The two amigos

This article was written for The Seventy Two Unfortunates Football League Preview, a collaboration between The Seventy Two and The Two Unfortunates - a pair of the web's finest sites devoted to the world's oldest round-robin competition. You can download the whole thing here as a pdf in all its 108-page glory. And it's free.

To tie in with my new job, then, in this piece I tell the story of the first two Spaniards to ply their trade in the Football League.

In a quiz about Spanish footballers in England that was posted on the Guardian’s website twelve months ago – timed to coincide with the arrival of David Silva at Manchester City – the first question asked who the first player from the country to appear as a professional in the Football League was. As many a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? contestant relying on a 50-50 lifeline has found out to their cost, while two of the possible options could be ruled out immediately the remaining pair seemed equally plausible answers. In this example, Albert Ferrer (a Chelsea debutant in 1998) and Xabi Alonso (who followed suit for Liverpool six years later) were joined by the names Emilio Aldecoa and José Gallego.

It would be fair to say that Aldecoa and Gallego are not as well-known as Ferrer or Alonso, even though one was a full international who – like Ferrer – played for Barcelona. As opposed to their Premier League peers, though, Aldecoa and Gallego’s time in English football overlapped. They were born just five months apart and arrived in Britain in the same year as each other. The mere mention of the Spanish Civil War will be enough to explain that apparent coincidence. Aldecoa and Gallego hailed from the Basque country, the region whose army formed part of the Republican faction that ultimately lost the conflict. So it was, then, that in 1937 both men fled their homeland as refugees. Unlike many of their uprooted compatriots, they settled not in southern France but the heart of England. Arriving in the country aged 14 and 15 respectively, Gallego and his family moved to Cambridgeshire while Aldecoa’s wound up in Staffordshire.



It is Aldecoa whom the FA credit as the first Spaniard to play in the Football League. After his performances for a local works outfit had brought him to the attention of Wolves in 1943, Aldecoa had already been with Coventry for a season by the time League football officially resumed a year after the end of the War. What turned out to be Aldecoa’s only season in Division Two was not a particular success on an individual level – 29 appearances failed to yield a single goal for the left-winger – but Coventry did finish in a respectable eighth place, as Manchester City took the title. It was an underwhelming beginning and end to Aldecoa’s League career, when considered alongside his being a leading scorer in Major Frank Buckley’s wartime Wolves side, but the young man from Bilbao made history nonetheless during the course of 1946/47 – simply by taking to the pitch.

Joining Aldecoa in the Second Division that season, from the second half of the campaign onwards, was his compatriot José Gallego. An outside forward who had already spent four years with Cambridge City in the amateur divisions, Gallego earned a transfer to Brentford in January 1947. He made a handful of appearances before moving to the Bees’ Second Division rivals Southampton at the end of the season. A single substitute appearance was the only first team action that Gallego saw in two years on the south coast, although reports from that match suggest he might have made a better impression in time had it not been for an ankle injury. Gallego then made four appearances for Colchester United between 1950 and 1952, joining in the year the club was elected to the Football League.

After a respectable five-year stint as a professional, Gallego wound down his playing career with Cambridge United, who were then playing in the Eastern Counties League. He remained in the area even after retiring as a player, reputedly working for the local gas board.

Picking up Aldecoa’s story in 1947, however, sees him leaving England to return to Spain in order to join Athletic Bilbao. Although his Football League career was shorter than Gallego’s, it was Aldecoa who went on to enjoy greater and more prolonged success in the game. During his two years with his hometown club he picked up a cap for Spain, appearing as a substitute against the Republic of Ireland in 1948. Three years later, after a brief but prolific period with Real Valladolid, Aldecoa signed for Barcelona, helping the club to two Spanish championships and one Copa Latina (a forerunner to the European Cup). The two league titles that Barcelona won while Aldecoa was there were actually the fourth and fifth that the club had secured under the Franco regime, which is perhaps surprising given its association with Real Madrid. Of course, the team in white soon won their first championship since before the Civil War and then went on to dominate European football for the next decade.

