Which was the greatest football team in history? The Brazilians of 1970? The Dutch AC Milan of the late 80s? The Barcelona of Guardiola and Messi? None of these. The greatest team ever to play the game was the Manchester United "of old", when the legion of ex-players currently commenting on United in the media were still playing for the club.
In those days, United either won 5-0 or scored a last-minute goal to win 3-2 after going 2-0 down. You never knew which of those two Manchester Uniteds was going to turn up. They would smash their opponents to pieces, then smash the broken pieces into even smaller pieces. Words like “buccaneering” were hauled out of 18th-century obscurity and used to describe their play, because modern words were not romantic enough to capture their rollicking, free-spirited adventure. You score three, we’ll score seven – that was the United way.
At least that's how the ex-United players seem to remember it, foremost among them the erstwhile ginger genius, Paul Scholes. Alex Ferguson described Scholes as "a man of excellent opinions", and the now-prolific pundit has become the most influential critic of Louis van Gaal's "boring" side.
Divorced from reality
The curious thing about Scholes’s excellent opinions is how often they seem to be totally divorced from reality. “I was lucky enough to play with players that you would give them the ball and they can beat five men and ram the ball in the top corner,” he recently told viewers on BT Sport.
In fact, when you think back over Scholes's 19 years at United, only one goal of the type he describes comes to mind – Ryan Giggs' winner against Arsenal in the 1999 FA Cup semi-final. Scholes's commentary is quite typical of the reminiscences of the former United players. Maybe success has a tendency to scramble the brain, because those of us who watched from the outside remember it differently.
Take for instance the United team of 2008-9, whose attack featured Cristiano Ronaldo, a young and energetic Wayne Rooney, Carlos Tevez, and Dimitar Berbatov. They won the Premier League with 90 points, yet their tally of 68 league goals was only four more than United scored in the David Moyes season. The reason they were so successful was that they went four whole months without conceding a goal in the league. Fourteen of their 44 wins that season were by 1-0.
Ferguson always paid lip-service to the idea of attacking football, but the reality was that he often sent out defence-focused sides, knowing he could rely on his world-class forwards to make the difference. Once you’ve got a reputation for playing attacking football, you can defend with nine men all day.
Van Gaal's situation at United has some echoes of Pep Guardiola's at Bayern Munich. In his first season in Germany, Guardiola was often criticised by ex-Bayern players who complained that his possession-oriented style was boring.
The critics were at their loudest in April 2014, when Bayern went to Madrid for the Champions League semi-final, monopolised the ball and most of the opportunities, and lost 1-0 to a breakaway goal. Afterwards, Guardiola said: “I’m aware that I’m attempting something counter-cultural. Here they like the way Real Madrid played against us, the counter-attacking football of Borussia Dortmund. But Bayern hired me, my style of football.”
What Guardiola said about German cultural preferences could be applied to England. The game in both countries has been shaped by the tastes of the crowds. The crowds prefer high-tempo direct football that gets the ball into the box as often as possible, because that’s when a crowd knows it’s time to get excited.
Alex Ferguson’s United teams used the home crowd to their advantage. They would get it wide and sling it repeatedly into the box. Creating a lot of chances would get the crowd going, even if they weren’t good-quality chances, and Old Trafford in full cry put opponents under the sort of psychological pressure that few were equipped to handle.
Coaches like van Gaal and Guardiola see the game differently. The “boring, sideways passing” in midfield that Scholes complains about is, for them, an essential element of good attacking play. Passing in midfield is how you disrupt your opponents’ organisation. Guardiola told the journalist Marti Perarnau that “If there isn’t a sequence of 15 passes first, it’s impossible to carry out the transition between defence and attack. Impossible.”
Frustrating
The problem with implementing a 15-pass rule in English football is that the crowd doesn’t see the point of all this midfield manoeuvring and starts to chant “attack, attack, attack attack attack”, which is frustrating since that is exactly what you think you are doing.
Newspaper reports over the weekend suggested Guardiola might like to coach United whenever he decides to leave Bayern. If he comes to Old Trafford, the football will be like van Gaal's, only more so. If United supporters don't like what they're seeing now, they should be hoping for Ryan Giggs rather than Guardiola to inherit van Gaal's job. That's the best way to find out whether the United way is more than just a trick of the memory.
