Ryan Giggs at 40: How the Manchester United midfielder did it

It has taken toughness, steely self-confidence and a rare hunger for the game, as well as skill, to keep the United legend running. Ian Herbert talks to those who know the birthday boy well

Ryan Giggs applauds the Manchester United away fans on Wednesday (AP)

A strange way to relate the point, perhaps, but the quality which has most kept Ryan Giggs at the top of football as he turns 40 on Friday revealed itself in a yoga session two years ago.

It was supposed to be a PR exercise to promote a DVD which the 37-year-old with 599 league games under his belt, was launching with Sarah Ramsden, the yoga professional who has done so much to aid his longevity. Instead it became an object lesson in Giggs’ largely unappreciated teak toughness.

The idea was he and I would undertake the session together – and where less focused players might have joked along with the hopelessness of the interviewer, Giggs was straight-faced serious. “Pull up from the obliques,” he said, quietly but insistently. And, when we moved into the next series of stretches: “You don’t need to touch your toes if you’re feeling the hamstring.”

This is the flintiness Gary Neville has always felt is the essential point about Giggs. Neville and Roy Keane joined in sessions with Ramsden at the same time but they dropped off. Giggs, devastated when the latest of the many muscular injuries which had such a debilitating effect on the middle part of his career had ruled him out of United’s Champions League tie at Bayern Munich in November 2001, clung to yoga as one of his professional lifelines. He’s still running, 12 years on.

“He’s got a steely way about him, Giggsy, on and off the pitch,” Neville related years later. “He’s slight but people know he’s not to be messed with.” If you can judge a man by his friends then the fact that Giggs was even closer to Paul Ince, than to Nicky Butt, his great partner in wind-ups, certainly tells us something. It has taken something quite exceptional to make the Welshman flinch, down the years. The one moment most of his former United team-mates can remember came on a team-bonding trip to SAS headquarters in Hereford 21 years ago when the helicopter pilot briefly and deliberately cut his engine to simulate some drama. “Paul Ince froze and Giggs looked like he’d been dead for a fortnight,” said a witness to that experience.

From all he has written and said about Giggs, it seems Sir Alex Ferguson rated his toughness slightly less than the players. Ferguson’s new autobiography, which is revealing on this subject, describes how Giggs – “Bless him!” – was always the one he selected first when he was dishing out the stick. He “has a temper but a slow one,” Ferguson said, though that’s not quite the view of those who bore witness to the former manager carpeting Giggs after his dismal first-half performance in Juventus’s Stadio delle Alpi – on the way to a 1-0 defeat which encapsulated United’s dreadful autumn of 1996. Neville recalls Giggs biting right back and getting substituted because of it.

Ferguson’s characterisation extends to him viewing Giggs as an introvert. Yet others who observed the Welsh winger at close quarters, emerging as a force at United’s Cliff training ground in the early 1990s, describe the inviolable self-confidence of a teenager who knew precisely where he was going, even then. “From the first time I interviewed him, he had an unwavering gaze and held your eye,” says David Meek, the former Manchester Evening News sportswriter who chronicled so much of Giggs’ early progress. “For a young footballer, interviews can be unnerving but there was something intent about him fixing you with those dark eyes. I always felt it was a feature of someone confident in himself.”

Meek’s recollection provides a marked contrast to how Arthur Hopcraft, legendary chronicler of football in the 1960s and 1970s, remembered first meeting a diffident young George Best: “He bit his lip a lot, and shyly looked at his interviewer’s breast pocket.” Giggs was the one of those two young United prodigies who knew his mind. It is reasonable to make Best the point of comparison. Those who have only watched United for 10 years or so may not fully appreciate what a freak of nature the teenage Giggs was. But Roy Keane saw Giggs, two years younger than him, as “light years ahead” and Ferguson has no compunction about discussing the “George Best comparison” in his book.

The contrasts between Giggs and Best extend well beyond self-confidence, too. While Best’s contribution tragically narrowed to very little, Giggs’ expanded to a point where, to Ferguson’s mind, he was trying to do too much. This may have been a product of his unalloyed love of football – another Giggs characteristic which Neville discusses in his fine autobiography Red. And, whatever the cause, it did affect his performances. One of the lesser appreciated details about that Giggs goal against Arsenal in the Villa Park FA Cup semi-final replay of 1999 is that the then 25-year-old had been consigned to the bench that day, in part because of a dip in form. Ferguson felt that in his attempt to broaden out aspects of his game – awareness of space and passing – Giggs had “forgotten” the raw speed, balance, touch and courage which had made him one of the world’s supreme players.

In part, the manager blamed himself for this. It is testament to the powers of Ferguson’s man-management that he had asked Giggs into his office before the Arsenal replay, to talk him through a video he had asked to be put together which showed how the winger was overlooking his prime quality of running at defenders. “The real Ryan Giggs should step forward more often,” he said at the time.

Though Giggs later said that statement perplexed him, the fruits of Ferguson’s wisdom were certainly harvested that night in the Midlands. The irony was that Giggs later broadened out his game all over again, learning the art of playing central midfield, second striker and even full-back, to extend his United career. “There have been other long-serving players, but to have done it in his position, with the bravery to take the ball and to keep taking players on, is something special,” Neville wrote. “He’s been so intelligent, adjusting his game.”

The hunger for the game which will see Giggs play into a fifth decade is rather an anachronism now. “When he started, players could not retire when they wanted because they didn’t have the money,” says one elite technical director, who was in the Wales coaching set-up when Giggs was progressing through international ranks. “The money in the last decade has removed that need to go on and yet here is a multimillionaire, choosing to do so. There are very few in today’s elite game who find football such an all-consuming passion like that.”

Ferguson tells a very good story about an Italian agent ringing him up in the late 1990s, asking what his children did and – after hearing the United manager’s answer – declaring: “Sell me Giggs and I’ll make them rich.” He ended the conversation with customary haste. A good decision, that.