After finishing as a player with Sporting Gijón in 1954, Aldecoa moved into management with Girona and then coached CD Condal (a precursor to Barcelona’s B team) before having a season with Real Valladolid in 1966/67. Alongside his assignments as a number one, Aldecoa’s coaching career also took in a two-year spell as a member of Birmingham City’s backroom staff. He took up a post with the Blues in 1960 at the invitation of Gil Merrick, their new manager. Merrick had featured for the Blues against Barcelona in the semi-final of the Fairs Cup in 1957 and was still a player when they lost the final of the same competition to the same opposition in 1960, albeit no longer first-choice goalkeeper. While both games came after Aldecoa’s time there as a player, the Spaniard’s name would still have been known at the Nou Camp – which might explain how the job offer came up.

With Birmingham City about to enjoy a jaunt in the Europa League this season, it’s pleasing to be reminded that Aldecoa joined the club as a coach at a time when they were enjoying something of a golden period in European football. After the near-misses of 1957 and 1960, Birmingham reached the final of the Fairs Cup again in 1961. Beating Helenio Herrera’s Internazionale home and away in the semi-finals was at least some consolation for the disappointing aggregate defeat to Roma that followed. Aldecoa left Birmingham in 1962, a year before Merrick won the Blues’ first – and only, until the club repeated the feat in February – major silverware, the 1963 League Cup.

This season, then, as you watch David Silva attempting to prise open defences for Manchester City, remember the names José Gallego and Emilio Aldecoa. They made the same journey from Spain to England some 75 years ago, but for very different reasons.

While researching this article, I discovered that a minister of the Spanish Republican Government in Exile wrote to FA Secretary Stanley Rous in 1946 to try to arrange a fixture between an XI featuring players displaced by the Civil War (including Emilio Aldecoa) and a British side. If anyone can shed any light on whether such a game ever took place, I’d love to know more. Please send me an email if you can help: sftmc@hotmail.co.uk.

Dislikable XI

A couple of months ago I posted my contribution to Two Footed Tackle's My Favourite XI feature. Now I present a starting line-up of the opposite persuasion. Inspired by TFT's series, Ian Rands of A United View on Football has been asking people to name their Dislikable XI and I was very happy to take part.

Ian's website focuses on his beloved Sheffield United but also boasts the occasional humorous deconstruction of Premier League culture - with pie charts. He resides on Twitter as @unitedite.

Goalkeeper: Andy Goram

Scottish football belonged to Rangers in the mid-90s. Such was their success that even Celtic went six years without a trophy, which, given the current Old Firm duopoly, sounds simply astonishing now. Goram was Rangers’ goalkeeper from 1991 to 1998, during which time the club equalled their neighbours’ record of nine league titles in a row. My dislike of the player, though, I should make perfectly clear, has no political motive. It’s just that he made goalkeeping look like such hard work. Capable of breaking into a sweat merely by taking a goal kick, well-proportioned Goram also put in two nervous displays for Manchester United in 2001 during the nomadic end to his career.

Right back: Abel Xavier

Xavier, or Old Father Time as I liked to call him because of his white hair and fierce demeanour, arrived in the Premier League in 1999 when he joined Everton from PSV. He later moved to Liverpool, and then had two years with Middlesbrough after spells in Turkey, Germany, and Italy. To British viewers he’s probably still best known for his wild protests at conceding a penalty for handball in Portugal’s Euro 2000 semi-final against France. For his angry confrontation with referee Günter Benkö, Xavier was eventually banned from international football for six months.

Centre back: Tony Adams

As a Manchester United fan with painful memories of the 1998 title run-in, when Arsenal put on the after-burners and romped to their first Premier League crown under Arsène Wenger, one of my abiding memories from that period is Adams’ goal against Everton. He scored the last in a 4-0 win that saw Arsenal wrap up the league. I’d never had much time for Adams as an England player either, reserving my admiration for United’s pairing of Steve Bruce and Gary Pallister, but that famous strike (and the Martin Tyler commentary that accompanied it) made matters personal.

