Sam Wallace: Giggs' recipe for success: hard work, diplomacy – and avoid Best practice

In 2003 United fans cheered when he was substituted against Blackburn Rovers.

Back in 1993, when football clubs were just cottoning on to the idea of exploiting the commercial value of their biggest players, Manchester United authorised a video documentary in which Ryan Giggs met George Best to compare notes on life as a teenage star at Old Trafford.

Click here or click the image on the right to launch our guide to Giggs' career in pictures.

It was a pretty unremarkable affair but, given how little Giggs was permitted to speak to the press, it was the first insight into United's new prodigy. He drove around Manchester with a Granada TV presenter wearing a purple Reebok jogging suit (Giggs, not the presenter) stopping off at his mum's house and his favourite clothes shop to try on some jackets that looked like Barry Venison's cast-offs.

It ended with Best taking Giggs to his old haunt in Manchester, the Brown Bull, once the epicentre of his hip 1960s scene. By 1993 it was another tired, empty pub. Giggs had an orange juice; Best had half a pint. The presenter asked Giggs about avoiding the "mistakes" made by Best. Diplomatically, Giggs swerved the question. No one mentioned the fact they were in a pub with Britain's most famous alcoholic.

On Sunday, Giggs will be 36 years old. That documentary, made when he was 19, was almost half a lifetime ago, just after his first Premier League title. Now he has 10 more league titles, two Champions League titles and four FA Cups. All the promise that was hinted at 16 years ago has been fulfilled beyond anyone's imagination. Giggs has had an astonishing life in football.

He was once again a central figure on Saturday in United's demolition of Everton, the team he made his debut against as a substitute in March 1991. It was Giggs who picked out Michael Carrick for the second goal. Eighteen years on and Giggs is still a marvel; still a fixture in a team picked by the most unsentimental manager in the world.

Sometimes it takes a burst of nostalgia to remind you just what a great figure in English football he has become. Sometimes he can even be taken for granted. One thing's for sure: we will miss him when he is gone.

Giggs is the most successful player in the history of the English game and he has played at arguably the most powerful club in the land for his entire career. But it has not always been plain sailing. Roughly speaking, his career can be broken down to the periods before and after his 30th birthday, a crucial point at which it looked like he might at last be edged out of United.

The start of 2003 was the worst time for Giggs. He was so out of favour with United fans that they cheered when he was substituted against Blackburn Rovers in the Worthington Cup. He missed a sitter against Arsenal in an FA Cup fifth-round tie United lost at Old Trafford. Although he had signed a five-year deal the previous season, all the signs were that United were finally prepared to cash in on the interest of Internazionale and their owner, Massimo Moratti.

It might be too simple to say that Giggs turned it around with two goals against Juventus in Turin that February, but they certainly helped. Giggs himself came to remember it as one of his best seasons. United won the league title in May; it was David Beckham that left not Giggs; Cristiano Ronaldo arrived and a new era began.

Giggs has not lost his pace – or at least not all of it – and he has seen off so many pretenders to the left wing it is easy to lose count: Keith Gillespie, Ben Thornley, Jesper Blomqvist, Jordi Cruyff, David Bellion, Kieran Richardson, Park Ji-sung and Luis Nani. Good luck, Zoran Tosic. Yet even now, when Giggs plays mostly in central midfield, Ferguson still seems to consider him his first-choice left-winger for the big games; he picked Giggs on the left against Chelsea this month.

Giggs' introduction to United was into a team of old-school players, including Bryan Robson, Gary Pallister, Lee Sharpe and latterly Roy Keane, who all liked a drink. Yet Giggs never became a drinker. He was the ideal player to be commercialised and packaged up in the same way that Beckham and Wayne Rooney have been. Yet, one dodgy TV advert for Quorn aside, Giggs has never really embraced all that.

Sometimes it is the hardest thing to stay and fight against indifference. Somewhere along the line it might have been easier, and more lucrative, to leave United. But every summer Giggs has knuckled down and survived Ferguson's culls. Every working day he has climbed into his car, driven that familiar route to the training ground and made himself indispensable all over again.

He gives little away, which is how Ferguson likes it. His autobiography, in 2005, was candid about his feelings for his estranged father and his violence towards Giggs' mother. Yet when it came to Ferguson there was zero disclosure. In 18 years in United's first team, Giggs' greatest act of rebellion still seems to be attending that party at Sharpe's house which has become one of football's most well-worn anecdotes.

From that 1993 documentary only one ambition held by the 19-year-old Giggs remains unfulfilled and that was "to reach a World Cup with Wales". To be fair, at the time he did not know that once Ian Rush retired it would be the likes of Robert Earnshaw playing up front. But what a happy birthday: to be 36 and still one of the main men at Manchester United. When poor old Best was that age, he was at Bournemouth.

Keane's state-of-the-nation address

Great stuff last week from Roy Keane, the only man capable of turning a press conference about a game against Sheffield Wednesday into an all-out attack on the character of the Irish football team. I have said it before, the man is comedy gold. We should have more of him. Surely a contender to give Channel Four's alternative Christmas speech.

When Rafa enjoyed Phoenix-like revival

Like the look of the film 15 Minutes that Shook the World about half-time in the Liverpool dressing room during the 2005 Champions League final. It just makes me wonder how Rafa Benitez feels about being played by the same actor (Neil Fitzmaurice) who played Ray-Von in Phoenix Nights and Jeff in Peep Show. Hats off to Fitzmaurice, though, he has nailed Rafa's voice.

All or nothing to play for

Can't wait for the English teams' Champions League games this week: two matches (United and Chelsea) that mean nothing and one in which Arsenal need only a point at home to qualify. Well done, Uefa, on a fascinating competition. As usual, Liverpool will be the only entertainment.