Martin Thorpe
PELE missed and Alex Ferguson reckons Nayim’s was a miskick. It took one of Manchester United’s young pretenders to show the world how to look up, take aim and score with a dazzling lob from halfway. And it came as no surprise that that man was David Beckham.
If life is sweet for United at the moment, it is a dream for their London-born midfielder whose exploits on his return to the capital may well have sealed his inclusion in Glenn Hoddle’s first England squad to be named.
He scored the goal that put United into the FA Cup final, and another in the Charity Shield, and impressed Hoddle in the summer under-21 tournament in Toulon, so the writing could soon be on the team- sheet.
So much for speculation that the arrival of Poborsky and Cruyff would force the floppy-haired Beckham to the fringe of the United team. His passing, positional sense and ability to do the simple and difficult things well have become too important to Ferguson’s thinking.
Yet just over a year ago this precocious graduate of the United youth side was on loan to Preston, wondering where his career was going in a division where fame brought him only a memorable kicking from Fulham’s Terry Hurlock. “The move did worry me,” he says in broadest cockney. “But I now accept I was a bit behind the other lads at United, who seemed to be making more progress than me.” Since returning to Old Trafford he has been a revelation, either on the wing or tucked inside dispensing cool imagination and guile to the United midfield.
It is all he ever wanted. Although he comes from Leytonstone, United were always his team, his bedroom wall plastered with pictures of the idols he was soon to join. Now he is on England’s doorstep but, as he awaits his first call-up, Ferguson rightly offers caution. “David is young and there is a long way to go yet,” he said. “But I think he can handle an England call-up all right.” We’ll just nurse him the way we have been doing.”