Centre back: Alpay Özalan

For a couple of years during the qualifying games for Euro 2004, England and Turkey experienced a brief but heated international rivalry. After finishing third at the World Cup in Japan & South Korea, Turkey were England’s main opponents in Group 7 and the countries played out two bad-tempered matches in Sunderland and Istanbul. Alpay was Turkey’s (and arguably one of the world’s) best defenders at the time. A very public disagreement with Aston Villa manager Graham Taylor, however, had seen him disappear from first team action during the 2002/03 season. His goading of David Beckham, after the England captain missed a penalty during the particularly nasty goalless draw in Turkey in October 2003, damaged Alpay’s reputation in England further. Villa terminated his contract a few months later and he moved to Incheon United in South Korea. (Sadly, Martin Keown didn’t receive the same punishment for his reaction to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s miss earlier the same season.)

Left back: Paul Robinson

Perhaps it’s unfair to criticise a player for enjoying a more successful career than he might have expected, but Robinson’s consistent status as a Premier League player has long baffled me. Having figured for Watford, West Brom, and now Bolton, Robinson has amassed 190 Premier League appearances spread across six seasons since 1999. He’s also been booked on 42 occasions during that time. If you’re a left back by trade, picking up a yellow card every now and then is an occupational hazard. Robinson’s tally, however, suggests that top level football, like the wide men who hurdle his tackles, is leaving players like him behind.

Defensive midfielder: Terry Hurlock

Some players give you nightmares by virtue of a poor performance; some just give you nightmares. Terry Hurlock’s head shot in the 1994 Panini album was so harrowing that turning to Southampton’s page in order to affix another sticker was always done with much trepidation, lest one look turn you to stone. A Millwall club legend who gained three England B caps, Hurlock’s long curly hair and – how shall I put it? – difficult facial features earned him the nickname Warlock from Lions fans. True beauty comes from within, of course, and it might seem pretty rotten of me to include a player based on criteria out of his control, but the player who Neil Ruddock – never likely to have troubled the catwalks of Paris or Milan himself either – called his favourite animal takes his place in this side nonetheless.

Central midfielder: Paul Gascoigne

I have a problem with Gazza. Although Italia 90 is the first World Cup I can remember watching on television, I recall bits of the quarter-final against Cameroon but nothing of the epochal match against Germany that followed. Indeed, the passage of play that introduced me to Gascoigne was not the lunging challenge on Thomas Berthold but that on Gary Charles in the FA Cup final the following year. Gazza was, to my rather unsympathetic 7-year-old self, the silly man who injured himself tackling an opponent. After he moved to Italy, the infrequency with which I saw him play meant I never got past the ridiculous haircuts he sported each time he was called up to the England squad. During his renaissance at Rangers, I always felt that the quality of Scottish football undermined his success. Truthfully, I never admired Gazza as a player, even after that goal at Euro 96, because to me he always embodied colossal wasted talent. Psychological explanations for his erratic behaviour – harmful both to himself and others – continue to emerge, but the sadness of Gazza’s tale still fails to make me warm to him.

Central midfielder: Costinha

The moment still haunts me now. A late Porto free-kick flies towards the top-right corner of Tim Howard’s goal. United’s keeper, now one of the finest in the Premier League but then just 25 and having a shaky first season in England, can only palm the ball down to the edge of the six-yard box. Wes Brown isn’t going to reach it; Costinha will. He scores, Porto go through, and José Mourinho embarks on the most famous sprint ever undertaken by a man wearing a fashionable raincoat. Mourinho would no doubt have had a successful career had he not benefited from a poor piece of handling by Tim Howard, but that split second set in motion an incredible sequence of events. Porto won the Champions League, Mourinho moved to Chelsea, and he (or, at least, his personality) has dominated European (not to mention English) football ever since.

Attacking midfielder: Joe Cole

Is there any figure more tiresome in playground football than the hogger? You know the one: the player who’s near impossible to dispossess, and delights in proving it as he proceeds to dribble aimlessly towards the dinner hall – trailing one or two persistent opponents in his wake like some footballing Pied Piper. Eventually he trips over a stray schoolbag and loses the ball, and the game can continue. Joe Cole has always struck me as such a player, and it hasn’t surprised me in the slightest that his career has panned out the way it has. Hailed as the future of English football as a 16-year-old at West Ham, the buzz around Cole had already waned somewhat by the time he joined Chelsea in 2003. In fairness, Cole had been playing the most productive football of his career before being felled by a cruciate ligament injury in January 2009, but, although he eventually overcame that setback, a move to Liverpool last summer has only seen his fortunes suffer further.

