Is this season Ferguson's crowning glory?

When looking back on the greatest Manchester United teams that Sir Alex Ferguson has ever managed, it is easy to look at the teams of the mid and late-90's.

Those teams were littered with players who had a persona or spirit that Manchester United teams are held up against. Even with United winning three straight EPL titles, and advancing to the UEFA Champions League title match in each of the past two seasons (winning it all in 2008), those teams aren't usually mentioned in the same breath as the teams of the past decade.

Considering the standards that have been set by previous teams, this current group could be Ferguson's crowning achievement - Oliver Kay of the Times writes of how this season could be Ferguson's crowning glory.

The most fascinating aspect of this Nineties nostalgia is that Sir Alex Ferguson basks in it like everybody else. Last May, with United on the brink of a third successive Barclays Premier League title and still the European and world champions, he was asked to name his favourite team and he opted, as he has always does, for the 1993-94 vintage, going dewy-eyed at the thought of such fearsome characters as Peter Schmeichel, Steve Bruce, Roy Keane, Paul Ince, Mark Hughes and Eric Cantona in the same combustible dressing room.


For Ferguson, that remains the yardstick against which all other United teams fall short. Never mind that they were routinely embarrassed in the Champions League (hamstrung by the limitations on foreign players, yes, but also guilty of great naivety against more experienced European campaigners) or that the late-1990s team — in which Ryan Giggs was joined by Gary Neville, David Beckham and Paul Scholes — achieved more. The class of 1993-94, for Ferguson, remains the epitome of what a United team should be.

The modern United side do not seem to inspire anything like the same affection, whether from Ferguson or from those players who span the generations. When Scholes was asked last year to name the greatest XI of the players he had played alongside at Old Trafford, there was no Nemanja Vidic, no Patrice Evra, no Wayne Rooney and no Cristiano Ronaldo. In their places were Wes Brown, Denis Irwin, David Beckham and Teddy Sheringham. (Cantona, curiously, was not named in the XI or among the seven substitutes.) While Scholes’s choices were typically homespun, Giggs’s XI (again no Vidic, Evra or Ronaldo) was strikingly similar.

If the United of last season failed to inspire affection, while winning a third consecutive Premier League title and cruising to the Champions League final before losing to Barcelona, there seemed little hope for the class of 2009-10, who lost six league matches by mid-February and, with Ronaldo now at Real Madrid, have at times looked like a pale imitation of some of their more illustrious predecessors.

They are a team that lack the flair or the cavalier spirit that is more readily associated with the great United sides, yet they have managed to score 72 goals in 31 league matches, four more than they managed in the 38-game campaign last season. At times they have appeared to lack authority and steel, yet they have dug in to record victories in the biggest matches, when the stakes have been highest. Even their hunger has occasionally been called into question, but they, like all the great United sides, appear to be running into championship form at the right time.

This might not, on paper, be a great United team — and it is quite feasible, at this stage of the campaign, that they will end the season empty-handed — but in some ways this is beginning to look like the most admirable of all Ferguson’s sides. There are perhaps fewer world-class players than in any of his successful teams — Rooney certainly, Evra probably, Vidic and Rio Ferdinand theoretically but with question marks over their fitness — yet it is slowly proving to be greater than the sum of its parts, epitomised by Darren Fletcher, once an ugly duckling of a footballer, now beginning to fancy himself as the cock of the North.

And even some of the more problematic parts, such as Nani and Dimitar Berbatov, have begun to fit into place; their combination for the third goal in the 4-0 victory away to Bolton Wanderers on Saturday was something to behold.

Three games in eight days — away to Bayern tomorrow, at home to Chelsea in the Premier League on Saturday and at home to Bayern a week on Wednesday — will go a long way towards determining what kind of United team this is. In many ways they are the antithesis of the 1993-94 side so beloved of Ferguson — mild-mannered and at times lacking the character, as much as the physique, to stamp their authority on opponents — but the resolve that characterises all his teams has certainly been in evidence recently. It will never be anything like the 1990s again, but, in Manchester, it can often seem like nothing will.