Some dates are seared into English football history: 30 July 1966, 26 May 1989, 26 May 1999, 13 May 2012. Few would add 14 February 1987 to that list. Paul Wilkinson scored a late equaliser for the leaders and eventual champions Everton against their bogey team Oxford, Ian Rush scored a hat-trick in Liverpool’s 4-3 win over Leicester and, at Old Trafford, 13th-placed Manchester United beat Watford 3-1.
That last scoreline does not tell the whole story. United’s third, scored by Gordon Strachan, was their first counterattacking goal under Alex Ferguson. We didn’t know it at the time but it was the start of a significant tradition: in the next 26 years, Ferguson’s United scored well over 100 counterattacking goals. There weren’t so many in the first five years under Ferguson, because the side was not good or quick enough, though there were a few glimpses of the future in a 3-1 win on Luton’s plastic pitch in 1989 and a staggering shellacking of Arsenal a year later.
In 1991 Ferguson bought Andrei Kanchelskis and Peter Schmeichel, and fast-tracked Ryan Giggs into the first team. The pace and decisiveness of Giggs and Kanchelskis, and the distribution of Schmeichel, made United a great counterattacking team almost instantly, and it became a defining feature of Ferguson’s three great teams at Old Trafford. For two decades, United supporters were high on speed. Anthony Martial’s stunning goal against Stoke on Tuesday was a reminder of the way things used to be.
Just as we didn’t know the tradition had started on 14 February 1987, nor did we know it ended at the Emirates on 5 May 2009, when Cristiano Ronaldo confirmed United’s place in the Champions League final with a wonderful goal. United scored a few great breakaways in Ferguson’s last four seasons, including another at the Emirates the following season, but they were never the same once Ronaldo went to Real Madrid.
Indiana Jones and the swordsman
Ronaldo’s final season at Old Trafford was not always the happiest. He had reluctantly agreed to stay at United for one more year, and for much of the time he seemed distracted. He only scored in one Premier League match away from home, hitting two of United’s five at West Brom. But towards the end of the season, as glory beckoned in the Champions League in particular, he recaptured the form of the previous campaign.
In 2007-08 he reached 40 goals for the first time, ending with 42. In 2008-09 he managed a relatively modest 26 but he did score from 40 yards – twice – in the away legs of the Champions League quarter- and semi-finals. It’s an unprecedented achievement for which he doesn’t receive nearly enough credit. The first was away to Porto, to put United through after a nervous 2-2 draw in the first leg. The second was at the Emirates, where he destroyed Arsenal in the last great performance of his United career.
John O’Shea gave United a 1-0 victory in the first leg; it should have been more, and the lead felt precarious against an Arsenal side that included Cesc Fàbregas, Robin van Persie, Emmanuel Adebayor and Samir Nasri. The two teams had been involved in a high-class league match earlier in the season, won 2-1 by Arsenal. This time Ferguson had a different plan, to pack the midfield and use Ronaldo as a lone striker.
Ronaldo decided it was high time he had his own TV programme. The match became the Cristiano Ronaldo show, and he gave Arsenal’s defence a traumatic demonstration of the standard required to win the Champions League. He could easily have scored five. In the end he settled for two and an assist. The latter came first, in the eighth minute, when Park Ji-sung scored from Ronaldo’s low cross. Kieran Gibbs, playing the biggest game of his life at the age of 19, slipped cruelly as he was about to clear the cross.
Arsenal were still processing that goal when Ronaldo screamed a wobbling free-kick past Manuel Almunia from 40 yards. Almunia probably should not have been beaten at his near post but it was nonetheless an awesome goal. After 11 minutes, a potential epic was already over: United were three goals ahead in the tie, and the away goals meant Arsenal needed to score four times.
For the rest of the game United sat deep, let Arsenal have the ball and picked them off on the break. After a few near misses, Ronaldo scored a marvellous goal in the 61st minute. One moment Nemanja Vidic headed a cross clear. Seven touches and 12 seconds later, United had scored. The decisive economy of Park, Wayne Rooney and Ronaldo was devastating. The Telegraph’s Paul Hayward described it as an “ice-hockey goal”, such was the smooth way United moved the ball from one end to the other. As Ronaldo bolted – or rather Bolted – the length of the field, Johan Djourou struggled to keep up with his shadow, never mind his body. Rooney eased a tantalising low cross and the stretching Ronaldo crashed a shot over Almunia. It was a goal of undeniable greatness.