Striker: Oliver Neuville

English fans hold German football (its international and club games) in such high regard that the 4-1 humiliation meted out at the World Cup drew as much praise for Löw’s team as it did criticism of England from most level-headed fans, such were our modest expectations before the game anyway. Germany’s national side has been lauded for its positive approach and youthful joie de vivre – or should that be lebensfreude? – ever since a disastrous Euro 2004 brought about a sea change in the country’s style of play, first under Jürgen Klinsmann and now Joachim Löw. Sandwiched in between Germany’s group stage exits in Portugal and at Euro 2000, however, was an improbable run to the final of the 2002 World Cup. Neuville’s 88th-minute strike against Paraguay in the round of 16 was his only goal of the tournament but it set Germany on their way to an eventual meeting with Brazil. For me, the man with the shortest neck in football sums up the mediocrity that characterised that whole tournament.

Striker: Carlos Tévez

Manchester United rarely let a player go when it’s not of their choosing. David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo could be put forward as two exceptions, but in both cases the player’s time at the club was reaching its natural conclusion anyway. Just as importantly, Beckham was welcomed as a returning hero when United played Milan a year ago and I would imagine that Ronaldo would receive the same treatment too if Real Madrid visited Old Trafford with him in the side. Tévez, though, holds the record for the player who has gone from being adored to reviled by the red half of Manchester in the shortest amount of time. Over the years, United have plucked enough of their rivals’ players away to make it difficult for me to complain too much over the Argentine’s turncoat behaviour, but it rankles with me enormously nonetheless.

Manager: Otto Rehhagel

It’s a truth universally accepted (or it certainly should be) that European Championships make for better tournaments than World Cups. Euro 2000 boasted the finest array of talent ever assembled for a summer competition in my lifetime, the squads of France and Portugal being particularly impressive. It remains my favourite ever tournament, and some notable people (including Jonathan Wilson) are big fans of it too. It was the most attack-minded spectacle since Mexico 86. At Euro 2004, however, organisation prevailed over inspiration. Rehhagel’s Greece ground the holders (France), the tournament’s entertainers (the Czech Republic), and the hosts (Portugal) into submission to emerge as the unlikeliest of winners.

My XI was preceded by that of the Dagenham & Redbridge blog 9-Men (@9men) and followed by Isaac Ashe's selection (@goaltastic).

Through Gritted Teeth: Patrick Vieira

Andrew Thomas' astoundingly good Twisted Blood blog celebrated its first birthday recently. For the past month or so, Andrew has been running a feature entitled Through Gritted Teeth dedicated to players that fans admire against their better judgement. My choice, the nineteenth in the series, was former Arsenal captain (and erstwhile nemesis of Roy Keane) Patrick Vieira.

In episode 1F18 of The Simpsons, “Sweet Seymour Skinner’s Baadasssss Song,” Bart’s dog escapes at school during show-and-tell and Principal Skinner is sacked because of the ensuing chaos. Having terrorised his headmaster for such a long time, Bart expects to feel happy at this turn of events. Instead, racked with guilt at the consequences of his actions and missing the competition that his rival offered, Bart tries to get Skinner his job back. With her brother confused by his emotions, Lisa offers him an explanation:

"I think you need Skinner, Bart. Everybody needs a nemesis. Sherlock Holmes had his Professor Moriarty, Mountain Dew has its Mellow Yellow, even Maggie has that baby with the one eyebrow."

For several seasons, the Premier League’s Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty were Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira. My club allegiance leaves me inclined to cast Keane as Holmes – on the side of good – but that’s a personal preference. Keane shares the loner tendencies of Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation and Holmes’ description of Moriarty as “the Napoleon of Crime” draws a crude geographical link with the country Vieira represented as a player but, truthfully, it doesn’t matter which player might better resemble which character. Neither wrote a treatise on binomial theorem at the age of twenty-one, as Holmes said of Moriarty in The Final Problem, and neither has ever been seen in a deerstalker hat. What matters is that my high regard for Keane owes itself to the performances he consistently put in because of a fierce sense of competition with his peers, foremost amongst them Vieira.

