Manchester United

[Raste]

Den gode gamle tråden her er jo savn under United kamper. Etter det ble splitting så har jeg følt at ikke alle gidder å gå i kamptråden osv.

[Old Game]

Når du skal være konstant morsom (uten å egentlig være det) så blir det bare slitsomt Jotun. Ta deg en kopp kaffe, sett deg utafor boligen din å tenk ut noen mer gjennomtenkte vittigheter. Du er fin i små mengder

 

Vi får ta kamptråd her i mårra vi to Raste, som i gamle dager! Her har vi "feiret" CL og PL gull sammen

Endret 28. februar 2011 av Goldwing

[Jørgen]

Synes det er deilig å slippe å bla igjennom 20 + sider etter en kamp i denne tråden. Jeg er nesten aldri i kamptråden under kamp, og jeg leser vel bare halvparten av kamptrådene.

[Raste]

Når du skal være konstant morsomt (uten å egentlig være det) så blir det bare slitsomt Jotun. Ta deg en kopp kaffe, sett deg utafor boligen din å tenk ut noen mer gjennomtenkte vittigheter. Du er fin i små mengder

 

Vi får ta kamptråd her i mårra vi to Raste, som i gamle dager! Her har vi "feiret" CL og PL gull sammen

Ja, gode tider det Game

[Ol'H]

Jeg liker kamptrådene jeg, kanskje ikke så nødvendig for hver kamp men men.

[Old Game]

Starter dagen som redcafe okkupant med litt hjertevarme. Jeg skal bygge opp til tidenes kamphumør i ren old school stil, bli med folks! Nåde om noen flytter innleggene mine forresten!

 

The nicest 'celebrity' I've ever served was a young footballer. Strange to associate footballers with manners, I know.

 

He walked towards me, and as somebody who's son is a fan of the team he plays for I knew who he was as soon as he spoke to me.

 

At a hundred miles an hour and clearly flustered he said "I was wondering please if you could help me Miss. Do you sell - I'm sorry, I cannot pronounce it in English. Tagleeeteeelea. I'm sorry. That doesn't sound right. I can write it for you.....oh but my spelling not so good either. Is OK. Thank you anyway."

 

I quickly reassured him I knew what he wanted and I'd show him where it was.

 

The whole walk around to the pasta aisle he apologised for not being able to find it himself, for 'troubling' me and even for his pronunciation.

 

When we got there it was like I'd taken him to a case of buried treasure. his face lit up and he said 'Oh this is it. Yes! Thank you so very much Miss.'

 

Then he pulled out a 5 pound note and said 'for you'

 

I laughed and asked him what it was for and he said 'A tip. Because you help me so much.' When i explained that we can't accept tips and it's not generally customary to even be offered them, he blushed and said he was confused with tipping because it's very different where he's from - but to know that he was very grateful.

 

I finally told him I knew who he was and that my son was a fan. He was very pleased, and we talked for a few moments about his team and then we said our goodbyes.

 

I told my son when I got home and his face lit up, although he was annoyed at me for not getting an autograph! I didn't even think to ask!

 

The next day though, I was called by name to the customer service desk - and who stood there but my mystery footballer. He must have read the name on my badge. It turned out that he'd brought my son a signed shirt and even brought an unsigned photo with him so that he could dedicate it personally to my son once he'd asked me for his name.

 

Truly nice person.

 

His name? Most of you probably won't have heard of him. Javier 'Chicharito' Hernandez.

 

Kjenner at jeg blir varm helt inn til hjerterota. Hernandez all the way for meg, min soleklare favorittspiller i dagens Utd.

 

Ble du ikke varm nok i sjel og sinn? Neivel, her har du enda en kjernekar: Sir Ryan Giggs

The first game: 2 March 1991. You look at the photos now and so much has changed. Old Trafford, back then, was an unsophisticated place, desperately in need of investment, much in line with a city struggling from the effects of post-industrialisation. "Madchester" might have been booming but Manchester was far from the metropolis of stylish apartment blocks, Calatrava bridges and glass condominium towers we see now.

 

Ryan Giggs was 17, wearing a shirt that seemed slightly too large for his skinny frame. Manchester United 0 Everton 2. The team were on a run of seven league games without a win, almost a quarter of a century since their last title. It was an inauspicious debut. "The thing that sticks out is Dave Watson coming through the back of me," Giggs says. "It was 'welcome to the big boys' league'. I had a big cut on my knee for ages after that." Otherwise, he cannot remember too much apart from Ferguson shouting at everyone in the dressing room.

