McClaren interrupted the celebration of Sheringham’s equaliser to implore Ferguson to restructure the team so that they weren’t so exposed defensively. The short-lived Golden Goal rule was in use, which meant the first goal in extra-time would be the last. “Steve,” said Ferguson. “This game isn’t finished. I know my players. I know this team. They’ve only just begun.”
He started shouting at the players to get back to the halfway line so that the game could resume as quickly as possible.
There were 26 seconds between Bayern kicking off and Solskjaer winning a corner for United. Beckham ran across to take it, again struggling to make room because the photographers were so close to the pitch. This time there was no Schmeichel, so he whipped an inswinger to the near post. Sheringham, who had a free run, thought he was going to score again. He jumped a fraction too early, however, and knew he would not be able to steer a header at goal. In a split-second he went to plan B: hang in the air for as long as possible and divert the ball across the six-yard box.
When Sheringham flicked the ball on, Stam at the far post thought he was about to score the winner. Instead Solskjaer instinctively stabbed the ball into the net from a few yards. It was a tap-in in name, but not in nature; this was an unusual and deceptively brilliant finish, because the only place he could score was the roof of the net. “Pure instinct,” he said later. And even purer ecstasy. “I don’t believe it, but it’s happened,” said the commentator Alan Green on Radio Five Live. Belief was the word of the night: United’s in the face of apparently inevitable defeat, and the disbelief of those who were watching. “Unbelievable,” said Terry Venables on ITV. “That word is used too frequently, too easily, but that was unbelievable.”
Solskjaer’s first thought, like Sheringham, was that he might be offside. He wasn’t – there were two men on the line – but the only person in his peripheral version was his marker Kuffour. As the corner was taken, Kuffour had a firm grip of Solskjaer’s shirt in the six-yard box. Then Kahn shoved Kuffour out of his personal space. Had he not done so, Sheringham’s header would have been cleared by Kuffour. Instead it unwittingly created a gap for Sheringham’s header to reach Solskjaer.
Cole missed what happened, his view obstructed by the spring of anticipation from the bench. Phil Neville was celebrating even before the goal was scored, and led a charge of the United bench, straight down the touchline to jump around with the other players. “The celebrations begun by that goal,” said Ferguson, “will never stop.”
Once he knew he wasn’t offside, Solskjaer mimicked the knee-slide with which Basler had celebrated earlier in the match. It’s sometimes suggested that Solskjaer’s celebration was the root cause of the knee injury that kept him out for almost three years in the mid-2000s, but that’s a myth. He did however strain ligaments and miss a couple games from Norway that summer. “It was worth it.”
It was rare to see Solskjaer celebrate a goal with such abandon. His attitude to finishing never really changed: it was his job, he was good at it, and to go wild when he scored would be like a postman celebrating delivering the mail. When Solskjaer signed for United in 1996, Ferguson told him he would spend six months in the reserves to acclimatise to English football. But he was so good in training that Ferguson put him on the bench for the third league game of the season, when he came off the bench for his debut to slam a late equaliser against Blackburn. The speed of Solskjaer’s progress, and the savage precision of his finishing, took everybody by surprise – except himself.
Solskjaer prided himself on the intensity and authenticity of his finishing practice. “In training, even though it looks stupid sometimes, I always do things at match pace,” he told the Manchester United Opus. “[If] you take one, two, three, four, five touches, fanny about and score a goal… there’s no point. Do it as if it’s a game. Do things at match pace.”
Do it as if it’s the last minute of the European Cup final.
Into Added Time 