The two players embodied the antipathy that existed between their clubs at the time. Fixtures involving Arsenal and Manchester United are a great deal less intense now, with the Gunners failing to adapt as well as United have to the challenge posed by Russian and Arab billions at the top of the table, but a large part of the rivalry vanished with the departure of the two captains. Less than six months separated Vieira’s transfer to Juventus and Keane’s Old Trafford exit. It was as if Vieira and Keane defined so much about each other that, once one left the scene, the other had to depart too. Holmes and Moriarty tumbled to their deaths over the edge of the Reichenbach Falls in The Final Problem as Conan Doyle killed off both characters at once; less dramatically, the Premier League lost Keane and Vieira in quick succession in 2005.

Vieira was Arsène Wenger’s first signing on becoming Arsenal manager in 1996. Indeed, the £3.5m deal with Milan went through before Wenger officially took over at Highbury. Over the next nine years, Vieira won three Premier League titles and four FA Cups in north London. Uncapped by France when he joined Arsenal as a 20-year-old, within four years Vieira had won the World Cup and the European Championship. He then assumed the club’s captaincy in 2002 upon Tony Adams’ retirement. Vieira’s final game for Arsenal was the 2005 FA Cup final against, appropriately enough, Manchester United. He scored the decisive penalty kick in the shootout and Arsenal, of course, haven’t won a thing since.

The triumphs that Vieira and Arsenal enjoyed, though, were punctuated by continued success at Old Trafford. Wenger’s side celebrated the Double in 1998; Ferguson’s won the Treble a year later. As ripostes go, it was a pretty bloody marvellous one. While Arsenal and United traded silverware on the pitch, Keane and Vieira were locked in an individual battle to be regarded as the country’s most important midfielder. The running feud between the pair during a match at Highbury in August 1999 – which United won 2-1 thanks to two goals from Keane – was perhaps the first sign that this was no longer just a sporting contest, but a personal dual. Five-and-a-half years later, it became apparent that the two men could hardly share a tunnel let alone a football stadium.

That incident, which followed the ‘battle of the buffet’ at Old Trafford six months earlier after United prevented Arsenal from going 50 league games unbeaten, proved to be the beginning of the end for both Keane and Vieira. With slapstick and slanging matches starting to overshadow the football, they now resembled less the well-drawn literary figures of Holmes and Moriarty and more the aging, petty neighbours played by Sid James and Terry Scott in the film spin-off of Bless This House. A once totemic rivalry was descending into a petty disagreement between men morphing into caricatures. With Chelsea on course to win the league a few months later during José Mourinho’s first season in England, Keane and Vieira were no longer arguing over the destination of the title – just the size of their egos.

Both Wenger and Ferguson started to plan for life without their captains. Juventus offered £13.75m for Vieira in July 2005 and his manager accepted. In November, Keane talked his way out of Old Trafford following a series of loose-lipped performances on MUTV that infuriated Sir Alex. I can’t have been the only United fan to have wondered, though, what it would have been like to have had both in the same side. After all, Vieira’s assets as a player were so obvious that, were you to give a child a pen and tell them to draw a box-to-box midfielder, they would – after tears and a few strict words as a result of the recalcitrant youngster’s likely insistence on drawing cats and dogs instead – eventually sketch a tall figure with an improbably small head and a number four on his back. Vieira and Keane would have complemented each other perfectly as midfield partners but, as it was, I suspect they benefited one another just as much from afar.

Preceding my Through Gritted Teeth piece was Dave Hartrick's look at the entire 1990 Crystal Palace side. Alex Hess followed my ode to Vieira with one on, rather aptly, Roy Keane.

Ian Henderson: Bouncing back

This article first appeared on The Two Unfortunates - the non-partisan website for everything to do with the Football League.

