Scholes' standing leg steals the show

David Beckham started well but drifted into obscurity at the San Siro, writes Richard Williams

A GALA night in one of football’s great theatres, and just you try keeping David Beckham out of it, particularly with his England manager in the dress circle. In the third minute, before the stadium had time to draw breath, Patrice Evra fouled Alexandre Pato and up stepped the man of the hour. A long free-kick from the right, an overhead clearance from Evra, an instant volley from Ronaldinho, lurking unattended on the edge of the area, and a deflection off Michael Carrick past the wrong-footed Edwin van der Sar. There, Fabio Capello. Your trip was not wasted.

A bit of a scruffy goal, by Milan’s standards, but it seemed to justify Leonardo’s decision to restore Beckham to the starting line-up in place of Gennaro Gattuso. Not that the home side’s coach would have dreamed of leaving him out on such an occasion. La Scala needs its stars, and so does San Siro. It was not looking quite so clever 70 minutes later, when Beckham was substituted after achieving little else and United seemed to be on their way to a famous victory.

In purely footballing terms, of course, Milan have a bigger star than Beckham, and Ronaldinho’s presence constantly illuminated the first half as he tormented Rafael da Silva, his young compatriot, with flicks and darts and backheels, all of which had the crowd sighing with delight.

Milan could have been three up by the time United equalised. Beckham added little more before the interval, beyond a harmless corner from the right and a free-kick from 25 yards that flew several feet over.

Instead it was one of his fellow members of United’s FA Youth Cup-winning team of the early 90s who reshaped the evening, and perhaps the tie.

And if Milan’s goal was scruffy, then United’s effort in the 36th minute was pure comic opera, although at least Paul Scholes’s bizarre contribution came at the end of the best piece of collective interplay of the half, a move of at least 10 passes involving half a dozen players. But how weird that Scholes, such a consummate technician, should come by a goal via the unintended consequence of an air-shot, the ball missing his right boot and bouncing off his standing leg to trickle inside the far post, with Nelson Dida and his defenders looking on in horror. Even the half-time replays on the giant screen were whistled by the home fans.

Gattuso’s absence had certainly helped Scholes to enjoy his evening. Deployed in the sort of deep-lying position Milan allocate to Andrea Pirlo, he was able to take his time on the ball before distributing it with generally unerring precision as United mounted a series of strong attacks in their efforts to cancel out their earlier misfortune.

Strange, too, that with such an unsightly piece of work he should become the United player to achieve the thing none of his predecessors had managed in the four away legs against Milan stretching back to 1958. Among those unable to make their mark at San Siro were such prolific strikers as George Best, Denis Law, Bobby Charlton, Dennis Viollet, Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Ryan Giggs. Not one of them had been able to find a way past defenders bearing the names Schnellinger, Nesta and Maldini, and such goalkeepers as Lorenzo Buffon, Fabio Cudicini and – until last night – Dida.

United’s best chance over the two legs is probably offered to them by the inexperience of Leonardo, who took charge last summer. This is the 40-year-old World Cup winner’s first coaching job – quite a place to start, you might think, and quite a gamble on Silvio Berlusconi’s part – and his total lack of any kind of record makes a dramatic contrast with that of the other coaches the English club encountered in their earlier meetings with Milan.

In 1958 there was Giuseppe “Gipo” Viani, credited with establishing Milan’s reputation for attractive, attacking football, whose team included Juan Schiaffino and Niels Liedholm, while Jimmy Murphy managed United during Matt Busby’s convalescence from his Munich injuries. Eleven years later Busby’s team of Charlton, Law and Best fell to Nereo Rocco’s Milan, an all-star outfit led by Gianni Rivera.

The two teams avoided each other for the next 36 years, Alex Ferguson and Carlo Ancelotti meeting for the first time in the round of 16 in 2005, when an unanswered goal by Hernan Crespo in each leg finished United’s interest in the competition, and two years later Ferguson and Ancelotti, this time in a semi-final, United winning the first leg 3-2 but losing the return 3-0. Still United had not scored in the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza.

And when they did, there could be only amazement that a match full of such an open, entertaining, skilful, imaginative football should turn, and then turn again, on a couple of acts of pure fate, part of the action but in a sense divorced from it. Rooney’s goals, midway through the second half, were altogether more orthodox affairs, silencing the Milan fans who had jeered him earlier, and suddenly United’s assault on history was gaining its reward.

Guardian Service