WHEN ALEX Ferguson was asked recently about the team he was planning to play in the next match he leant back in his chair and announced to the assembled journalists that if anyone predicted his side accurately he would pay for them to have a weekend in Loch Lomond before adding, Fergie being Fergie, that he would make sure “the midges were out”.
The prize, as you can imagine, went unclaimed. It has become football’s equivalent of nailing a jelly to the wall and tonight, when Wigan Athletic visit Old Trafford, we can expect it to be the 99th consecutive game in which the Manchester United manager has not kept the same side.
Another manager would have been rumbled by now but Ferguson has managed to put together one of the more remarkable runs of modern-day football almost under the radar and without any of the scrutiny that plagued Rafael Benitez when he did the same thing three years ago or, before that, the misgivings that surrounded Claudio Ranieri’s judgment during his time at Chelsea.
The critique of Ranieri’s methods often bordered on derision and when Benitez finally sent out an unchanged team it was tempting to conclude that the decision owed partly to him trying to appease a hostile media.
Ferguson, in stark contrast, is not facing any calls to abandon the habit and revert to something more orthodox and on Sunday, when Leeds United are the opponents in the FA Cup, we can safely assume the run will reach 100 and counting.
As the man himself says: “The days when Liverpool won the league only using 14 players are no longer possible – nobody even thinks about that now.”
It has become a demonstration in how the oldest manager in the business has not only moved with the times but managed to stay in front of his contemporaries. Ferguson learned from the Champions League in 1993-94 that the same players could not be used in all competitions and it was from that point onwards that he started introducing the younger members of his squad in the League Cup and some European matches, gathering momentum to a point now when he has not named the same starting XI since the final weeks of the 2007-08 season.
Yes, Ferguson is helped by having a bloated squad after some hard and sustained spending but he is also, undeniably, the doyen of rotation and, in another sense, a trend-setter when you consider the number of managers who have tried to copy the same methods.
At the halfway point of their season, the United manager has already used 30 players, acting on a combination of computer analysis as well as his own judgment to work out when players need to be rested and look for the first tell-tale signs of fatigue.
“The idea is to get everyone making a contribution,” is Ferguson’s take. “You might get some players who you would not say are automatic to play but they know that, come the end of the season, they can look back and say they contributed. The modern-day game is all about a squad.”
Ferguson spent long parts of his press conference yesterday praising his squad for the way, in his opinion, they had managed to cope since Cristiano Ronaldo moved to Real Madrid.
The team, he felt, had become too reliant on Ronaldo’s goals and at the start of the season he made a point of informing his players that, without their star performer, it would be more of a squad responsibility now than it had ever been.
United have had to contend with considerable injury problems but, even so, Ferguson has manufactured it so that only eight players – Ryan Giggs, Dimitar Berbatov, Michael Carrick, John O’Shea, Antonio Valencia, Wayne Rooney, Darren Fletcher and Patrice Evra – have started 10 or more of their 19 league games.
Giggs might be on that list but, a month into his 37th year, the club’s longest-serving player is increasingly being used with strategic care. The same applies to United’s oldest player, Edwin van der Sar, and the club’s other 30-somethings, Paul Scholes, Gary Neville and, newly, Rio Ferdinand. Van der Sar, to cite one example, has sat out every League Cup tie since the final against Wigan in February 2006.
In the last international break, he and Giggs were both given time off to take their families on holiday to Dubai.
The idea, according to Ferguson, is that his players are “fresh” for the business end of the season and, by asking them to share the load and repeating the process every week, a culture has developed in the dressing room whereby they have come to expect it, and accept it is the best strategy.
Last season United played more games (66 in 290 days) than any other campaign in their history. Only once, when Liverpool got through 67 in 1983-84, has an English team shoehorned more matches into a single season. Another successful campaign for United would mean playing a similar amount this season and that is why Ferguson will continue to rotate more than a fairground ride.
PROBABLE TEAMS
MANCHESTER UNITED (4-4-2): Kuszczak; Neville, Vidic, Brown, Evra; Valencia, Carrick, Anderson, Park; Rooney, Owen. Subs from Foster, Rafael, Scholes, Giggs, Gibson, Obertan, Berbatov.
WIGAN ATHLETIC (4-3-3): Kirkland; Melchiot, Boyce, Bramble, Figueroa; Thomas, Gomez, Scharner; Rodallega, Scotland, N’Zogbia. Subs from Amaya, De Ridder, Sinclair, Kingson, Cho, Bouaouzan, McCarthy.
Guardian Service
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