The Sunday Times - 30th May 1999

One by one, they walked from the dressing room. A red rose in their lapels, a gold medal around their necks and new assurance in their bearing. The journey from changing room to team coach was like a bridge, taking them from a glorious past into a future that promised even more. As they ambled on there was no need and even no inclination to rush.

Beckoned, they stopped. On other evenings, this intercourse with journalists is a chore, an immunisation injection to be taken before re-entering the real world.

Jaap, a few words? "Yah. When we scored the goal, there was a sense of 'maybe there's time for another one'."

What a thing to say. Any other team would have settled for the reprieve.

Asked if he thought people would now love the team, Gary Neville said: "After what we've done and the way we've played, people have to admire us, even if they don't like us."

Nicky Butt said the laps of honour at the end knackered him and the medal was for Terry, his dad.

"Being part of Manchester United," Dwight Yorke said "was the best feeling any footballer could have."

Once they called him the man with no medals. Teddy Sheringham fingered the latest in his collection and said: "This is a squad for digging deep."

GOLD is not often found near the surface. Roy Keane was last to leave the changing room. "Won without me tonight, probably cost me a few quid as I have got to renegotiate my contract," he said.

Then, more seriously: "The top teams come back and win these trophies again; that's what I want us to do. I'm ambitious. I can't wait for next season to begin."

How different it had been for the Germans. Past us they went, grim-faced and silent - dead men walking.

As he got to the team coach, Mehmet Scholl could no longer stifle the need to scream. Putting his hand to his face, he shouted, "Shit, this is unbelievable, this is unbelievable, I should have won this."

Overhearing him, a few journalists approached and Scholl tried to tell them how badly he felt about the chance he had not taken. Should have scored that goal, he said. Bayern would have won, but instead he hit the post.

Seeing the commotion Oliver Kahn got off the bus, pushed away the journalists and turned to his teammate. "How can you do this?" he asked before pushing Scholl onto the bus. A disappointment so deep, so personal, was not to be shared with strangers. The door of the coach snapped closed and Kahn had his solitude.

However wronged the Bayern players may feel, destiny is not a question of chance but rather a matter of choice, it is not something to be waited for but a thing to be hunted. United's pursuit has been season-long and unrelenting. They fought to the end as they had all through.

On their European trail, United travelled to Barcelona, Inter and Juventus and didn't lose. On an October night in Brondby, they scored six. "It was," said Brondby coach Ebbe Skovdahl, "football from another planet."

Yet even those evenings of thrilling football were surpassed by the final leg of the campaign - the 10 days to eternity.

It began on a Sunday afternoon against Tottenham; the one that should have been the easiest but wasn't.

"It was the one I was most nervous about, because it was the one that would set us up," said Gary Neville. Senior players remembered the failure to beat West Ham in a similar match four years before, how that had cost them a championship and, six days later against Everton, an FA Cup final.

Against Spurs it wasn't a smooth, convincing performance, for by now, injuries and tiredness had weakened the team. So fearful were United of things going wrong, it was as if they half-expected Les Ferdinand's goal. Beckham's equaliser just before half-time steadied them.

During the interval Ferguson told the players he was taking off Sheringham and introducing Andy Cole. Many of them considered Sheringham was being harshly treated but didn't dare say it. Sheringham himself was desperately disappointed. He had played well in the first half, setting up things that hadn't been finished. But then, with almost his first touch, Cole neatly killed Gary Neville's long pass, took another touch to tee himself up and then lobbed Ian Walker. In an instant Ferguson had been vindicated.

COLE'S performance as substitute was the first act in what would become a recurring sub-plot. United scored six goals in winning the three games, four from substitutes. Not only had Ferguson assembled an impressive squad and managed to keep the back-up players sharp and keen, his instinct for when to use them was unerring.

After getting past Spurs, the team felt good about the Newcastle game. Having just won the Premiership, they saw Ruud Gullit's team as the perfect stepping stone to the game that mattered most.

Most felt it inconceivable they would now lose to Newcastle. "I remember going in at half-time," said David May, "and saying to Scholesy, 'I am not even tired, I can't believe this is a Cup final, I can't believe how easy it is'.

