Giggs, Butt and Neville were among those who thought the game was up. “I kept looking up at the clock,” said Neville in his Times column. “It was ticking down towards the end of the second half and I just thought that the Germans had gone and done us again.”
But thinking you’ve lost and giving up are two different things entirely. In the 90th minute, as the board went up to show three added minutes, Babbel played a loose pass back towards Linke. He was pressured by Solskjaer into conceding a throw-in on the left wing, at which point Neville sprinted across the field to take a long throw. “I was absolutely knackered,” he said. “I’ve wondered a few times since, ‘Why did I do that? What was I doing running all that way?’ And it’s simple, really: it’s what I’d been taught to do since I was a kid at United. You keep playing, you keep trying, you keep sprinting until the death.”
As Neville gathered himself, the board went up to show there would be three additional minutes. His throw was headed clear towards Beckham, one of the few players on the pitch who still looked fresh. He beat Scholl to the loose ball and then evaded his attempted challenge before playing a good pass to release United’s left-winger: Gary Neville. He was still in position from the throw-in; as he ran towards the ball and prepared to cross with his left foot, every step betrayed a furious concentration not to cock it up. He did enough to keep the ball alive: his low cross hit a Bayern defender, deflected into the area and was put behind by the stretching Effenberg.
With Beckham preparing to take the corner, Schmeichel charged past the halfway line. “Can you f*g believe him?’ said Ferguson to McClaren. This wasn’t on the chalkboard when Ferguson asked his assistant to run through set-pieces before the game. The last time Schmeichel had done something similar, against Arsenal 14 months earlier, he pulled his hamstring trying to get back and missed the European Cup defeat to Monaco three days later. Schmeichel’s gesture was in keeping with Ferguson’s philosophy that United might as well lose 2-0 as 1-0. Perhaps Ferguson’s unimpressed response was because he felt it compromised the dignity with which he wanted to accept defeat.
It was only when Sheringham saw Schmeichel that he realised how little time was left. As Beckham watched Schmeichel galumphing forward, his brain registered two things. The first was all the b*s he received from Schmeichel as a young player during training if his crosses weren’t up to scratch; the second was that instead of whipping the corner as he usually did, he should float it towards Schmeichel in an attempt to cause maximum havoc.
Beckham’s corner skimmed off the head of Linke, who was under pressure from Schmeichel, and reached Yorke beyond the far post. He headed it back towards the centre, where the substitute Fink sliced what should have been a routine volleyed clearance straight to Giggs on the edge of the area. Giggs may have been comfortable playing on the right wing, but he was less comfortable on his right foot. He mis-hit a shot to such an extent that it span like a leg-break past Linke and straight to Sheringham. He swivelled to drag the ball into the net from six yards, becoming the first person to score a goal in the European Cup final with his tibialis posterior muscle. Or, as he put it more evocatively in the Times last month, “it was a scruffy scuff off my sock”.
Sheringham’s first instinct was to check whether he had been flagged offside, even though he knew he wasn’t. Bayern were instantly flattened. “I just thought, ‘I can’t do this any more’,” said Babbel in the Sunday Times. “It wasn’t the body saying that, it was the mind. Something faded in me, in the whole team. The truth is that right then, at that moment, at 1-1, I knew we would lose.”
In the 58 seconds between the equaliser and the kick-off, the United players went through all kinds of emotions. Beckham “felt like crying”; Solskjaer was chuffed because he would get to play another 30 minutes in a European Cup final; a shattered Butt started running round to try to get the blood going in his legs. Sheringham looked up, trying to comprehend the vastness of the stadium, the occasion and what he had just done. As he did so, Schmeichel ran back to his goal. When he got there he started breathing demonstratively in an attempt to focus and get his pulse down. He needn’t have bothered. He’d already had his last touch of the ball as a Manchester United player.
Teddy Sheringham scored five goals in the 1998-99 campaign. It was his least prolific season between 1986 and 2007. He hardly played until April – partly because of injury, partly because of a desperate hangover from a miserable end to the 1997-98 with United and England. When he was picked in a big game, away to Bayern in the group stage, he played very well – and then scored a last-minute own goal while trying to redeem a mistake from Schmeichel. At the start of 1999, with Sheringham’s morale through the floor, Ferguson told him his chance would come at the business end of the season. It did. He started the astonishing FA Cup semi-final replay against Arsenal, making the opening goal for Beckham, and then became an unlikely pillar of the Treble. “Life,” he said after the game, “feels pretty good right now.”
Into Added Time 