Owen Hargreaves' Bayern time helps Man Utd

By Mark Ogden
Last Updated: 2:07AM BST 09 May 2008

Owen Hargreaves: thinks Man Utd can beat Chelsea to the punch

Sir Alex Ferguson will need to coin a new phrase to describe the tension if Manchester United's Premier League fate remains undecided as Sunday's final fixture against Wigan goes into stoppage time. 'Squeaky-bum time' won't quite convey the agony that Ferguson and his players could be experiencing.

The United manager has been here before. He has faced three previous final-day title deciders; a draw at West Ham in 1995 handing Blackburn the title before victories at Middlesbrough (1996) and at home to Spurs (1999) denied Newcastle and Arsenal respectively.

The nature of this title race suggests that both United and Chelsea face a nervous 90 minutes on Sunday. If it does go down to the wire, United midfielder Owen Hargreaves is ready to call on his own experience to edge United over the line.

Hargreaves, a £19 million signing from Bayern Munich last summer, went into the final day of the 2000-01 Bundesliga season with Bayern needing just a point at Hamburg to thwart Schalke's title bid. As the game ticked into injury-time, Bayern trailed 1-0 while Schalke had secured a 5-3 home victory against Unterhaching.

A dramatic injury-time equaliser by Swedish defender Patrik Andersson secured the point that Bayern needed and Hargreaves admits that he would be quite happy if events followed a similar course on Sunday.

He said: "We won the double by scoring in the 93rd minute against Hamburg and then three days later winning the Champions League on penalties. We couldn't have left it any longer or made it any more difficult than that!

"To be in this position feels comfortable because I've been there before. At the beginning of the season, if someone had said we had 90 minutes to win the league we'd have jumped at that. We're in a good position.

"How do you keep cool? Just by doing the same things that got us here. I don't think we need to change anything at this stage. We've had a really good season and that's why we're top of the Premier League. We just need to train, prepare ourselves and we'll be ready for the weekend."

United have already displayed an ability to score crucial goals in the dying stages of games this season. Carlos Tevez has won crucial points at Tottenham and Blackburn with goals in the 93rd and 88th minutes respectively. Cristiano Ronaldo secured a decisive victory against Sporting Lisbon last November with a 90th-minute free-kick.

Hargreaves insists that confidence is high at Old Trafford.

He said: "We are full of confidence. Wigan did themselves a favour by winning at Villa, so this game doesn't mean a lot for them, but for us it means everything.

"We have 90 minutes to play in which we can win the league. It's a great position to be in and we are ready for it. There's no midweek game, so we can put in some good training sessions and be ready for the weekend."

Verdicts He must go, and really go, not be pushed upstairs to a couple of million quid per year sinecure as director of football - a licence to meddle.
That would be an insult to fans who exist on a fraction of what Grant would get for being a failure. Napoleon's key requirement was for lucky generals and maybe Grant is just that. The focus on Grant's doleful features can be dismissed as an irrelevance, as if the dugout were really a catwalk. The most significant criticism of Grant is broader: his employment in charge of a leading European club is a snub to all those better-qualified managers. It is a case of who Grant knows, not what he knows. That's wrong. Grant's personal impression shouldn't matter but it does to the fans. There have also been times when it was felt that decisions he made were poor, as highlighted by the defeat in the Carling Cup final.
If Grant does win the Champions League, you cannot simply sack him, but I do not think he'll continue in the longer term.