 

The anniversary is on Wednesday. "Twenty years of tramping up and down that bloody wing," as Ferguson puts it. Though, Giggs being Giggs, he doesn't want too much fuss. He cringes when it is put to him there might be a statue for him outside Old Trafford one day. "A statue? I really don't know about that …" He is 37 now, flecks of grey hair appearing around his ears. Retirement is on the horizon – maybe only 15 months away – and there is the odd moment of insecurity. "I wasn't worried about it three or four years ago but I am now," he confesses. "I'm wondering what I'm going to do."

 

Coaching is one option. An ambassadorial role is open to him at United if he wants it. Giggs, one senses, will remain part of the Old Trafford furniture. There have been many super-talented kids come and go at this club. None has lasted 20 years. Nobody has played so many games. Or with such continued excellence. It has been an epic and anachronistic run. "Twenty years, I do feel proud," says a man who increasingly possesses the universal appeal of Sir Bobby Charlton. "You're talking about a player coming into a successful team at the age of 17 and staying there for 20 years. It's not impossible, but it's tough to think it will happen again."

 

The question he gets asked most these days is simple: what's the secret of his longevity? But there are many different factors. "First of all, it's what you're born with; your genetics." After that, it's about "trying to live your life the right way."

 

The younger Giggs – that wiry kid with the mop of curly hair – was on first-name terms with Manchester's nightclub doormen, but that had its drawbacks. "Coming into the first-team, a lot of hype, celebrity girlfriends, it meant photographers following me all over the place." Giggs felt as though his privacy was being invaded. In his first full season he remembers the now-defunct Today newspaper "ran a week-long feature delving into my family, my dad's family, the rift between my mum and dad. It was just … I just didn't like it."

 

Giggs has had his fair share of lost nights, but he's virtually teetotal now and just wants "to keep a low profile". He finds it amusing that Rio Ferdinand should tell almost 600,000 followers on Twitter what he has eaten for breakfast or what cartoons he likes best. "Yeah, I don't get that ... I really just don't get that."

 

He turns up for this interview in a simple top, jeans and a £40 pair of Converse pumps. That kid of 1991, the boy who played football like a man, has become the man who plays football like a boy. Tuesday night, against Chelsea, Giggs will equal Charlton's record of 606 league appearances for United. In all competitions, Giggs has played for the club 861 times, overtaking Charlton (on 758) on the night of the 2008 European Cup final.

 

"At the beginning it's just desire to get in the first team and stay there," he explains. "Some players might lose their drive, but not the ones I've been friends with. You get older, but the desire is still there, and you actually enjoy it more." Plus he makes another point: "I've played for Wales, remember, and playing for Wales and playing for United, I know the difference. It's a lot easier when you have quality around you, believe me. I might have been finished three or four years ago otherwise."

 

Giggs has never been one for pumping his fists or long, impassioned dressing-room sermons, but in that quiet, understated way, he also has a fierce determination to keep on winning. It is his fix, he says, the only true form of job satisfaction. Plus there is the fear of failure that so many top sportsmen use as motivation. "Last year, for example, when Chelsea won the double. It winds you up. You don't want it to happen again. You don't want to feel like you did last summer. You want to feel like the year before when you won the league. You think about those moments just as much as you think about the things you've won. Probably more, in fact."

 

This is a common theme among Giggs's generation at United: remember the bad times, make sure they are the exception rather than the norm. "It stays with you. You go away on holiday, you're lying on the beach trying to enjoy yourself with the kids, and you do. But then you have a quiet moment, it comes back to you and you can't help it, you're pissed off. You're on holiday, and you're just pissed off."

 

The worst time? "My first full season, when we lost the league to Leeds. That awful feeling of emptiness." The European Cup final in 2009, losing to Barcelona, was a close second. "On the coach outside the stadium, you know you haven't played well personally, and you haven't played well as a team. It's the last game of the season, you'll never get it back and you're just gutted. We didn't perform. That was the worst thing. We just didn't perform. At United you always pride yourself that when you lose a goal you react – but we didn't that night."

 

Giggs, lest it be forgotten, already has two Champions League winner's medals. He was rummaging through his drawers the other week and found them under some clothes, along with his OBE and a couple of league winner's medals. "Oh, here they are," he thought. Most of his collection has been donated to the club museum, though he does treasure some possessions. "The night of the European Cup final in Moscow, Bobby presented me with a watch . . ." His eyes sparkle.

 

In 20 years he has had 131 different team-mates – good, bad, indifferent and, in a few cases, exceptional. A few weeks ago, Giggs nominated Paul Scholes as the best ("I've never seen anyone make the game look so easy"). This time he chooses differently. "Probably Roy [Keane]. If Bryan Robson was playing you never thought you were going to lose. Then Robbo left, Roy took over that mantle and you felt invincible with him around." Did Giggs escape the Irishman's furies? "No one got away with it. But I was here before him, remember. I didn't get it too bad."

