With Manchester United he has won eight Premiership titles four FA Cups and a European Cup and an automatic place in the greatest

With Manchester United he has won eight Premiership titles, four FA Cups and a European Cup, and an automatic place in the greatest side of the past 12 years has been his for the asking. Then there are the fabulous goals he has scored, his part in the treble season of 1999, his occasional famous girlfriend – never mind his power to draw record crowds to shopping centres in unremarkable provincial towns.
But most of all there is the longevity – over the past decade he has come to symbolise a club reborn in a city rebuilt. We have experience of these situations and we will handle it.”He added: “The hostility in these games is between the fans, not so much the teams. Disciplinary wise players have been sent off, but there has never been anything serious and the spirit has been good.”. When Ryan Giggs was a teenager he once brought the M4 to a standstill. He was making an appearance in Slough for a sponsor – perhaps a soft drink, the memory is hazy – when the police asked him to stop because the queue off the slip road had halted traffic.

“I didn’t mind,” he says smiling at the recollection, “I was ready to go home.”

When they come to write the definitive history of Nineties football, of the birth of the Premiership, of the rise of the footballer as modern icon, there will be a chapter that belongs to Giggs alone. It happened with George Best, it happened with Paul Gascoigne and it happened with David Beckham It is the way of the world. He was about 32 or 33 and every day he got up at four in the morning to do an extra session at Bayern Munich That’s the sacrifice you need to make Ruud was on the bike four hours after his operation. You have to go ‘bang’, right at it.”Ferguson was reluctant to rejoin the debate generated by Rooney’s red card in Spain – “I have a lot of thoughts on what happened, I am just not prepared to share them with you” – as he intends to keep in-house a disciplinary procedure that is expected to include a fine of a week’s wage for the 19-year-old. It’s difficult to say if he’ll be fit for the World Cup but he’ll have a chance.”Ferguson is confident Heinze will be able to resume his career at United, but admits the 27-year-old has an arduous rehabilitation programme ahead of him “Our record with these injuries is terrific, 100 per cent. He did say: “We’ll put the sending-off to bed and Wayne will play on Sunday.

He is a big game player and there will be no problem with that.”I am not surprised by all the attention. Ruud [van Nistelrooy], Roy Keane and Wes Brown twice have come back from cruciates, so we are confident he will come back OK.”Methods have advanced but it is still hard work from the word go I use the example of Lothar Matth?. He’s been a real warrior and true defender in the Argentinian fashion. He’s going to miss most, if not all of the season because of it It’s awful luck for the lad. But it is the loss of Heinze, who could miss next summer’s World Cup, and the subsequent exposure of his limited squad that is now the Scot’s overriding concern.”It is terrible news,” said Ferguson “It’s a cruciate injury from an innocuous incident. These things happen all the time, but the way he landed created the injury. It is hardly ideal preparation for a contest that promises even greater antagonism than usual as the Kop warms up for Wayne Rooney’s return to Merseyside.Rooney, admonished by Ferguson for his dismissal against Villarreal on Wednesday, will start tomorrow at a ground where he scored the only goal in last season’s corresponding fixture and had a mobile phone thrown in his direction as a result.

Only last Saturday Heinze collected his Matt Busby Player of the Year award for a flawless introduction to English football following last summer’s £6.9m move from Paris Saint-Germain.With Neville out, younger brother Phil sold to Everton, Wes Brown and Quinton Fortune injured and Jonathan Spector on a season-long loan at Charlton, the loss of Heinze leaves the United manager little option but to select the midfielder Kieran Richardson at left-back for the trip to Liverpool. “If we get the breaks with injuries then we’ve got a great chance,” he said. Tomorrow he takes a Manchester United side already five points adrift of the champions to Anfield minus Roy Keane, Gary Neville and another of his “warriors” – Gabriel Heinze, out for the rest of the season with a cruciate ligament injury.
Confirmation that the Argentina defender had not suffered a medial knee ligament as anticipated in Villarreal and had instead ruptured his anterior cruciate represented a monumental setback yesterday. And who was the only player capped by England under Graham Taylor to share the manager’s initials? Happy mulling.b.viner independent.co.uk.

On the eve of the new Premiership season, Sir Alex Ferguson surveyed his squad’s prospects of not only competing with the resources of Chelsea but taking the title from them at the first attempt. Who was he?Furthermore, which is the only club in the Football League with the first five letters of the alphabet (in any order) in its name? Of all league clubs in both England and Scotland, which one is unique in having a letter that no other club has? Name seven post-war England internationals with an X in their surnames. The winner was Jon Russell, a football trader at Sportingbet , who gets a bottle of something alcoholic, but not Double Diamond, for coming up with the following list: Alan Ainscow, Bosko Balaban, Colin Cameron, Didier Drogba, Erik Edman, Fabrice Fernandes, Gary Gillespie, Hossam Hassan, Ivar Ingimarsson, Jermaine Jenas, Kevin Keen, Larry Lloyd, Massimo Maccarone, Noureddine Naybet, Oluwaseyi Olofinjana, Phil Parkes, Qu Qing (of Adelaide United, apparently), Ray Ransom, Steve Sims, Tommy Taylor, Ugo Ukah, Victor Valdes, Werner Weist, Xu Xiang (of Shanghai Zobon), Yevgeny Yordanov, and Zlatko Zahovic.Mr Russell asked whether he deserved extra points for including five Wolves players in his list and not using Zinedine Zidane, and I decided he did, which made all the difference.Anyway, I’m about to vacate this column for two weeks to concentrate on writing a book about sport in the 1970s, so I’ll leave you with these questions to mull over, starting with one, aptly, about a footballer capped by England in 1977 who was on the books of all four big North-West clubs – Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City. I was also keen on the tennis question: who was the first German-born player to win a post-war men’s singles title at Wimbledon? That was John McEnroe. And I am particularly indebted, as Cyril Fletcher used to say on That’s Life!, to Trevor Parry for acquainting me with this corker: which are the four places in Scotland to share names with Formula One racing drivers? The answers are Stirling (Moss), (Johnny) Dumfries, (Eddie) Irvine and Ayr town centre (Ayrton Senna).Football reigns supreme, however, and congratulations to those who met my challenge to find 26 alliterative footballers, although for really tricky letters such as Q and X I permitted entries from other sports.