Fergie Week: Manchester United 2-3 Real Madrid (1999-2000)
On the day of the United match, Marca devoted its entire cover to one phrase, repeated 14 times: “No nos asusta el Manchester” (“We are not afraid of Manchester”). You did not need an NVQ in psychology to know what was going on.
In the Independent, the Spanish football expert John Carlin dismissed their chances. “If team spirit, if individual skill, if organisational solidity, if current form are the elements that determine the outcomes of football matches, there is no way Real Madrid can knock Manchester United out of the European Cup,” he wrote. “So overwhelming is United’s superiority in almost every department that, should Real win, those who make a living out of imposing conventional reason on the beautiful game (football writers, say, or television pundits) will be obliged to concede that they are trading in gibberish, that analysis counts for nothing, that victory and defeat in football are determined by forces that surpass human understanding.” His conclusion was pretty straightforward. “If United fail to win, forget all logic in football.”
Carlin was far from alone in drawing such a conclusion. In the aftermath of that astonishing victory over Bayern Munich, it was widely assumed United would dominate Europe for the next five years and establish the same kind of legacy as the great Bayern, Ajax and Liverpool sides of the 70s and 80s. We now know that such a dynasty is nigh-on impossible — nobody has retained the trophy since Milan in 1990, and nobody has won three in a row since Bayern in 1976 — but at the time it felt like a natural conclusion.
The main reason for that was United’s almost unprecedented sense of omnipotence. It wasn’t necessarily arrogance; they conceded the first goal far too often to think they were bullet-proof, but they came back so often that there was an understandable if misplaced feeling that they could get out of any hole. In the 21 months since the start of the 1998-99 season, when the signing of Jaap Stam and Dwight Yorke completed the formation of this particular side, they had come from behind to win or draw an astonishing 31 games, eight of them in Europe, two of them, against Juventus and Bayern the previous season, in circumstances that beggared belief. “I don’t think this team ever loses,” said the assistant coach Steve McClaren. “It just runs out of time.”
Their rare defeats could be rationalised in other ways, too. Their failure at the Club World Championship in Brazil could be attributed to an alien environment and a once-in-a-lifetime shocker from Gary Neville, who got the yips and gifted Romário the first two goals in a 3-1 defeat to Vasco da Gama. Of United’s three league defeats in the previous 16 months, two came when they were down to 10 men for large parts of the game, at Chelsea and Newcastle, and the other, a 3-1 loss at Spurs, involved three freakish goals. There was an unspoken sense that, with a level playing field, United could not be beaten. They certainly had few fears about Real. “We weren’t going to underestimate them,“ wrote Jaap Stam in his autobiography, “but there was a feeling around the squad that the draw could have been a lot trickier.”
Life has never been as good as it was for United on the afternoon on 4 April 2000 as they approached the kick off in the first leg. This is not a conclusion entirely drawn in hindsight. “If the club lives for another thousand years, men will look back and say, ‘This, then, was the drunkest hour’,” wrote the United fan Richard Kurt in the Irish Examiner that day. “At this moment, as the red clans clamorously gather, the universe seems ours for the taking.”
A year earlier, United had lived on the edge throughout their triumphant European Cup campaign. Even their staggeringly accomplished victory over Juventus came after they’d been 2-0 down. Now, it seemed, they had the chance to take the next step by hammering Real on their own pitch. Instead, a peculiarly passive United were fortunate to earn a 0-0 draw.
Although Real had much the better of the game, United had the best chance, with Andy Cole heading over from three yards after Stam had flicked on David Beckham’s corner. Glenn Hoddle famously said that Cole needed five chances to score and, while most were happy to treat the word of Hod as gospel in this instance, the reality is that Cole’s problem was not the quantity of his misses but the quality of them. There were some beauties throughout his career, which meant that Cole, arguably the most rounded England striker of his generation, was often treated as a bit of a joke. Take this Madrid tie: Cole is remembered for missing that chance, yet he contributed appreciably more than the largely anonymous Dwight Yorke.
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