Ryan Giggs goes on and on

There are very few people in the football world who don’t have a huge amount of admiration for Manchester United’s Ryan Giggs. Even the many millions of people who hate United seem to find it hard to hate Giggsy. He is universally respected and admired.

Highly

Over the last two weeks we have seen more examples of just why he is regarded so highly. At thirty-five years old, he is being used more sparingly by Sir Alex Ferguson now, but week in, week out, he is showing how important he still is.

Last week we saw Giggs being instrumental in United’s exciting and controversial win in the derby game against City. He absolutely tormented Micah Richards who must have had nightmares about him for several nights after the game.

Rest

This week he was left out of the side and given a well earned rest. United toiled away against a typically resolute Stoke side but despite their huffing and puffing never really looked like getting anything other than a 0-0 draw out of the game.

On fifty-five minutes Sir Alex withdrew the talented but absolutely infuriating Nani and threw on the veteran Welshman. Within seven minutes he had made an exquisite run behind the Stoke defence and squared the ball for Berbatov to tap in the opener and fifteen minutes later his perfectly flighted free-kick was headed home by John O’Shea to make the game safe.

After the game Sir Alex said,

“Ryan Giggs is important and he made the goals. I felt his intelligence would give them a bit of bother on that side of the pitch. Nani did pretty well but Ryan gives you something else. He has the intelligence to take up good positions. For the first goal he went on a lovely run behind their defence and the second was an excellent free-kick.”

In his remarkable career to date Giggs has played eight hundred and twelve times for United since he made his debut back in 1991 as a seventeen year old. Remarkably, Giggs has never played less than thirty-seven games in every one of the eighteen seasons since then.

Titles

He has helped United to eleven Premier League titles, two Champions Leagues, four FA Cups, three League Cups and several other less important trophies. Individually he was twice the PFA young player of the year and last season he finally won the PFA player of the year award. He has been included in the PFA team of the season an incredible eight times and was included in the PFA team of the century. In 2005 he was inducted into English football’s hall of fame.

It is an amazing record and to see him and the equally impressive Paul Scholes still ‘doing the business’ for United is pretty impressive. In fact, after all the talk of how United were going to cope with the loss of Ronaldo and Tevez it seems that it will be a much bigger problem to deal with the loss of Giggs and Scholes when their career’s come to an end. If they ever do!