Giggs: My 20 years with Manchester United's first team

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Ryan Giggs remembers his debut for Manchester United against Everton in 1991, and a special 'welcome' from Dave Watson. Photograph: Alex Livesey/Getty Images

The first game: 2 March 1991. You look at the photos now and so much has changed. Old Trafford, back then, was an unsophisticated place, desperately in need of investment, much in line with a city struggling from the effects of post-industrialisation. "Madchester" might have been booming but Manchester was far from the metropolis of stylish apartment blocks, Calatrava bridges and glass condominium towers we see now.

Ryan Giggs was 17, wearing a shirt that seemed slightly too large for his skinny frame. Manchester United 0 Everton 2. The team were on a run of seven league games without a win, almost a quarter of a century since their last title. It was an inauspicious debut. "The thing that sticks out is Dave Watson coming through the back of me," Giggs says. "It was 'welcome to the big boys' league'. I had a big cut on my knee for ages after that." Otherwise, he cannot remember too much apart from Ferguson shouting at everyone in the dressing room.

The anniversary is on Wednesday. "Twenty years of tramping up and down that bloody wing," as Ferguson puts it. Though, Giggs being Giggs, he doesn't want too much fuss. He cringes when it is put to him there might be a statue for him outside Old Trafford one day. "A statue? I really don't know about that …" He is 37 now, flecks of grey hair appearing around his ears. Retirement is on the horizon – maybe only 15 months away – and there is the odd moment of insecurity. "I wasn't worried about it three or four years ago but I am now," he confesses. "I'm wondering what I'm going to do."

Coaching is one option. An ambassadorial role is open to him at United if he wants it. Giggs, one senses, will remain part of the Old Trafford furniture. There have been many super-talented kids come and go at this club. None has lasted 20 years. Nobody has played so many games. Or with such continued excellence. It has been an epic and anachronistic run. "Twenty years, I do feel proud," says a man who increasingly possesses the universal appeal of Sir Bobby Charlton. "You're talking about a player coming into a successful team at the age of 17 and staying there for 20 years. It's not impossible, but it's tough to think it will happen again."

The question he gets asked most these days is simple: what's the secret of his longevity? But there are many different factors. "First of all, it's what you're born with; your genetics." After that, it's about "trying to live your life the right way."

The younger Giggs – that wiry kid with the mop of curly hair – was on first-name terms with Manchester's nightclub doormen, but that had its drawbacks. "Coming into the first-team, a lot of hype, celebrity girlfriends, it meant photographers following me all over the place." Giggs felt as though his privacy was being invaded. In his first full season he remembers the now-defunct Today newspaper "ran a week-long feature delving into my family, my dad's family, the rift between my mum and dad. It was just … I just didn't like it."

Giggs has had his fair share of lost nights, but he's virtually teetotal now and just wants "to keep a low profile". He finds it amusing that Rio Ferdinand should tell almost 600,000 followers on Twitter what he has eaten for breakfast or what cartoons he likes best. "Yeah, I don't get that ... I really just don't get that."

He turns up for this interview in a simple top, jeans and a £40 pair of Converse pumps. That kid of 1991, the boy who played football like a man, has become the man who plays football like a boy. Tuesday night, against Chelsea, Giggs will equal Charlton's record of 606 league appearances for United. In all competitions, Giggs has played for the club 861 times, overtaking Charlton (on 758) on the night of the 2008 European Cup final.

"At the beginning it's just desire to get in the first team and stay there," he explains. "Some players might lose their drive, but not the ones I've been friends with. You get older, but the desire is still there, and you actually enjoy it more." Plus he makes another point: "I've played for Wales, remember, and playing for Wales and playing for United, I know the difference. It's a lot easier when you have quality around you, believe me. I might have been finished three or four years ago otherwise."

Giggs has never been one for pumping his fists or long, impassioned dressing-room sermons, but in that quiet, understated way, he also has a fierce determination to keep on winning. It is his fix, he says, the only true form of job satisfaction. Plus there is the fear of failure that so many top sportsmen use as motivation. "Last year, for example, when Chelsea won the double. It winds you up. You don't want it to happen again. You don't want to feel like you did last summer. You want to feel like the year before when you won the league. You think about those moments just as much as you think about the things you've won. Probably more, in fact."

