Good article. Long, but worth reading. Good insights into roles.
Owen Hargreaves, sitting in the hot seat
Owen Hargreaves plans to put his European pedigree to good use against Lyons on Tuesday
Jonathan Northcroft
It has not taken Owen Hargreaves long to speak Manchester United. All the correct terminology is used. Wayne Rooney is “Wazza”, Nemanja Vidic, “Vida”, he mentions “Giggsy and Scholesy”, not “Ryan and Paul”, as a naive new squad addition might. And the most important person is afforded his proper soubriquets.
“The Manager knows what he needs,” Hargreaves says, or “it was The Boss’s idea . . .” Hargreaves talks the lingo as if Carrington has been his workplace for years. Born in Canada of English parents, it took him a long time to become a footballer in this country and at the club he long wanted to play for but Hargreaves and United now seem a perfect fit.
It was different in Germany. Plucked from Canada, he arrived at Bayern Munich an adolescent in a strange country, but there was no willkommen mat. “At Bayern, the tension in the team was probably a bit too much. There were tackles and fights all the time. I remember my first season, you can’t imagine how many fist fights I had with older players. They felt threatened by me,” Hargreaves says. “I wasn’t going about my business in a poor way, I was just playing hard, training hard and making myself be known. They took offence because they could feel me coming through.
“Here it’s not like that at all. There’s no animosity. If you play, you’re good enough and you deserve to play. It’s not a case of being dropped or anything like that and if you play for United you realise there’s a bigger picture. Every player here has a different style and who’s picked depends on how we want to play. We played Arsenal and Lyons back to back and picked different teams in both games.”
It is not just that United are what Hargreaves wants; Hargreaves is what United want, and that, of course, is no accident. After the Djemba-Djemba/ Kleberson/Bellion summer of 2003, when missing out on Ronaldinho appeared to make Sir Alex Ferguson take a funny turn in the transfer market, he has been pristine with his signings and the secret has been concentrating on one or two specific targets per season rather than buying en masse. Where Rafael Benitez might spend a transfer window acquiring three or four Yossi Benayouns for £18m, the Ferguson policy is to buy one Anderson or Michael Carrick for the same price. So it was with Hargreaves, who United spent almost two years trying to prise from Bayern prior to his arrival in July 2007. “Man United sign their players specifically based on the needs of the team, which is very clever. A lot of teams don’t do that. They buy anyone, or just look at the name, then try and fit all the players together,” Hargreaves says.
Ferguson was looking for a holding player, but not any old holding player. He wanted a midfielder who would sit, but not sit still. Defensive midfield measures are required in modern football but given the number of attacking options he still wanted fitted into his side, Ferguson wondered if he might not be able to get one player to do the spoiling midfield job other clubs use two to do. Not only would that player need positional awareness and discipline, but also levels of fitness and speed necessary to get about the normal territory of two men. Step forward Hargreaves; Arsène Wenger, for similar reasons, alighted on Mathieu Flamini.
“The manager knows what he needs and because we play so open and attacking, we need someone who is not just a traditional holding midfield player but who can cover a lot of ground as well, because the distances are quite big. I knew that coming in, and that’s what I do best,” says Hargreaves. “I had to play against Kaka last year and that’s why they signed me. Against Lyons my job was to keep an eye on Juninho and limit his abilities. When you play against these top players it’s difficult to completely knock them out of the game, because they’re that good, but you do what you can.
“Ideally, everyone would like to have the stepovers and overhead kicks and be like Ronaldo. But we all have abilities and you learn what you do well, and then focus on doing that. When you’re younger you want to try to do everything, but here you’ve got to look at the bigger picture. We’re all pieces of a puzzle and the pieces fit to make our team, and if everybody does what they do well we can probably beat any team in the world.”
With such a mindset it seems bizarre that Hargreaves was watched by Liverpool when his team came over from Canada for an under-14 tournament in Wales and was rejected by Steve Heighway, Liverpool’s then academy manager, who told Hargreaves’s father: “Nah, he’s too greedy.” Nowadays, selflessness is his key. Ferguson has said it is in Europe that he expects Hargreaves to make the biggest difference to United, and while injuries restricted his involvement in the Champions League group stages to one 11-minute substitute appearance against Sporting Lisbon, he was straight into the team for the first knockout stage first leg against Lyons and is expected to start in Tuesday’s return game at Old Trafford.
He has the pedigree, having won the Champions League with Bayern before he started a game for England. He also has the confidence. “United are like Bayern,” he says. “For us even a draw is a bad result. I expect us to be in the FA Cup final, I expect us to be in the Champions League final and, hopefully, to win the league again. We have the abilities.”
Hargreaves feels that despite the fact that one away goal for Lyons could alter the dynamic of the tie, United should progress. “It will be difficult for them to score at Old Trafford because it is for any opponent, and we felt 1-1 over there was a good result,” he says. “An away goal in the Champions League is massive. I thought [Karim] Benzema played well and scored a great goal, but we contained them in open play and it was just the set-pieces that were dangerous.”
Though the tendinitis that ruined the early part of his season can still flare up on a firm surface, the sky appears otherwise cloudless for this Germano-Canuck Englishman. “I never thought I’d travel so much,” he says. “I look at the places I’ve lived like chapters in a book. There’s no point reminiscing. I’m here now and enjoying it. At Munich, you were expected to know your place. There’s a hierarchy. Here, if you’re good, you’re good. There are no young and old players, they say, only good and bad ones. I think in England that is a true statement.”
Capello’s verdict
This game won’t be easy, but it was good for United to get the away goal. Lyons have to score at Old Trafford, but if they come to attack, it will be present a problem. Everyone knows if United fi nd the space on the counter-attack they will be dangerous. I remember United v Roma last season. When Roma attacked, United counter-attacked. We all saw what happened then. If United play to their strengths in this competition they can achieve success
The protector: how Owen Hargreaves shields his defence
Two heads are better than one? Not if you’re Sir Alex Ferguson. Whereas most top teams in Europe use at least two ‘sitting’ midfielders to protect their defence, Manchester United deploy just one. Ferguson was specific about his requirements when he signed Hargreaves, realising the need for a more defensive midfield player to use in the Champions League but not wanting to compromise too far his attacking principles. The solution was to find a player who could not only hold a defensive position in front of United’s back four, but get around a large area of midfield to make tackles and interceptions while more positive midfielders like Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs or Anderson could concentrate on going forward. The player to fit the bill would have to be disciplined, aggressive, quick and super-fit: step forward Hargreaves
In midfield, Scholes’s job is to pass the ball forward and go up in support of attacks. Hargreaves, meanwhile, stays, ready to dash across to wherever necessary to make a tackle or interception if United’s move breaks down and the opposition gain possession. Against Lyons he had the additional responsibility of looking after the elusive Juninho, who plays a roving role behind Lyons’s front line. Of the 16 teams to play in the Champions League first knockout stage on February 21-22, only two others used the same attacking model as United: Barcelona, for who Yaya Toure is a solo defensive midfielder, and Arsenal, where Mathieu Flamini is the closest to a copy of Hargreaves
You obviously never watched the match