At Least They Tried

Being a football fan is all the extremes. It’s what we remember – seasons that stick in the mind tend to be when you’re either going for the championship, or clinging on for survival against relegation. Nobody really talks about the time you came 13th and had nothing to play for after you got dumped out of the cups in the first round.

So it is with players too. Heroes and villains, geniuses and donkeys. Every club has had the reliable type, usually a centre half or full back, who plays 300 games with distinction, but it’s more likely that in the pub we’re talking about the enigmatic winger who can win a game on his own, or the liability of a goalkeeper who throws a few in every season.

In terms of the latter camp, we all enjoy a cheap laugh at the expense of some poor sap who just didn't click. They may well have been good, even very good: the likes of Alan Brazil, Kleberson and Neil Webb played at international tournaments and had plenty of success elsewhere. But for whatever reason (injury, pressure) it didn't work out for them at Manchester United. Here’s my top five Old Trafford failures in my time supporting the club.

Ralph Milne
To give him his dues, Ralphie was a big part of why Dundee United enjoyed some success in the mid 80s. A quick, skilful winger, he’s still their top scorer in European competitions and should have been a Scottish international.

Should have. Ah, the fatal kiss of promise, how bitter the taste lingers. Sadly, a penchant for a drink saw young Milne binned off to Charlton in 1986. But as they were a top flight team at the time, there was still a chance to turn it round. Alas, a few months later, he was shipped off to third division outfit Bristol City, having failed to set English football on fire.

Then, in a show of bizarre transfer dealing that would become a trademark, Fergie elected to give him a chance on the big stage again.

At £175,000, it was probably a gamble worth taking, but replacing as he did Jesper Olsen – an erratic player, but one always capable of a flash of flair – the sight of a prematurely aging Scotsman lumbering down the left wing was never going to prove popular with the Old Trafford faithful. He managed to hold down a place through most of the 1988/89 season, which proved to be our worst since relegation in 1974. Over the summer, Danny Wallace was brought in to take the 11 shirt, and with Lee Sharpe also making a name for himself, poor Ralphie was left to hang out in the reserve team for two years before he was given a free transfer to obscurity.

Jim Leighton
Sorry, Scots readers. I don’t want to be seen to be Jockophobic, but “Slippery” Jim’s name has long gone down in Manchester United history as a byword for erratic goalkeeping and disaster between the sticks.

But how was it so? After all, the man had long established himself as a top player both with Scotland (in the days they always qualified for the World Cup) and Aberdeen (in the days you didn't need to be called Celtic or Rangers to win something in Scottish football). With Gary Bailey retired, Gary Walsh too inexperienced and Chris Turner lacking in quality, he seemed the perfect man to improve a team that had finished second in 1988.

Instead, we endured two years of mid table mediocrity in the league during which he became a target of derision for fans: Red Issue magazine produced a spoof advert for the Jim Leighton Condom (“Catches nothing!”). Come the 1990 FA Cup final, he didn't look at all steady on his toes and it was only a late Mark Hughes goal that earned a reply. In a ruthless, but correct, move, Ferguson dropped the man he’d taken from Aberdeen to the World Cup in Mexico for Les Sealey, who was on loan from Luton.

Les, who gave truth to the adage of goalies being mad, played well in the replay and kept the shirt, earning a European Cup Winners Cup medal and the love from the fans that his predecessor never had. Poor Jim played one more game, against Halifax in the League Cup before drifting back across the border. To his huge credit, he re-found his form with impressive spells at Hibernian and back at Aberdeen, proving good enough to once again play at the World Cup in 1998.

Eric Djemba-Djemba
“So good, they named him twice!” was the joke at the time. Originally, it wasn't ironic, as his sorting of Sol Campbell on his Charity Shield debut earned many approving nods and having the same first name as the King also seemed some kind of omen.

With Roy Keane nearing the end of his days as linchpin of the midfield, a somewhat desperate search to fill the midfield began. Liam Miller and Kleberson were also brought in to different levels of failure in a search that wasn't really ended until Owen Hargreaves arrived in 2007. Of course, that solution turned out to be somewhat fleeting.

Poor Eric, meanwhile, turned out to be hopelessly out of his depth in the Premiership. My abiding memory is of his freakish goal against Leeds, where he managed to half-volley a cross into the roof of the net, after which he seemed as surprised as we were. We were equally surprised when he was offloaded to Aston Villa. One can only assume Martin O’Neill owed Fergie a huge favour as he was soon packed off on loan to Burnley.

His contract at Villa was later ripped up, and he seems to have found his level playing in the Danish league.

David Bellion
Proof that just being really, really fast isn't enough to be a top footballer, the career of David Bellion also showed that the lesson of Franz Carr was forgotten very quickly.

That aside, the reason we signed someone who hadn't exactly done the business at Sunderland baffles to this day. The term “headless chicken” doesn't quite do justice to David’s style of play, in which concepts such as a ball control, positioning and passing were thrown right out of the window. The highlight of his two year spell was scoring past Arsenal in the first few seconds of a League Cup tie, albeit helped by the keeper spooning his soft shot into the net.

Like Djemba-Djemba, the biggest surprise was not only that we managed to offload him, but that it was a top flight side that came in for him, and he returned to his native France with Nice. After a spell with Bordeaux, he's back there now, which shows somebody obviously rates him.

Bebe
We conclude on the most odd of the lot. Signed despite Fergie having never seen him play, all the stories at the time were that he’d pretty much been living in a cardboard box a year before. More annoying, especially given that most cruel of mistresses, hindsight, was that for the same money we could have had established international Rafael Van der Vaart.

The whole transfer was covered in mystery, with plenty of rumours that I probably shouldn't repeat under advice from my lawyer*. Needless to say, nobody saw us signing some random kid who had only played a few games for minor teams in Portugal. In terms of shock factor, it was a biggie and at the time, this hack wondered whether a stroke of genius had been pulled off. Sadly, in turns out that all those stories in football comics that I read as a kid, where some guy is spotted playing in the park on Friday and on Saturday is hammering in the winner for his favourite team in the cup final, turned out to not have any basis in reality.

Early on, he managed to bluff a couple of goals, which suggested he might have something about his game. But then came the fiasco against Crawley Town, where United laboured to a 1-0 victory against a non-league team. Nobody came out of that one with honours, but Bebe especially managed to perform as if the ball was some strange object that could cause lethal illness if touched. Subsequently, he was kept far away from the first team and was loaned out to Turkey in the summer. Only a few games into this fresh start, he broke his leg. Ouch.


*I don’t actually have a lawyer. I just wanted to say that to make myself sound “in the know”.