Van Persie scored a late penalty, with Darren Fletcher harshly sent off for what seemed a good tackle, but United eased through 4-1 on aggregate to meet either Chelsea or Barcelona – who were playing the following night – in the final. It was a slightly strange victory, in that the game was over before it had settled, but the rest of the match confirmed Ferguson’s sense that he had found a template to beat Arsenal. Eight months later, Rooney scored a beautiful counterattacking goal in another 3-1 win at the Emirates. For two or three years, United generally beat Arsenal with an ease that bordered on contempt.
“We didn’t need to win the ball against Arsenal, we needed to intercept it,” Ferguson wrote in his autobiography. “We would say to our players: ‘Stay with the runners, then intercept the pass.’ Then we counterattacked quickly.” That meant a three-man midfield: Michael Carrick was the brains, Anderson was the legs and Fletcher – among the world’s best defensive midfielders between 2008-10, before the debilitating effects of ulcerative colitis took hold – was both. The front three was usually Park, Rooney and either Ronaldo or, after he had gone, Nani. The way United beat Arsenal was football’s equivalent of Indiana Jones and the swordsman.
Defence: the best form of attack
There are probably a few footballers who think Sun Tzu is a holiday resort. But the old bot unwittingly provided a perfect description of the counterattack: “When the enemy gives you an opening be swift as a hare and he will be unable to withstand you.” Such goals are uniquely thrilling, with each pass furthering an orgiastic crescendo. Some teams specialise in them, like Romania in 1994, Arsenal under Arsène Wenger, Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest in the late 1980s and early 1990s – who were ahead of their time, certainly in England – and of course Ferguson’s United.
These teams lived and breathed counterattacks, looking for them at every opportunity. Look at the almost rabid manner in which Roy Keane and David Beckham hunt John Collins in this clip: they don’t only want to win the ball, they want to win the ball while Everton are exposed. It was a reversal of the old cliche, proving that defence can be the best form of attack.
Changing of the guard
“You probably don’t even hear it when it happens,” said the Sopranos’ Bobby Bacala in reference to a gangster’s death. (A few episodes later, he saw and heard the whole thing, straight from the barrel of the gun, but that’s another story and we’re not allowed on the Culture pages.) Sometimes you don’t even know it’s happened. The last two great Manchester United sides demonstrated that greatness for the final time in north London, and each time nobody realised it was the end. Paul Scholes’s header at White Hart Lane in 2002-03, to put United decisively ahead of Arsenal for the first time in a brilliant title race, was the last hurrah of the perfect Beckham-Scholes-Keane-Giggs midfield, and Ronaldo’s goal at Arsenal was a similarly symbolic moment.
Even though they had not reached the exhilarating heights of the previous season United were European and world champions, with the aura to match. Many people – not only in England – expected them to beat, maybe even trounce, a Barcelona side who had used up years of luck in getting past Chelsea in the semi-finals. Barça didn’t need any luck thereafter, of course, because their crushing 2-0 win over United in the final empowered them to redefine football.
“I think one of our problems … was that Sir Alex thought Barcelona would be like Arsenal,” said Rio Ferdinand in his autobiography. “Both teams liked to attack and had technical midfielders who liked to pass around you … I think maybe we got carried away by thumping Arsenal; we didn’t realise how much better Barcelona were … Unfortunately we found that out on the night.”
The match was a changing of the guard – from United to Barcelona, from Ronaldo to Lionel Messi, and from the Premier League to La Liga. Between 2007-09, England supplied nine of the 12 Champions League semi-finalists and four of the six finalists. It is easily the strongest England has been in Europe since the mid-1980s. Everything changed in the summer of 2009; Barcelona hammered United, Ronaldo went to Madrid, as did Xabi Alonso, and La Liga quickly became the strongest league in the world.
Although United played Barcelona in the final two years later, there was a chasm between the teams by that stage. In hindsight, that goal at Arsenal on 5 May 2009 was a significant moment in time. It was not only the end of United as a great counterattacking team; it was the end of United as a great team full stop.
(The goal against Arsenal can be seen after 7m 36s of the below video.)
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