"There was no way I thought we could get beat, not in a million years. There was no way they would score."

They celebrated Wembley but observed the agreed 2am curfew. Next afternoon they trained at Bisham Abbey, not the weary session of the bleary-eyed but a lively and good-humoured workout. May roomed with Sheringham and they spent much time talking about the likely line-up for Barcelona. Both had high hopes of starting.

"We tried to work it out," said May. "I reckoned that with Jaap coming on late in the Cup final and Ronny [Johnsen] moving into midfield, that was how we would start against Bayern. Teddy agreed. I think quite a few of us were surprised with the team he eventually picked. It's heartbreaking when you expect you might be in the team and you're not. You think, 'hopefully there'll be an injury or something', so you can do your bit, but at the same time, you don't want anything bad to happen your teammates."

Second-guessing Ferguson is a game fraught with danger. Spurning the safe option of using Johnsen in midfield, he chose a team he believed would win the game. The challenge against German opposition, he had long believed, lay in confronting their mentality, their sense of having superior will-power. His team selection set down an important marker.

There were other expressions of Ferguson's determination not to be cowed. On the day before the game he wore the red, round-necked jersey of United's 1968 team. Lest anyone forget, United had a winning tradition in the European Cup. As his team climbed higher, Ferguson's mind games have become more subtle.

IT WAS a strange match. Engaging but uninspiring for 90 minutes, it then exploded.

United didn't play well but they performed admirably. Unbalanced by the absence of Keane and Paul Scholes, they were further diminished by disappointing contributions from Jesper Blomqvist, Yorke, Cole and Butt.

With so much working in their favour, Bayern will regret not playing with more ambition. They scored a goal and waited for destiny to arrive; United chased it.

"What won it for us in the end was our squad spirit, not team spirit, squad spirit," said Steve McClaren, the assistant manager. "On the night we didn't perform to our potential, didn't play as a Manchester United team expects to play, but we never gave up. That was down to the spirit, epitomised for me by Teddy Sheringham. When I came to Old Trafford in January, Teddy was on the treatment table, but once he was able to train, I have never seen anyone work harder to get his sharpness back.

"Then when it came to the last 10 days, he was actually very unlucky. He played well in the first half against Spurs but the manager thought something different was needed and that Andy Cole might get a goal. Then Teddy was unlucky not to be in the FA Cup final team but he accepted it and performed brilliantly when he got the chance. Again he was left out for the European Cup, came on with 20 minutes to go and turned the match.

"That shows incredible character and it's what the good players have, what makes them different from the players who aspire to be in their positions."

Yet few saw it coming. Three minutes from the end at the Nou Camp, the funeral arrangements for United began. Lennart Johansson, the Uefa president, left his seat and, escorted by security guards, made his way to the back of the stand to take a lift down to ground level. Wondering what he would say to the winning captain, Oliver Kahn, he waited for the lift.

On RTL, the German television commentator Marcel Reif watched the minutes tick away and felt an urge he knew he should resist. But he couldn't.

"Maybe I shouldn't say it," he said, "but I promise never to say it again, ever. Football, as Gary Lineker once said, is a simple game; 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win."

Reif had barely finished when United won a corner on the left, their 11th of the match. "I knew things were desperate when I saw Peter going up for the corner," Keane would say later. Three men jumped with Schmeichel, the ball broke to Yorke at the back post and he nodded it back inside. There seemed little danger as it bounced in front of Thomas Linke, the clearance should have been routine. But Linke miskicked, the ball spinning right to Ryan Giggs, whose shot was turned in by Sheringham.

WARUM? [Why?] blazed Bild Zeitung on its front page two days after the game. Why had Linke miskicked?

Beckham lined up the 12th corner less than two minutes later, Sammy Kuffour stood alongside Ole Gunnar Solskjaer deep inside the Bayern penalty area. Then the strangest thing happened. Anxious about congestion in his six-yard box, Kahn pushed Kuffour away, clearing the area in front of him but allowing Solskjaer space he would never have expected. Beckham's precise corner and Sheringham's controlled flick-on did the rest.