This is a common theme among Giggs's generation at United: remember the bad times, make sure they are the exception rather than the norm. "It stays with you. You go away on holiday, you're lying on the beach trying to enjoy yourself with the kids, and you do. But then you have a quiet moment, it comes back to you and you can't help it, you're pissed off. You're on holiday, and you're just pissed off."

The worst time? "My first full season, when we lost the league to Leeds. That awful feeling of emptiness." The European Cup final in 2009, losing to Barcelona, was a close second. "On the coach outside the stadium, you know you haven't played well personally, and you haven't played well as a team. It's the last game of the season, you'll never get it back and you're just gutted. We didn't perform. That was the worst thing. We just didn't perform. At United you always pride yourself that when you lose a goal you react – but we didn't that night."

Giggs, lest it be forgotten, already has two Champions League winner's medals. He was rummaging through his drawers the other week and found them under some clothes, along with his OBE and a couple of league winner's medals. "Oh, here they are," he thought. Most of his collection has been donated to the club museum, though he does treasure some possessions. "The night of the European Cup final in Moscow, Bobby presented me with a watch . . ." His eyes sparkle.

In 20 years he has had 131 different team-mates – good, bad, indifferent and, in a few cases, exceptional. A few weeks ago, Giggs nominated Paul Scholes as the best ("I've never seen anyone make the game look so easy"). This time he chooses differently. "Probably Roy [Keane]. If Bryan Robson was playing you never thought you were going to lose. Then Robbo left, Roy took over that mantle and you felt invincible with him around." Did Giggs escape the Irishman's furies? "No one got away with it. But I was here before him, remember. I didn't get it too bad."

As for Ferguson, Giggs seems convinced his manager will outlast him. He tells a story of Ferguson contracting the virus that went around the club before the Manchester derby last November. Ferguson was feverish, looking like death. Then it came to match-day and he was there in the dugout. "He loves the challenge. I just can't see the gaffer leaving in the near future. He'll be around a lot longer than me." Ferguson turns 70 at the end of the year, but Giggs shrugs. "Maybe not another 10 years, but four or five definitely."

Ferguson, he says, is a "lot more mellow these days, a lot less scary than when I was 13," though Giggs has lost count of the number of times his eyebrows have been singed by the "Hairdryer". One of his favourite stories remembers how, a few weeks after his debut, Steve Bruce and Robson told him that now he was established as a first-team player he should ask Ferguson if he qualified for a club car. An emboldened Giggs duly knocked on the manager's door. "He went absolutely nuts," he recalls. It was only later that the teenager realised he had been set up.

Older, wiser, Giggs has become the popular face of Manchester United, revered throughout the game. His medal count is staggering (forty-eight and counting, if you count the times he has been a runners-up). Giggs did not invent the art of dribbling but there have been times over the last 20 years when it felt as though he had taken it to its highest level.

He is also well qualified to respond to Didier Deschamps's observation last week that United no longer play with the "fantasy" of old. "Since losing Cristiano [Ronaldo] and Carlos [Tevez], losing great players, I know why people might say that, but we're still in a really strong position. We're top of the league, we're still in the Champions League, still in the FA Cup."

And the mind goes back to that game against Everton 20 years ago. "It was thoroughly colourless stuff," the Guardian reported at the time. "Manchester United's championship hopes, for the 24th consecutive season, had long gone cold." Giggs's appearance, as a 35th-minute substitute for the injured Denis Irwin, does not warrant a mention. "It felt like a wake," Giggs remembers. But the skinny kid with the gashed knee has not done too badly.

0 Red cards

1 Goal of the season, his matchwinner in the FA Cup semi-final against Arsenal in 1999

1 PFA Player of the year award, for the 2008-09 season

1 OBE for services to football, awarded in 2007

1 Honorary degree, a Master of Arts from Salford University for contributions to football and charity work in developing countries

2 Champions Leagues winner's medals, in 1999 and 2008

2 PFA young player of the year awards

3 BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards, including two from BBC Wales

4 FA Cups, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2004

4 League Cups, 1992, 2006, 2009, 2010

9 Times included in the PFA team of the year

11 English league titles, a record

11 The number of consecutive Champions League tournaments in which he has scored, a record

12 Goals for Wales

19 The only player to have scored in every Premier League campaign since its conception

22 The 22nd person to receive the Freedom of the City of Salford in January 2010

64 Caps for Wales

158 Manchester United goals

605 League appearances, one short of Bobby Charlton's record

862 Manchester United appearances, the most in the club's history

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Twenty years ago, on 2 March 1991, a budding United youngster named Ryan Giggs made his Old Trafford entrance. Now, he's the club's most decorated servant and recently put pen to paper on a new deal, ensuring he'll remain a Red until at least next summer. But for Giggs, now 37, his first-team debut remains all a bit of a blur.

