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Ryan Giggs
| Category: | Male Player |
| Year Inducted: | 2005 |
Profile by Robert Galvin, the author of Football's Greatest Heroes, the official book of the National Football Museum Hall of Fame:
Ryan Giggs has made more appearances for Manchester United than any player in the club’s history, amassing a record number of individual domestic honours and two Champions League winner’s medals along the way.
Since making his debut at Old Trafford on the left wing as a 17-year-old, Giggs has won a record 10 championship medals, to add to his four FA Cup and two League Cup gongs.
Fittingly, the Welshman marked his achievement in overhauling Sir Bobby Charlton’s total of 758 games in a United shirt by converting the decisive strike in the penalty shoot-out against Chelsea in the 2008 Champions League final in Moscow.
Ten days earlier, on the final day of the Premier League season, Sir Bobby was present at the JJB Stadium when Giggs came off the bench to score the goal against Wigan Athletic that secured the title, again at the expense of Chelsea.
‘Ryan’s record with United is unbelievable,’ Sir Bobby told reporters. ‘I’m really proud of him. He is a great athlete and a great person. The day he came to Manchester United, I knew he was special.’ Sir Bobby wasn’t the only one.
‘Whatever the club has paid me in my time as manager was justified at a stroke by securing Ryan as a player for the club,’ Sir Alex once wrote. ‘When he runs at people, he can leave the best defenders in the world with twisted blood.’
Several Arsenal players might recognise the condition. Three or four of them were behind the ball when Giggs took possession in his own half during extra-time at Villa Park in the semi-final of FA Cup in 1999.
‘I expected him to lay it off, but he just kept on coming,’ David Seaman, the Arsenal goalkeeper said, ‘and it was a real shock when he beat the lot and was right in on goal. His finish was exceptional, too. Ryan just smashed his shot past me from a narrow angle ’
It proved to be the winning goal. ‘Given the context, [United were down to 10 men] this has to be one of the best goals ever scored in major football,’ Ferguson said later. ‘Giggs will tear you apart again,’ the United supporters chanted, re-working the lyrics of the cult Joy Division song.
The following month Giggs was the first player to embrace Ferguson in the wake of Manchester United’s 2-1 victory over Bayern Munich in the Champions League final in Barcelona. ‘The strain Ryan put on the opposition was one of the factors that steadily drained them in the second half,’ Ferguson said later, referring to the part Giggs played in United’s remarkable comeback.
Little had changed in fact since Ferguson first saw Giggs in action. Standing on the touchline at the Manchester United training ground, the Scot watched with increasing excitement as a young, wiry teenager tore the opposition to shreds in a trial match.
‘When I saw Ryan in that game he gave one of those rare and priceless moments that make all the sweat and frustration and misery of management worthwhile,’ Ferguson recalled in his autobiography. ‘I shall always remember my first sight of him, floating over the pitch at the Cliff so effortlessly that you would have sworn his feet weren’t touching the ground.’
A United fan as a boy, Giggs had been training at the Manchester City school of excellence (he had a habit of turning up in a red football shirt). On his 14th birthday the Giggs family received a visitor at their home in Swinton: Ferguson made a special journey in order to persuade the teenager to sign schoolboy forms.
Within four months of turning professional in November 1990, he made his first-team debut. ‘He was a hero to the younger lads, like me,’ said David Beckham.
At international level, the Cardiff-born Giggs made 64 appearances for Wales, before announcing his retirement from international football in 2007.
His value to Manchester United was recognised when the club broke an unwritten rule: that only a one-year contract is offered to a player once he turns 30; for Giggs, however, Sir Alex Ferguson made an exception. ‘I wanted three years, but we quickly settled on two,’ he said.
George Best, the great United idol of the 1960s and the player against whom Giggs has been compared throughout his career, watched the Welshman’s progress with interest. ‘One day they might even say that I was another Ryan Giggs,’ Best said in 1992.