Being dubbed a young player with promise is sometimes the cruellest thing that can happen to a footballer. As contemporaries in the Norwich City youth set-up a decade ago, Ian Henderson and Ryan Jarvis made their first team debuts within six months of each other. In November 2002, Henderson scored as a substitute in his second Canaries appearance. Jarvis, the more precocious of the pair, was the star striker of England’s U17 side when he became City’s then youngest ever first team player in April 2003. A year later, although they were still only on the fringes of the first eleven, both teenagers were Premier League players as Norwich won promotion.

Fast forward to 2011 and Jarvis, having been released by Norwich in 2008, has just left Leyton Orient on a free after three years in east London brought him a mere 14 goals. Still only 24, where the player goes from here is unclear but he can still boast of a goal against Liverpool the season Rafa Benítez’s side won the Champions League. Meanwhile, after many setbacks of his own, Henderson has this season enjoyed the best period of his professional career. Two goals for Colchester United against Bristol Rovers in the final game of the campaign put the 26-year-old on double figures and left Henderson as the club’s top scorer in League One.

Until this season, Henderson's career had been blighted by bad luck and poor timing almost ever since its promising beginning. Persistently finding players selected ahead of him on the wing and in attack, Henderson’s problems were compounded by a few injury issues and ultimately his time as a Canary was brought to an end in 2007. Between leaving Norwich and arriving at Colchester, Norfolk-born Henderson had unremarkable spells with Rotherham United and Northampton Town before two equally ill-fated periods – albeit for different reasons – with Luton Town and MKE Ankaragücü of the Turkish Süper Lig.

In December 2008 Henderson found himself without a club after Northampton Town released him from his contract six months early. The following month he joined Luton’s condemned campaign at the foot of League Two. With the Hatters having had a 30-point penalty inflicted upon them at the start of the season by the Football Association for numerous financial irregularities, relegation to the Conference had been all but confirmed the moment Luton lost their appeal against the decision. Henderson played eighteen times between January and May, scoring his first goal in just under two years when he netted against Dagenham & Redbridge. Luton did not renew his short-term deal at the end of the season, however, as Henderson tumbled from being a Premier League player in 2005 to one perhaps heading out of the professional game just four years later.

With his options in the Football League seemingly exhausted, Turkish top flight side MKE Ankaragücü approached Henderson with the offer of a trial. He subsequently signed a two-year deal but ultimately spent just three months in Ankara, playing only twice. A failure to settle was cited as the reason even though he had family with him in the country and a Turkish girlfriend, as this article on Les Rosbifs reports. Henderson had been joined at the club by Darius Vassell, who remained at Ankaragücü until the end of the season and managed four goals in 25 appearances. Given that the club’s financial problems notoriously resulted in Vassell’s hotel bill going unpaid, any swift reservations Henderson had about the move were probably well-founded.

His transfer overseas proving not such a Turkish delight, it was Henderson’s former mentor who offered him a way out. Aidy Boothroyd, the youth team coach at Norwich from 2001 to 2003, had been appointed the Colchester United manager a few weeks earlier after the former incumbent, Paul Lambert, switched to Carrow Road, and in October 2009 Henderson began training with the Essex club. If the circumstances surrounding the player’s move already had a couple of Canaries connections, the hat-trick came in the form of the opposition for his debut in January. Norwich were the visitors to the Weston Homes Community Stadium, the clubs’ first meeting since Colchester won 7-1 at Carrow Road the previous August and Lambert promptly jumped ship. The row between the respective boards had yet to be resolved financially and, with relations tense, a crowd of over 10,000 watched as the side managed by Colchester’s former boss routed his old team 5-0. To complete Henderson’s misery, he was sent-off in injury time.

Failing to guide Colchester into the play-offs that season, Boothroyd left to take over at Coventry City. He was replaced by his assistant, John Ward, and it has been under his tutelage that Henderson has enjoyed undoubtedly the best year of his career. A total of 11 goals from 42 appearances in all competitions represents a huge improvement for a player whose previous best was four strikes for Norwich in 2003/04, all scored during a purple patch in November. After his low point of 2009, it is heartening to see how Henderson has fought back to establish himself in League One. His former teammate Ryan Jarvis will no doubt be hoping to follow his example.