"It’s weird because it’s all a total blank," Giggs recently told Inside United. “I don’t know why – maybe it’s because the whole thing was so unexpected. I do know I came for Denis [Irwin]. But I saw some clips of the game a few years ago and I could barely remember anything!"

After a record 863 appearances and counting for United, it’s perhaps forgiveable that the mind goes a bit hazy on the detail, but Ryan recalls more clearly his first start against Manchester City.

"I remember a lot more about the City game because I expected to be involved in that, although I was still surprised when the manager named me in the starting XI. I thought I’d be on the bench for that one," he added.

That game had the best possible outcome for the 17-year-old, with a derby-winning goal, albeit one of dubious origin, having taken a sizeable deflection off Blues defender Colin Hendry.

"I don’t think I’d have got away with [claiming] it these days!” he jokes. "I remember the manager asking me if I’d got a touch on it and I said: ‘No, I don’t think so.' His response was: ‘Well, I’m telling everyone it’s your goal so you’d better do the same.'"

It was a whirlwind of excitement for a young man who was also called up to the Welsh squad, making his debut against Germany as the then-youngest-ever Wales international.

“I’ll never forget Mark Hughes driving me to Wales in his Porsche when I got my first call-up," recalled Ryan. "I remember getting into his car and thinking: ‘What do I say?’ We had a good chat, though, and he was really good with me, both at United and when we were away with Wales – it was the stuff of dreams for me at the time.”

So now he’s the elder statesman of the dressing room, how well does he get on with United’s current crop of youngsters?

“There was an article in the paper about it being 20 years since my debut and they had some stats in there that the lads were killing me about. Rafa [da Silva] and Fabio were only eight months old at the time!

"To be honest, though, it doesn’t really feel like I’m 37; I have some great banter with the young players and still think of myself as just one of the lads.”

So, as the Peter Pan of Manchester United continues into his 21st year in the first team – with a contract extension to the end of next season – it’s our continuing good fortune that his form, ability and influence are barely diminished by the passing years. Why stop at 2012?

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Wednesday, March 2, marks 20 years of Ryan Giggs as a Manchester United first-team player. It is the anniversary of an inauspicious 2-0 home defeat to Everton in which a 17-year-old Giggs replaced a hamstrung Denis Irwin after Everton's first goal to make his debut.

Two decades at the top makes Ryan Giggs a freak of the modern game. Even when casting back through the English game's history, there are none whose careers have lasted so long at such a high level. Sir Stanley Matthews may have been playing at 50 but was not a stranger to the Second Division.

At Manchester United, Giggs is already by far the longest-serving player in the club's history. Munich survivors Bill Foulkes and Bobby Charlton both played just under 17 years for the club while Billy Meredith, United's first "Welsh Wizard", may have played for fully 30 years from 1894 to 1924, but spent much of that time in the colours of Manchester City. Giggs has remained a singular player in the English game, and is similarly admired across Europe too. He thanks an inherited physiology and the right advice for a longevity that is enhanced in focus by casting back the mind to the club whose first-team he first lined up for on March 2, 1991. Giggs and Alex Ferguson, as he was then, may remain, but Manchester United is a very different beast indeed. Indeed, March 1991 was a time when the club were preparing to float on the Stock Exchange and were majority-owned by a local clan in the Edwards family, formerly involved in the butchery business.

An Everton victory at Old Trafford may be a rare thing these days, but was not unusual at a time when the Toffees had been champions as recently as 1987. United's last title had come way back in 1967. On the Wednesday before this Saturday 3pm kick-off, quaint in itself, Everton had dumped a newly Dalglish-less Liverpool from the FA Cup while both teams had given up on title ambitions long before they met here. Everton continued a revival under the returned Howard Kendall with goals from Pat Nevin and Dave Watson and such a result barely served as a surprise. The significance of this occasion would take some time to be recognised.

