Football: Lessons of a hellish night in Istanbul: Richard Williams on how Alex Ferguson's dream went up in smoke

WHEN they came out to get a feel of the place, an hour and a half before the kick-off on Wednesday night, the Manchester United players had the look of men who'd been sent over the top, into the guns. As they emerged from the tunnel - a concrete trench which was to be the location of the match's bitter epilogue - they were hit by the sound of 40,000 people whistling: the breath of hell.

Walking the length of the field, searching for the knot of United supporters at the far end, they looked lonely and lost. The blast of the whistling, which rippled the flags and banners that had turned the whole ground red and yellow, seemed to make them sway like reeds in a gale. Within a couple of minutes, though, the whistling had stopped, to be replaced by a chant borne on the thunder of a hundred tenor drums.

Manchester, Manchester, fuck you, Manchester.

That was what they sang, 40,000 of them. In the plainest English. So this was what we had taught the world: the manners and vocabulary of the modern football match.

In fact the congregation gathered in the Alisamiyen Stadium in Istanbul on Wednesday - led by the Prime Minister of Turkey, Mrs Tansi Ciller - gave a performance of which any home crowd in the world would have been proud. Most of them had been there since lunchtime, making a day of it, tuning up the singing and the drumming. And when the moment came, they created an atmosphere that was part- Maracana, part-Millwall - half festive, half ferocious. The ideal ambiance, in other words, with which to complete the intimidation of a visiting team whose nerves were already stretched and twanging, having been programmed to expect a special degree of animosity.

The funny thing is that there was nothing really malevolent about the Turkish crowd. Their behaviour was noisy, but - despite the vocabulary - it was not hateful. Nothing to compare, certainly, with the baser exchanges that have gone on between, say, the supporters of Manchester United and Liverpool in recent years. The Turks certainly felt that the English had insulted and patronised them in recent times, but the players were only a symbolic target of their grievance. At the airport two days earlier, the banners carried by a welcoming committee of no more than a hundred Galatasaray fans had a bantering tone, if you cared to look past the slogans.

Instead of withering as the storm raged around them, the United players should have been instructed to defuse the tension. A wave to the ground as a whole, rather than just to their own fans, would have been a helpful piece of public relations. But in England in 1993 we have lost the instinct for that kind of gesture, for that kind of generosity - or even for its simulation.

Galatasaray beat Manchester United in the second round of the European Cup on Wednesday night because they and their supporters wanted it more. There were tactical and technical reasons for the result, but no amount of footballing analysis should be allowed to obscure the effectiveness with which the Turkish club's players translated their sheer desire into a match-winning performance. None of the emotion was wasted: every scrap was focused on the task at hand.

But it was outrageously patronising to suggest, as some did, that this represented Turkish football's finest hour. Galatasaray, founded in 1903, reached the semi-finals of the European Cup a mere four years ago - when, after overcoming the scarcely negligible opposition of Rapid Vienna, Neuchatel Xamax and Monaco, they were beaten by Steaua Bucharest, who in turn fell to the Milan of Gullit and Van Basten in the final. Manchester United, 25 years after their own solitary success in the competition, would have settled for that kind of showing this or almost any other year.

While most of the United players stood in a little knot at the far end, trying to absorb the intensity and to take some warmth from the presence of their own fans, Eric Cantona had had enough. All alone, he walked back across the turf and down into the mouth of the tunnel, his solitary procession exposing that exaggerated ballet dancer's carriage - the straight back, the splayed feet, the head held straight and level by some internal gyroscope. Something was clearly going on in the Frenchman's head, but at that stage his thoughts were impossible to guess. A shade over three hours later, in that same tunnel, Cantona's equilibrium had gone as he became the central figure in the match's squalid final act. Beyond the circumstances of that episode, which may be impossible to determine with any kind of judicial precision, his reaction to defeat explained something about United's failure.

They won the championship last season, a year after handing the title to Leeds when their nerves betrayed them, because Cantona arrived in the autumn to bring the one quality they lacked: a sense of relaxation. From Alex Ferguson down, they were overwhelmed by the knowledge of how important the title had become to Manchester United, and by the sheer weight of destiny. Cantona felt no such burden. To him, after Auxerre, Marseille, Bordeaux, Montpellier and Leeds, Manchester United was just another club. And, unlike any other member of the Old Trafford playing staff, he had actually won the championship. His insouciance came to their rescue, spreading among his team-mates like a virus.

The European Champions' Cup, though, is something else. For a start, it is a French invention. Until Marseille's tainted triumph last May, no French club had won it. But a great French forward, Raymond Kopa, appeared in the first four finals - for Stade de Reims in their defeat by Real Madrid in the inaugural edition in 1955- 56, and then for the Spanish club in their next three victories - and an even greater son of the Hexagon, Michel Platini, scored the only goal in the 1984- 85 final, for Juventus against Liverpool. Cantona may have seen himself as their spiritual heir, a fellow exile obliged to rent his talent abroad.

Whatever the reason, Alex Ferguson was right when he said afterwards, apropos of Cantona's performance, that 'the lad was desperate to do well'. That desperation sabotaged the Frenchman's contribution to the team effort, already undermined by Ferguson's fretful decision to omit Mark Hughes. Left alone at the point of the attack, with Ryan Giggs and Lee Sharpe operating half as wingers, half as inside-forwards, Cantona found himself asphyxiated by the attentions of his marker, the powerful Reinhard Stumpf, and the sweeper, Gotz Falko. Without Hughes to take the weight and hold the ball, Giggs and Sharpe found themselves drifting towards the centre rather than holding their shape and stretching the flanks of the Turkish defence. 'We never crossed the ball once,' Ferguson lamented afterwards, but the reason for that had as much to do with his own strategy as with the performance of his young wingers.

Putting the strength and experience of Hughes in the grandstand rather than on the pitch also exacted a price in midfield, where Paul Ince disappeared, as usual, into the shadow of Bryan Robson. It seems cruel to say so, but United won the title last season in Robson's absence, and the two events may not have been unconnected. The old warrior's attitude - teeth bared, tackles snapping late at opponents' ankles - makes him look awfully old-fashioned. Nowadays, at international level, trophies are won without the help of a Peter Storey or a Romeo Benetti. Ince's finest performance last season was the exhilarating league match at Loftus Road, where, in Robson's absence, he took on the Queen's Park Rangers midfield single-

handed and ran himself to a standstill in leading United to a 3-1 victory. When Robson is there, Ince defers to his reputation and standing within the club: a net loss to the team. On this occasion, of course, Uefa's nationality rules effectively meant that Ferguson had to pick Robson; but to have omitted Roy Keane, unhappy on the right side of midfield, would at least have left more space for Ince to express himself.

Such is the wisdom of hindsight. As for prediction, it may not be too far-fetched to draw a parallel between last week's defeat and the psychological implosion that cost Old Trafford the championship in the spring of 1992. As Alex Ferguson emerged from the dressing- room on Wednesday night, his dignified smile looked like an emblem. In order to win, it seemed to say, sometimes you must first learn how to lose.

(Photograph omitted)