 

As for Ferguson, Giggs seems convinced his manager will outlast him. He tells a story of Ferguson contracting the virus that went around the club before the Manchester derby last November. Ferguson was feverish, looking like death. Then it came to match-day and he was there in the dugout. "He loves the challenge. I just can't see the gaffer leaving in the near future. He'll be around a lot longer than me." Ferguson turns 70 at the end of the year, but Giggs shrugs. "Maybe not another 10 years, but four or five definitely."

 

Ferguson, he says, is a "lot more mellow these days, a lot less scary than when I was 13," though Giggs has lost count of the number of times his eyebrows have been singed by the "Hairdryer". One of his favourite stories remembers how, a few weeks after his debut, Steve Bruce and Robson told him that now he was established as a first-team player he should ask Ferguson if he qualified for a club car. An emboldened Giggs duly knocked on the manager's door. "He went absolutely nuts," he recalls. It was only later that the teenager realised he had been set up.

 

Older, wiser, Giggs has become the popular face of Manchester United, revered throughout the game. His medal count is staggering (forty-eight and counting, if you count the times he has been a runners-up). Giggs did not invent the art of dribbling but there have been times over the last 20 years when it felt as though he had taken it to its highest level.

 

He is also well qualified to respond to Didier Deschamps's observation last week that United no longer play with the "fantasy" of old. "Since losing Cristiano [Ronaldo] and Carlos [Tevez], losing great players, I know why people might say that, but we're still in a really strong position. We're top of the league, we're still in the Champions League, still in the FA Cup."

 

And the mind goes back to that game against Everton 20 years ago. "It was thoroughly colourless stuff," the Guardian reported at the time. "Manchester United's championship hopes, for the 24th consecutive season, had long gone cold." Giggs's appearance, as a 35th-minute substitute for the injured Denis Irwin, does not warrant a mention. "It felt like a wake," Giggs remembers. But the skinny kid with the gashed knee has not done too badly.

 

Jo mer jeg tenker på det, jo mer ønsker jeg å se Hernandez på topp i aften. Gutta bak hos Chelsea er tunge og treige, og ingen er vant til å møte en så bakromshissig spiller som Javier. Rooney og Berba er bedre spillere, men gutta er ikke i nærheten av like giftig og ingen av dem truer så konstant på topp. Begge liker å trekke ned, kjenne på ballen og generelt være endel av midtbanen. Hernandez kan være helt usynlig for å så angripe en bakromspassning som om det skulle vært den siste risposen i Etiopia. Dessuten er han dødelig effektiv på hodet og er kanskje den største trusselen vår dersom det slåes inn presise innlegg.

 

Jeg mener oppriktig at han er den dødeligste spissen i PL og jeg tror en kamp som i kveld er skapt for Hernandez. Vil se taipanen (verdens giftigste slange) mot LFC også forresten. Godgutten

Endret 1. mars 2011 av Goldwing

[The Hoff]

"Hernandez kan være helt usynlig for å så angripe en bakromspassning som om det skulle vært den siste risposen i Etiopia."

 

Du slutter aldri å overraske meg meg med geniale analogier. Skriv en bok, vær så snill!

 

Dette var forresten ikke ironi/sarkasme.

 

Jeg lader forresten opp til kamp med å sitte på lesesal, lese, drikke kaffe og slippe ut kubikk på kubikk med tarmgass.

[kandinsky]

... bennær'n.

 

Mener selv at Chicharito og Berba skal starte, men siden 4-5-1 er like sikkert som at Torres kommer til å goale, så håper jeg på Hernandez i spissen såklart. Synd jeg må jobbe en del i dag, ellerså skulle jeg benka meg her sjæl.

 

Legger ned et ønske om å for evig kalle Hernandez for taipanen.

 

Mer Giggs-love:

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/mar/01/ryan-giggs-ten-best-goals?CMP=twt_gu

Endret 1. mars 2011 av niko.

[Old Game]

Valget av taipan (innenlands) var ikke tilfeldig heller.

