Manchester United's manager is ready to field a different side
for the 99th consecutive game – with rather more success than
Ranieri or Benítez
Sir Alex Ferguson will not be able to resist fielding a
different Manchester United side for a century of successive
matches. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
When Sir Alex Ferguson was asked recently
about the team he was planning to play in the next match he leant
back in his chair and announced to the assembled journalists that
if anyone predicted his side accurately he would pay for them to
have a weekend in Loch Lomond before adding, Fergie being Fergie,
that he would make sure "the midges were out". The prize, as you
can imagine, went unclaimed. It has become football's equivalent of
nailing a jelly to the wall and tomorrow, when Wigan Athletic visit
Old Trafford, we can expect it to be the 99th consecutive game in
which the Manchester United manager has not kept
the same side.
Another manager would have been rumbled by now but Ferguson has
managed to put together one of the more remarkable runs of
modern-day football almost under the radar and without any of the
scrutiny that plagued Rafael Benítez when he did the same thing
three years ago or, before that, the misgivings that surrounded
Claudio Ranieri's judgment during his time at Chelsea.
The critique of Ranieri's methods often bordered on derision and
when Benítez finally sent out an unchanged team it was tempting to
conclude that the decision owed partly to him trying to appease a
hostile media. Ferguson, in stark contrast, is not facing any calls
to abandon the habit and revert to something more orthodox and on
Sunday, when Leeds United are the opponents in the FA Cup, we can
safely assume the run will reach 100 and counting. As the man
himself says: "The days when Liverpool won the league only using 14
players are no longer possible – nobody even thinks about that
now."
It has become a demonstration in how the oldest manager in the
business has not only moved with the times but managed to stay in
front of his contemporaries. Ferguson learned from the Champions
League in 1993-94 that the same players could not be used in all
competitions and it was from that point onwards that he started
introducing the younger members of his squad in the League Cup and
some European matches, gathering momentum to a point now when he
has not named the same starting XI since the final weeks of the
2007-08 season.
Yes, Ferguson is helped by having a bloated squad after some
hard and sustained spending but he is also, undeniably, the doyen
of rotation and, in another sense, a trend-setter when you consider
the number of managers who have tried to copy the same methods.
At the halfway point of their season, the United manager has
already used 30 players, acting on a combination of computer
analysis as well as his own judgment to work out when players need
to be rested and look for the first tell-tale signs of fatigue.
A decade ago, the concept of playing, and sticking to, a regular
team was so ingrained on the football world that the critics would
have solemnly dismissed such methods as a recipe for disaster. Now
it can be described as flexibility, or ingenuity, or simply being
one step ahead of the rest. "The idea is to get everyone making a
contribution," is Ferguson's take. "You might get some players who
you would not say are automatic to play but they know that, come
the end of the season, they can look back and say they contributed.
The modern-day game is all about a squad."
Ferguson spent long parts of his press conference today praising
his squad for the way, in his opinion, they had managed to cope
since Cristiano Ronaldo moved to Real Madrid. The team, he felt,
had become too reliant on Ronaldo's goals and at the start of the
season he made a point of informing his players that, without their
star performer, it would be more of a squad responsibility now than
it had ever been.
United have had to contend with considerable injury problems
but, even so, Ferguson has manufactured it so that only eight
players – Ryan Giggs, Dimitar Berbatov, Michael Carrick, John
O'Shea, Antonio Valencia, Wayne Rooney, Darren Fletcher and Patrice
Evra – have started 10 or more of their 19 league games.
Giggs might be on that list but, a month into his 37th year, the
club's longest‑serving player is increasingly being used with
strategic care. The same applies to United's oldest player, Edwin
van der Sar, and the club's other thirty-somethings, Paul
Scholes, Gary Neville and, newly, Rio Ferdinand.
Van der Sar, to cite one example, has sat out every
League Cup tie since the final against Wigan in February 2006. In
the last international break, he and Giggs were both given time off
to take their families on holiday to Dubai.
The idea, according to Ferguson, is that his players are
"fresh" for the business end of the season and, by asking
them to share the load and repeating the process every
week, a culture has developed in the dressing room whereby they
have come to expect it, and accept it is the best strategy.
Last season United played more games (66 in 290 days) than any
other campaign in their history. Only once, when Liverpool got
through 67 in 1983-84, has an English team shoehorned more matches
into a single season. Another successful campaign for United would
mean playing a similar amount this season and that is why Ferguson
will continue to rotate more than a fairground ride.