The official reason given for Micah Richards’s absence for Manchester City’s Carling Cup third-round tie against Fulham on Wednesday evening was a shoulder injury.
The suspicion, though, was that the young England defender was still so traumatised by the licking he had been given by Ryan Giggs in the Manchester derby three days earlier that Mark Hughes, the City manager, had taken pity on his player and removed him from the line of fire.
Being given the run-around by someone 14 years your senior would ordinarily be a rather embarrassing affair, but when your tormentor is the Benjamin Button of the Barclays Premier League, it can easily be forgiven.
In David Fincher’s film, the Button character, as played by Brad Pitt, gets younger as he gets older and, as the mind wandered back to that extraordinary afternoon at Old Trafford, it was fair to wonder if the same thing is happening to Giggs.
Sir Alex Ferguson is rarely, if ever, lost for words, but as the Manchester United manager was asked to reflect yesterday on the latest contribution from the most decorated player in the history of the British game, it seemed, for a moment, that the list of superlatives he usually plumps for on such occasions had dried up.
“I don’t know what else there is to say about Ryan,” Ferguson said. “It’s not a matter of him defying his age, it’s a matter of the fact that there’s no discernible deterioration in his game.”
Giggs turns 36 in November, but his form has been so good over the past two seasons, in particular, that even mentioning the word “deterioration” in the same breath as him somehow seems wrong. Paul Scholes and Gary Neville, two other United stalwarts, cannot sneeze without the notion of retirement cropping up, but it has become a dirty word when discussing the Welshman.
If anything, he is a better player than he was four or five years ago, when, during one of the rare barren spells of his career when United went three seasons without a league title, he became a scapegoat for those fans uncomfortable with their team not being top dogs.
Should Giggs score against Stoke City at the Britannia Stadium this afternoon, he will become only the seventeenth player to score 100 Premier League goals and only the ninth United player to reach 150 in all competitions, but as Ferguson was at pains to point out yesterday, the Welshman’s importance and influence have never been measured simply by the number of times he finds the net.
Putting aside, for a moment, his temperament and experience — is there a player in the modern era who can compare on that front? — it is Giggs’s unquenchable thirst to learn and improve that sets him apart. With 11 league titles and two European Cups to his name, he could easily have chosen to sit back and milk the plaudits. Aware that he no longer had the blistering pace of his youth, however, he has cultivated other areas of his game.
In his youth, his crosses too often lacked precision, but those he delivered for Darren Fletcher’s two goals against City, devastating in their accuracy, perfectly illustrated the improvement in that area.
His passing has also become more incisive, a benefit perhaps from playing in a more central role most of the time. Last Sunday’s derby may be remembered for Michael Owen’s controversial winning goal in the sixth minute of stoppage time, but the purists may prefer to dwell on the ball from Giggs that led to it.
Perhaps the one surprise against City, though, was that Giggs could still prove quite so effective on the wing.
Richards, 21, is one of the fastest and most powerful defenders in the country, but Giggs exposed his inexperience and while such a cameo in that position is likely to remain just that, he will continue to have us salivating wherever he plays.
No comments:
Post a Comment