Just a single bite from this snake contains enough venom to kill 100 human adults or an army of 250,000 mice. Its venom is at least 200 – 400 times more toxic than a common cobra. The Inland Taiwan's extremely neurotoxic venom can kill an adult human in as little as 45 minutes. Fortunately this snake is very shy

 

Har egentlig lesedag i dag (har tom tatt fri fra jobb til dette formål) og skulle vært på biblioteket, men faen altså, jeg eier ikke selvdisiplin eller moral. Sitter her i godstolen med kaffekoppen, pcen og planer om en ekstravagant frokost. Er så lei av å ta opp (forbedre) fag for å komme inn på skole når ingenting frister, så tenker på å drite i hele greia (planen var å ta opp de to fagene jeg har karakter 2 i, dvs tysk og matte) å hive meg på noe studier til høsten. Kanskje jeg skal ta en maritim utdanning å komme meg ut på sjøen igjen... Har krabbet urovekkende fort opp i åra å vekk fra stempelet som ung og lovende

Endret 1. mars 2011 av Goldwing

[The Hoff]

Du virker alt for glup til å ikke klare å forbedre ett par 2ere? Privatundervisning i tysk av der Emil?

[Old Game]

Haha, hadde vært noe! Har greie karakterer ellers, så kommer da inn på mye selv med dos toers i bokji. Men klart det hadde åpnet mange dører om jeg hadde forbedret loddene i karakterboka, det er bare det at jeg syntes det er pyton å lese på fag jeg ble uteksaminert i for flere år siden.

 

Kanskje jeg skal ta lærertudanning. Hvem vet, kanskje jeg rekker å undervise Raste i et år eller to før han tar steget videre til videregående skole!

[kandinsky]

Da ville jeg mye heller valgt pleier-yrket og satset på å teste ut noen nye varianter av lobotomering på Smågal.

[Jotun]

Hva med brannmann Gold?

 

Isj. Vært hos øyenlege og han dryppet noe graps inn på øynene mine. Bedøvde noe baki der som gjør at eg ikke klarer å fokusere på nært hold. Må sitte med pc'en på armlengdes avstand for å se hva som blir skrevet

Endret 1. mars 2011 av Jotun

[Old Game]

Hva med brannmann Gold?

Er dette jotun eller mrs jotun som snakker? Hvis det er sistnevnte så ja, jeg leker gjerne barnmann.

 

Hva blir resultatet i dag guttaboys? Jeg tipper 1-2, Smalling og Rooney for oss.

[IcedInsanity]

Hva med brannmann Gold?

Er dette jotun eller mrs jotun som snakker? Hvis det er sistnevnte så ja, jeg leker gjerne barnmann.

 

Hva blir resultatet i dag guttaboys? Jeg tipper 1-2, Smalling og Rooney for oss.

 

Barnmann?? Har du SETT kjerringa til Jotun eller?

Endret 1. mars 2011 av LunaticFanatic

[kandinsky]

1 eller maks 2p på den neste to på Brua og Anfield. Er egentlig middels fornøyd med U idag altså. Tipper det blir 1-0 til Chelsea v/ Torrini.

[Geir M]

0-1 Nani scorer.

[Vamos]

Vi snur 1-0 til 2-1. O'Shea med goal etter 89 min.

[Gjest Slettet-EIV2CS]

Våkna som vanlig alt for tidlig, halv 8. Fant rundstykker i frysen og kokte 3 egg. Efter frokost var det ut å sette et makrellgarn og et trollgarn. Inne igjen til lunsj rundt 12 og henta meg inn igjen på HIMYM fram til middag. Servelatpølse, poteter, makaroni og løk for de spesielt interesserte. Har også vært oppe på løkka og spilt litt fotball idag, deilig med litt ballkontakt etter å ha vært ute i 6 uker etter jeg sleit et leddbånd i ankelen. Sitter her nydusja og det er bare et tildsspørsmål før Solskjær 98-99 kommer på. Skal fyre i gang xboxen og spille meg bort frem til kampstart, nervøsiteten klarer jeg ikke å holde borte lenger. Bilder av Torres som sender ballen forbi VDS mens han jubler sammen med JT og Drogba svir seg inn i panna.

 

Ellers vurderer jeg om kampen skal sees i stillhet med gardinene trukket for i kjellerstua eller hos en kompis. Håper mest på 4-4-1-1 med Giggs-Scholes-Fletcher-Nani|Rooney-Hernandez. Uansett utfall så håper jeg at Berbatov ikke blir alene på topp, det funker bare ikke. Etter å ha lest innlegg av Goldwing må jeg si at Chicharito fikk en ekstra stjerne i boken. Skremmende å sammenligne pris og ferdighet mellom han og Bebe.

 

Kjenner også at landskampen nærmer seg, jævla dansker: http://www.idiot.se/roliga-filmer/name-that-smell

[Old Game]

Drogba

"Some years ago I could have said, 'I dream to play at AC Milan, Real, or Manchester United'.

 

"But nowadays I don't feel such desire anymore. I am at one of the best clubs in the world. Those desires have been gone for a while."