Of Ryan Giggs

Recently, this blog turned three years old. Yet it doesn't contain a single post on Ryan Giggs – an oddity when you consider that I am a fan of Manchester United. I wish, though, to clarify that this is down, solely, to my failure to find the words that describe Giggs best.

On Tuesday night, with my eyes red and sore from lack of sleep I watched Manchester United defeat Chelsea and book itself a place in the semi-finals of the Champions League. Both goals on the night, as was the case with the solitary goal in the first leg of the tie, were created by Giggs – a player who at thirty-seven years of age continues to make the biggest of impacts at the highest of stages. His performance left me ecstatic and yet a little dazed. How do you describe a player who has been a paragon over a career that has spanned more than twenty-years?

To this day, I struggle to find the right words to describe Giggs’s brilliance – he is perhaps a freak of nature or just a peerless genius who with striking regularity chooses to impose his will like no other. Every time, though, when I endeavour to put words on paper to express the sheer class that has permeated through his career, I find that my vocabulary – limited to mundane adjectives like ‘brilliant’; ‘superb’; ‘outstanding’; ‘great’, etc., all of which he is, and more – is utterly inadequate to define the full extent of his qualities. What I can say, however, is watching Giggs play, at least as a Manchester United fan (I cannot speak for the others), is as joyous a sight as there is. Enough said.