Thank Ferguson for United hitting form at right time

After all the debate this season over just how inferior the current United side is to its many predecessors from the last twenty years, results over the past month have gone a long way to making such discussions redundant.

Beating last year’s league and cup winners three times in just over four weeks means that this comparatively unheralded group of players need just one more point to capture the club a historic nineteenth title and – with Schalke ultimately posing far fewer problems than Chelsea in the Champions League – are one match away from conquering Europe for the fourth time in United’s history too. Nothing has been won yet but, barring two catastrophic results in the league and an embarrassment against Barcelona at Wembley, United’s class of 2010/11 have done enough to prove their doubters – this writer amongst them – wrong.

One significant feature of the latter third of United’s season has been the sudden emergence of a clear first-choice eleven during the recent run of crucial games. What’s more, the personnel involved and their starting positions are not necessarily what most fans would have expected.

Dimitar Berbatov is the Premier League’s top scorer but Javier Hernández has conclusively emerged as the preferred strike partner for Wayne Rooney. In midfield, the resurgent Michael Carrick has found himself anchoring the side along with Ryan Giggs.

On the flanks, Park Ji-sung’s industry has repeatedly been complemented – to the expense of Nani – by the touchline-hugging Antonio Valencia. At the back, Rio Ferdinand has predictably replaced Chris Smalling after his young understudy’s highly encouraging stint at centre back, but Fábio da Silva has, perhaps surprisingly, managed to keep his twin brother out of the side at right back after Rafael’s return from an injury picked up at Stamford Bridge in April.

Fabio’s emergence at right back is particularly interesting. The 20-year-old Brazilian has been much slower to make an impact on the first team than his sibling. Indeed, Fábio had to wait until New Year’s Day for his first league appearance of the season and it was not until the Chelsea match last Sunday that he guaranteed himself a winner’s medal (if and when United’s points tally becomes insurmountable). As well as one or two niggling injury issues, the main factor counting against Fábio has been Patrice Evra.

The Frenchman remains immovable at left back, two-footed Fábio’s preferred position, just as he has been since he saw off the challenge of Gabriel Heinze in 2007. The right back slot, however, where Rafael has impressed on many occasions and now Fábio is getting an opportunity, has proved much harder for one player to nail down.

In fact, United have been holding auditions for the right back berth ever since March 2007, when Gary Neville picked up the first of the series of problem injuries that ultimately curtailed his playing career. To emphasise how no one player has managed to make the position his own, it is highly likely that later this month United will field their third different right back – Fábio or Rafael – in as many Champions League finals, even though the players who performed the role in 2008 and 2009 – Wes Brown and John O’Shea – remain at the club. The identity of four fifths of United’s backline has been constant for almost five years, with Edwin van der Sar, Rio Ferdinand, Nemanja Vidić, and Patrice Evra all preparing for their third Champions League final in four seasons. Right back is the exception.

What links Wes Brown, John O’Shea, and Fábio (assuming he starts at Wembley) is that each of them played their way into contention; they were not necessarily seen as long-term candidates in the position, yet emerged as the right player to fill it at the right time.

As Sir Alex Ferguson has demonstrated perhaps better than ever this season, building a successful side is not just a question of having recognised first-choice stars playing every week, but also about being able to bring other players to form at the right stage of the season.

Had Michael Carrick begun the season in the assured manner that he is ending it, only to be playing as listlessly now as he was six months ago, the misfortune of the timing would be self-evident. He would not be picked for the final. As it is, with Carrick playing as well as he has done for at least two years, he is almost certain to start.

While outfield players can amalgamate slowly into a team, however, as Fábio has done over three years, a new goalkeeper is not afforded such a luxury. This is why clubs so rarely promote a player from within when their number one leaves, but buy a ready-made replacement instead. Whoever takes over from the retiring Edwin van der Sar in the summer will be under enormous pressure, from his very first match, to emulate the Dutchman’s success in goal. By contrast, Gary Neville’s various heirs at right back – all four of them – have enjoyed comparatively little scrutiny.

Written for Red Flag Flying High.