WARUM? screamed Bild. Why had Kahn done something so stupid?

Lennart Johnsson couldn't explain. "The lift took a half-minute to come, then you had to go through a long hall, down steps, through different rooms, through the dressing room area, and because we were inside we never heard a thing. At the end there were five stewards and policemen who had to accept we were who we said we were. Then I could see out onto the pitch and I was confused. I thought, 'It cannot be - the winners are crying and the losers dancing'. Then I realised what had happened. At 5am the next morning I saw their goals for the first time."

BAYERN'S players were inconsolable. Kuffour wailed, "no, no, no, no . . . " before finally rising and throwing his jersey to the Bayern fans. Refusing to have anything to do with the presentation ceremony, Mario Basler left the pitch immediately. "The silver medal is the same as last," he explained later. It had been Basler's premature triumphalism that infuriated the United players.

"Our manager tried to console us," said Scholl, "but you were in another world, the words passing over you."

Lothar Matthaüs swung his medal round and round, like a man preparing to throw the hammer.As he did, the United players gathered for the march across the field to accept the Cup and the medals that mattered. As they got closer to the podium, Beckham noticed Matthaüs and, breaking from the Reds, he walked towards his rival. Seeing him come, Matthaüs moved to meet him halfway. They shook hands at first and then embraced.

Their coming together embodied the greatness of the occasion and the manliness of the contest. The young man of English football, the old man of the German game; they had nothing more to give except their respect. One acknowledging that on the greatest sporting nights the margins can be damn fine, the other recognising that no matter how fine, the winner must be congratulated.

In that, Lothar Mattaüs spoke for us all.

Man Utd 2 Leicester 2 (August 15, Premiership)

From the very beginning of the season United were pulling matches out of the fire. Leicester were 2-0 up with 14 minutes left when Teddy Sheringham was summoned from the bench. Sheringham was destined to put one of the final touches on United's treble nine months later in Barcelona; at Old Trafford in August, he helped to lay the foundations by scoring with a header within two minutes of his introduction. In injury time, David Beckham equalised with a 30-yard curling free kick. For Beckham it was the first step in his redemption after the nightmare of France 98

Man Utd 2 Liverpool (FA Cup fourth round, January 24)

The dress rehearsal for the European Cup final, although nobody realised it at the time. Liverpool took an early lead through Michael Owen. The score remained 1-0 until the 89th minute when Dwight Yorke tapped in from close range. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who had come off the bench in the 81st minute (the same time he joined the match last Wednesday) then hit home a left-foot shot from 10 yards to give United a 2-1 win.

Charlton 0 Man Utd 1 (Premiership, January 31)

Again United were taken to the wire. Charlton were in freefall, battling to avoid a swift return to the First Division. They had done everything right - almost. With two minutes remaining, and leaders Chelsea losing to fourth-placed Arsenal across London, Scholes, an 82nd-minute substitute, sent over a cross from the right for Yorke to head in via the Charlton upright. United returned to the top Internazionale 1 Man Utd 1

(Champions League quarter-final, first leg, March 17)

United took a 2-0 lead to Milan and Inter decided to risk the hitherto injured Ronaldo. The decision backfired but the Brazilian's replacement, Nicola Ventola, took advantage of Roy Keane's indecision to side-foot past Peter Schmeichel. Inter pressed for the aggregate equaliser, but with three minutes remaining, Scholes, who had been on the pitch for 11 minutes, finished off a trademark United break to send them into the semi-finals

Man Utd 2 Arsenal 1 (FA Cup semi-final replay, April 14)

At 9.40 on a cold Wednesday evening at Villa Park the pendulum swung both ways for United's treble hopes. The Cup holders were awarded a penalty with stoppage time already ticking away and United down to 10 men after Keane's second yellow card. As the iceman, Dennis Bergkamp, stepped up, the look of helplessness on Beckham's face said it all. But the Dutchman's well-struck shot flew at a comfortable height for Schmeichel, who flung himself to his left to save. The fresh legs of Ryan Giggs slalomed through a tired Arsenal defence in extra-time to score the goal of the season in the match of the season. The Treble was set up that night