuals. I decided to go and see Bill on my own – the only occasion when I turned to a psychologist for help.
Bill was a good man, and if there was one piece of advice I took to heart, and have repeated since to other players, it’s that if you have a long career in sport, you have to accept there will be a downturn like this. You have to try to be ready for it, not shocked by it. But while I knew Bill was talking sense, it was going to take time for me to get out of the rut. I’d feel better walking out of his room, but then I’d go on to the pitch and still feel like I was low on confidence and under-performing.
I really wasn’t enjoying my football but I was getting away with it because, as a team, we were dominating the English game to such a ridiculous extent. We’d gone to Brazil a few points off the top of the table and it was pretty much the same when we came back.
We were the best team in England by a mile, with a psychological grip on every opponent, but that meant European defeats came as a nasty shock. We were in the middle of a free-scoring run of eleven consecutive league wins, clocking up thirty-seven goals, when we had to face Real Madrid in the Champions League quarterfinals.
Somehow I managed to produce a half-decent game in a goalless first leg in the Bernabéu. In fact the manager went out of his way to say I was the one player who had performed. Was I coming out of my slump? If only.
In the return at Old Trafford the nightmares returned. A long ball was played across that a pub player could have intercepted, but it sailed over my head to Roberto Carlos who raced away on yet another attack. What was happening to me? I couldn’t even time a jump right.
The atmosphere had been electric at kick-off, but Madrid battered us, 3–0 up inside an hour – an own goal from Keano then two from Raúl. Henning Berg got mugged by a fantastic Redondo backheel over near the touchline. It was a brilliant piece of skill, but that was my area to cover. If I’d been on form, I’d have been back behind him.
We struck back through Scholesy and Becks but our European crown had been ripped away and it wasn’t much consolation that Madrid were a classy side who would go on to win the trophy. We’d been found wanting. We’d needed an injection of world-class talent to improve the team and to make sure no one could sit on their laurels, and we paid for the lack of high-profile signings.
Three days after Real took us apart, we went to Southampton, won 3–1 and clinched the title with four games to spare, but I can’t say I enjoyed the experience. There’s a photo at the Carrington training ground of everyone celebrating. I’m there jumping up and down but I was putting it on, pretending to be ecstatic. The truth was that I felt hollow. Three trophies in 1999 had become one a year later. And my contribution was way below what it should have been. I could only put it down to some sort of hangover from the Treble season.
As well as my own struggles, Becks had issues with the manager. The Spice Girls were huge news so his fame had reached a new stratosphere.
Becks and Victoria had been married near Dublin in 1999 and I was thrilled, and terrified, to be his best man. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous. I’d never really done a public speech before, and though this was only in front of the wedding guests, I knew every word of it would get out in the press. Mess it up and I’d be a laughing stock all over the front pages.
I wrote the speech myself, though I got the wedding organiser, Peregrine, to have a read through the night before. I was quite pleased with my gags but he seemed to think the one about George Michael in a toilet was a bit near the knuckle. That one came out, probably for the best. He left the one in about the Spice Girls hoping the entire Bayern Munich squad would turn up. Which girl wouldn’t like men who could stay on top for ninety minutes and still come second? Well, it was funny back then.
Becks likes to tell the story that he found me on the morning of the wedding standing anxiously in front of a full-length mirror with a can of deodorant in my hand, pretending it was a microphone. And I can’t deny it.
The wedding ceremony itself, with around thirty family and close friends, was a lovely occasion in a little folly. It was a very emotional event, with plenty of tears. Then we gathered for the main dinner and my big moment. I’d had a stroke of inspiration and borrowed a sarong from Victoria. David had been in the papers for wearing one so I slipped it on just before I had to go up. So that was one laugh guaranteed.
Becks’ closest mates have always been guys he’s known from way back – me, Dave Gardner, and Terry Byrne, one of the masseurs from the England camp who’d go on to be his personal manager. They were all there at the wedding, but there were obviously pop stars too, through Victoria. The occasion inevitably attracted massive publicity.
Then, in February 2000, Becks rang the club one morning to say he was going to be late for training. He said he’d had to look after Brooklyn, who was unwell; but Victoria had been pictured out that night at a party, and the manager assumed that Becks had been at his house down south. When Becks finally turned up and came out on to the training pitch, the boss sent him straight back in.
Becks was made to travel with the team to the big game at Leeds that weekend, but he wasn’t even on the bench. He had to sit in the stands – which of course only brought more attention, with all the photographers at Elland Road taking pictures of Becks seething in his seat.
After the game we went straight off on international duty with England. We were playing Argentina at Wembley on the Wednesday. At least it gave things a few days to calm down, and Becks and I could chat about how he was going to work this out. We decided that I should be the mediator.
When we got back on the Thursday, I went and had a word with Steve McClaren.
‘Look, I’ve had a chat with Becks and he wants to clear the air with the manager. But I think we need to help them find a solution.’