This Manchester United vintage had their mind on other things. Like now, they had European ambitions, though that was an unfamiliarity in itself. The summer of 1990 had seen the end of the five-year European competition ban imposed after the Heysel Stadium Disaster at the 1985 European Cup final.

Champions Liverpool's ban was extended for a season for their fans' behaviour at Heysel, so along with Aston Villa, who had finished runners-up, United were once again English pioneers in Europe, competing in the now-defunct European Cup Winners' Cup. May of 1990 had seen them end a five-year trophy drought with the FA Cup, a goal from Lee Martin winning a replayed final against Crystal Palace.

After an encounter with hairy Hungarians Pecsi Munkas and the local glamour of a trip to Welsh Cup holders Wrexham, the following Wednesday would see Montpellier welcomed to Manchester. A French outfit who boasted Carlos Valderrama and Laurent Blanc in their ranks, La Paillade lay in wait in the quarter-finals, and the Everton match saw coach Henry Casperczak watching from Old Trafford's Main Stand as United lost their first home game since October.

The exotica of the French club's continental stars was not matched by Manchester United on this particular afternoon, and nor could it be. United was a club without European influence. As they would do until the late-season addition of Russian Andrei Kanchelskis, they lined up with an all-British Isles starting XI, with Irwin, Northern Ireland's Mal Donaghy, Scotland's Brian McClair and Darren Ferguson plus Wales' Clayton Blackmore providing as foreign an edge as could then be offered. It would take Kanchelskis' arrival and the summer purchase of Peter Schmeichel to move the club on the road to the league of nations it currently represents. That enforced isolation from the continent, and the failure of players like Jesper Olsen and Nikola Jovanovic to impose themselves at Old Trafford had served to keep them parochial, though Eric Cantona, a former Montpellier man, would alter the culture forever the following year.

United's true stars at the time were Bryan Robson and Mark Hughes, and both were returning from injury and were not risked here. By this time, the former's match-winning influence had been lessened by the regularity of his absences and he was replaced here by Darren Ferguson, the manager's son making his first start for his dad's team. That Giggs went unnoticed and unheralded by many on that muddy afternoon reflected the fact that Ferguson Snr had made use of several youth players in recent years and many of them had been and gone in very little time indeed.

Some had lasted and made an impact: Martin, Hughes and Blackmore were products of The Cliff, an arcane training facility in Salford eventually replaced by the hi-tech modernity of Carrington in 2000. But sat on the bench alongside Giggs was Russell Beardsmore, a wiry and bucktoothed midfielder who had arrived in the first team as a member of an early and largely ill-fated group of "Fergie Fledglings". That group, named in deference to the famous "Busby Babes" had enjoyed a flush of success when Liverpool had been beaten on New Year's Day 1989 but players like Beardsmore, David Wilson, Mark Robins and Deiniol Graham were eventually forced to seek first-team football elsewhere while Tony Gill's career had been ended by injury.

The Observer's Patrick Barclay had obviously received advanced notices from his Old Trafford snouts, describing Giggs as "a wiry 17-year-old recently given a five-year contract and the most talked-about prospect at Old Trafford since [Norman] Whiteside". And indeed, there had been quite some buzz about Giggs, or Ryan Wilson as he was initially known until a name change to reflect his loyalty to his mother in the face of his parents' divorce.

"I shall always remember my first sight of him, floating over the pitch at The Cliff so effortlessly that you would have sworn his feet weren't touching the ground," said Ferguson in his autobiography of his initial encountering of the 14-year-old Wilson. "He carried his head high and he looked as relaxed and natural on the park as a dog chasing a piece of silver paper in the wind. From that moment on, we protected Ryan like the treasure he was."

Long before that Everton bow, Charlton, the man he would eventually surpass, was already a confirmed fan as was youth coach Brian Kidd, the softly-spoken Mancunian serving as a mentor for Giggs and his contemporaries at that time. Meanwhile, Giggs' eventual position of left winger had an incumbent, another flushed with youth, though one bought in from Torquay at 17 in late 1988. This had been 19-year-old Lee Sharpe's breakthrough season, a League Cup hat-trick at Arsenal, runaway champions that year, and a series of pacy dissolutions of right-backs had caused him to be viewed by fans and team-mates as their prime attacking weapon. On this occasion, Barclay's view from the press box was that "United's only obvious tactic (was) that of getting the ball to their left winger as often as possible (which) foundered on his inability to get over a single decent cross".

