Gracious in severely hurtful defeat at the hands of a team he
described as the best Manchester United have faced during
his time at the club, Sir Alex Ferguson searched for a
sliver of light in the darkness. "Great teams do go in cycles," he
said of Barcelona, "and they're at the peak of the cycle they're in
at the moment."
Xavi, Iniesta, Messi, Busquets, Puyol, Piqué, Valdés: all
products of La Masía, Barcelona's academy, where the teachers
might adapt the celebrated Jesuit maxim to read: give me a child at
the age of 12 and I will give you the man. Some cycle, anyway, if
that is what it is. Compare and contrast the generation on whose
youthful talents United surfed to their present eminence, the one
that produced Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, David Beckham, Nicky Butt
and the Neville brothers on the old training ground at the Cliff,
and whose last remaining survivors made somewhat forlorn
appearances at Wembley on Saturday.
A cycle, Ferguson said, but he knows better than anyone that the
successors to his own Class of '92 – named for their success in
that year's FA Youth Cup – have yet to make their
appearance. That sudden blossoming of gifted youngsters provided an
echo of the group nurtured in the early 1950s, the generation of
Duncan Edwards and Bobby Charlton, who won the youth trophy five
years in a row and formed the basis of Matt Busby's Babes. That's a
long, long cycle for a club that demands success.
Ferguson was among the crowd last Monday night when United's
latest crop won this season's Youth Cup with a very convincing 4-1
victory against Sheffield United at Old Trafford, repeating the 6-3
aggregate beating they had handed out to Chelsea's gilded
youngsters in the semi‑final. Plenty of cause for optimism there,
you might think, except that when United last won the trophy, in
2003, it was with a side containing no players destined to make
substantial careers in the first team (the closest candidates were
Phil Bardsley, Chris Eagles and Kieran Richardson). And of the team
with which they last reached the final, in 2007, only Danny
Welbeck, who has just spent the season on loan at Sunderland, still
looks to have a chance of establishing himself.
So will any of the Class of '11 make it all the way through the
unforgiving process of natural selection? Ravel Morrison, 18 years
old, is prodigiously gifted and could be said to have something of
Wayne Rooney about him, not just in his instinct for damaging the
opposition but also in a personal indiscipline which saw him in
court again last week. Paul Pogba, a Vieira-like influence in the
central areas, and Ryan Tunnicliffe, a more muscular midfielder,
could also make the transition to line up alongside Javier
Hernández, Chris Smalling and the Da Silva brothers, young
acquisitions from elsewhere, in a future United first team. Most of
the rest will simply disperse.
United's supporters have always made a fetish of home-grown
products, but like most big clubs their best sides have included
top players imported from elsewhere: Albert Quixall from Sheffield
Wednesday, Denis Law from Torino, Bryan Robson from West Bromwich
Albion, and so on, all the way to Rooney, the team's only real
success on Saturday night, and Dimitar Berbatov, the principal
casualty. If the balance has been swinging in that direction at Old
Trafford in recent seasons, it must be because the academy output
is not of sufficient quality.
The products of La Masía are at the very heart of Barcelona's
line-up. The imports – David Villa, Eric Abidal, Dani Alves – are
placed around the fringes of the team structure. The heart of the
formation is what counts, and it is there that Ferguson can be said
to have failed when it comes to competition against the very
best.
You can win England's domestic trophies with a midfield permed
from Scholes, Giggs, Anderson, Michael Carrick, Darren Fletcher and
Darron Gibson, and you can even get to the final of the European
Cup, but only in a lucky year, when your opponents in the final
have somehow slipped through quality control (or when, as in 2008,
they are another Premier League team), will you win the competition
by which the continent's elite clubs define themselves. Ferguson
was unlucky with Fletcher's fitness last week, but Giggs and
Carrick were unable to make a greater impression on the game than
they had managed in Rome two years ago, even in a formation
rejigged from 4-3-3 to 4-4-2.
During the buildup last week Ferguson spoke of United's 4-0
defeat at the hands of Johan Cruyff's Barcelona in 1994 as
something of a turning point for his side, the moment at which they
began to shed their naivety and take the steps that led to the
treble of 1998-99. The 69-year-old's time is necessarily more
limited now, but he may hope to use the disappointment of Saturday
as another launching pad.
Since the arrival of the widely detested Glazers six years ago,
United have been saddled with £478m of debt while paying out £369m
in fees and interest. Thanks to the miracle of capitalism, however,
their current account contains £170m, an unknown proportion of
which will be available for Ferguson to spend. Now, having won the
Premier League at a canter but finished the season on a note of
anticlimax, he could do with a big, bold capture.
Some of the game's hot young properties, such as Ganso and
Neymar of Santos, Edinson Cavani of Napoli and Anderlecht's Romelu
Lukaku, are earmarked for other top Champions League clubs, while rumoured
midfield targets such as Wesley Sneijder and Luka Modric, excellent
players though they are, do not quite fire the imagination. Most of
all, however, as he approaches the 25th anniversary of his arrival
at the club, Ferguson could do with another turn of the cycle,
sharpish.