Bolton 0 Manchester Utd 1: THE LAST time we saw Alex Ferguson dancing like this it was amid claps of thunder on a Sunday afternoon in Wigan after an elegant swish of Ryan Giggs's left boot had brought confirmation of a 10th Premier League title last May.
You know the routine by now. A hop, a step, an unco-ordinated little jump and clap of the hands, and suddenly the oldest manager in the business has gone all Gene Kelly on us.
It needs something special to see this side of Ferguson, and it was not just the quality of Dimitar Berbatov’s winning goal that made this feel like such a powerful moment, but the sense of timing, and what it said about the character of the reigning champions.
It told us that this is a team that can hold its nerve when the pressure is rising dangerously close to intolerable. But then, we probably should have known that anyway. There are not many moments in football more dramatic than the last-minute winning goal and who could possibly dispute that United grip us in this way more than any other team on the planet?
Ferguson certainly likes to brag of his team’s remarkable penchant for the spectacular – “nobody scores more late goals than us,” he says – because this choreographed drama is no fluke. It simply cannot be when it has happened so many times. Habits like this owe nothing to good fortune and everything to nerve. It is known as competitive courage and United are blessed with so much it is easy to understand why their supporters, once again, have adopted the mindset of champions-in-waiting.
On Saturday their team never resorted to lumping the ball hopefully forward, even in those final nerve-shredding moments when it had looked as though Bolton’s massed defence and sleeves-up determination had managed to restrict them to a draw that would have felt more like a defeat.
Other teams than United would have abandoned any sense of refinement and aimed to get the ball as quickly as possible into the penalty area. They would have hoped for a lucky bounce or the drop of the ball.
What United did was trust the qualities that had brought them greatness in the first place. They didn’t rush or panic. They just set about the business of making sure the opportunity to climb to the league’s summit would not be relinquished. They quickened their step, put on their seen-it-all-before faces and started – via the wonderfully intuitive Giggs – the quick, incisive exchange of passes that would break Bolton’s resistance.
“I was looking at the clock towards the end of the match,” Gary Neville would later say, “and there was about a minute and 10 seconds left. But at this club you never think you’re out of the match. You always know you’ll get another chance. That’s been the motto down the years: we’ll always get a chance.”
Giggs had darted inside and, with the outside of his boot, spun a pass into the feet of Carlos Tevez on the edge of the penalty area. Andy O’Brien committed the centre-half’s sin of trying to intercept a ball that another defender was covering and suddenly Tevez was away. His cross was delayed with expert precision and Berbatov was unmarked eight yards from goal to finish.
“We kept doing the right things, we remained patient and disciplined,” said Neville, nodding his head at the sound of his own words. “We kept moving the ball from side to side, we didn’t become desperate and we got our reward right at the death.”
All of which must look fairly ominous to the side they have displaced at the top, regardless of how Liverpool do against Everton tonight. By the time United next play in the league, at West Bromwich Albion tomorrow week, it will be 80 days since they last conceded a top-division goal. It is 15 hours and 42 minutes since Edwin van der Sar was last beaten and, should they make it an 11th successive clean sheet at the Hawthorns, it will be the longest sequence by any club since the Premier League’s formation 17 years ago.
The most remarkable thing? United still do not look as slick and penetrative as many of Ferguson’s previous title-winners. But the imbalance of talent is something to behold in England’s elite league these days. Bolton have not scored in four successive league games and their new striker, Ariza Makakula, did little but create a sense of mystery over how he could ever have won international caps with Portugal. Their manager, Gary Megson, said he was convinced Bolton would hold on. But it is part of United’s beauty that there have been many managers who have said that down the years.
Guardian Service
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/YVIRIOZQ35EWRPZXR27KGMO6YU.png)