After Irwin limped off, Giggs' arrival came earlier than expected and a reshuffle had him playing in an advanced position off McClair, but this was no wonder debut in the style that Cristiano Ronaldo or Wayne Rooney would both later produce. In Barclay's view, Giggs "failed to find his feet until well into the second half when the Stretford End were encouraged by a superb cross".

That part of Old Trafford would soon become acquainted with such a sight, though Giggs would have to wait until the following season to bed in and become part of the furniture at what has since become English's football's most potent winning machine. Twenty years on, few could dispute his status among United's greatest ever players.

"Looking back now," Ferguson wrote, "I feel I can honestly say that whatever United have paid me in my 13 years at Old Trafford was justified at a stroke by securing Ryan." And that was a statement delivered way back in 1999.

What happened next? United would squeeze past Montpellier in the Cup Winners' Cup after a home draw, and eventually beat Barcelona in a rain-drenched but still cherished final in Rotterdam. They also lost the League Cup final to Sheffield Wednesday and finished sixth in the Football League, a place behind Manchester City - the last time that occurred. The following season saw Giggs become a first-team regular, to the displacement of Sharpe, who began to suffer the injuries and distractions that eventually halted his development. United, however, blew their title challenge in 1991-92 in a disastrous 11-day period before finally breaking the hoodoo with the first Premier League title the following May. Giggs eventually surpassed Charlton's United appearance record of 759 matches when coming on as a sub in the 2008 Champions League final. Having signed a new contract last month, Giggs will be a United player at least until the summer of 2012.

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O'Shea pays tribute to stalwart Giggs

John O'Shea says he is in awe of the achievements of Manchester United team-mate Ryan Giggs and insists the Welshman's longevity could see him continue playing until he is 40.

Wednesday marks exactly 20 years to the day that Giggs made his United debut against Everton, though he was unable to celebrate the anniversary by securing victory over Chelsea on Tuesday night.

While a few one-club men still exist in English football - Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, Ledley King and Tony Hibbert among others - Giggs' achievement in reaching the milestone of two decades in the top flight is unparalleled in the modern era.

And even though many of Giggs' team-mates have been around Old Trafford for some considerable time themselves - O'Shea, Paul Scholes and Wes Brown included - they are lost in admiration for the 37-year-old.

With Giggs having signed a one-year contract extension earlier this year, O'Shea feels he could carry on for at least another three years.

"Without a doubt,'' O'Shea said. "His physical shape hasn't changed since I've known him and he looks after himself so well.

"Depending on injuries he could easily carry on, although I am sure he just wants to take it one season at a time. He is just enjoying it so much at the minute so I can't see why he can't but I'll let him decide on that.''

If nothing else, Tuesday's game allowed Giggs to equal Sir Bobby Charlton's record of 606 league appearances, another record in addition to the scores the Welshman already has.

Indeed, in the modern era, the only player O'Shea can think of that is remotely comparable is recently-retired Italian legend Paolo Maldini.

"You see how the manager has built squads and Giggsy has been a vital part of every single one of them,'' he said. "It's just incredible. Maldini springs to mind with AC Milan but I think Giggsy has even gone past him."

Giggs' new one-year contract means that he could certainly run Maldini close, but the United winger remains 41 league games shy of Maldini's total of 647 games for AC Milan and also 39 short of his overall total of 902 matches.

Nonetheless, O'Shea believes Giggs can be considered nothing less than an "absolute legend" at Old Trafford.

"The speed and the balance he still shows to go past whether it be an old, experienced defender or a new, up-and-coming young strong defender is incredible," O'Shea said.

"Every cliche in the book has been used about the man already and I am sure they will be said many times again. He is an absolute legend.''

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Chris88110 SG

Legend, fact

gunner77 SG

Legend, fact

Rock^Star SG

looks a little like james franco when young lol. We would buy this guy's shirts at peninsula in the early 90s. Our idol.