‘Alan Hansen said Man Utd had missed their best ever chance to be champions’ - The Athletic 22/9/20

By Andy Mitten

It’s 9am on Saturday April 18, 1992, and the issue 18 of United We Stand fanzine is ready for pick up from the printers near Old Trafford. The cover says “Champions At Last” ahead of Manchester United’s surely imminent first league title since 1967.

Three bags are filled and placed into the hold of one of the two Hurst’s of Wigan coaches waiting outside the Dog & Partridge pub by Old Trafford. We’d been organising these coaches since the start of the 1991-92 season (they’re still going) taking United fans to away games as glory beckoned.

The mood was optimistic on the coach, the fare £12 per person. United were league leaders, two points ahead of Leeds United after 37 of 42 games and with one game in hand. Luton sat 20th of 22 teams. They’d been hammered 5-0 at Old Trafford earlier in the season, with Brian McClair scoring two.

United received 1,800 of the 13,400 tickets, seats in the Oak Road stand priced £13.50 each. It didn’t meet demand but at least it was an allocation — the first time in five years that away fans were allowed into Luton’s cramped Kenilworth Road home following a ban on away fans primarily due to hooliganism.

“Prediction: Luton 1 Champions Elect 3”, stated the fanzine confidently, copies of which were voraciously consumed on the coach as the vibe built steadily along the M6 and M1 during the three-hour trip south. A guide to Luton in the mag advised: “The town is boring and the only good thing about the football team is that they sent City down to Division Two in the early 80s. Luton have never won at Old Trafford.”

Everything else seemed positive. The previous summer, Luton had ripped up their unpopular plastic pitch and donated it to nearby Whipsnade Zoo, another reason they’d become the bete noir of English football. Perhaps the pitch helped them achieve their highest ever position of seventh in the top tier in 1987, perhaps Luton became a better team for it since they also reached three Wembley cup finals and survived in the top flight for so long despite small gates — yet United had won on each of the previous three seasons on the plastic.

There was every reason to be confident…

Oak Road, Luton, is a tight terraced street where instead of the downstairs rooms of two of the terraced houses there is a turnstile block into the Oak Stand away end with the upper rooms above it. The road was full of United fans where the talk was of lifting the title at Anfield in two weeks, or tickets for West Ham away. United played seven games between April 7 and April 26, including four games in eight days. Luton was the second of the run.

United’s line up was a strong one: Schmeichel, Parker, Irwin, Bruce, Phelan, Pallister, Giggs, Webb, McClair, Hughes and winger Lee Sharpe, the league’s reigning Young Player of the Year.

Seats were bolted onto the terracing, limiting legroom; stanchions obstructed and limited the view. None of that mattered when Sharpe, in for Andrei Kanchelskis, ran onto a flick-on from Mark Hughes, saw Trevor Peake stumble and steered the ball through the legs of goalkeeper Alec Chamberlain to put United ahead after 25 minutes. In front of the away end. Against the run of play.

“The ball wouldn’t come down so I had to take a little hop at it,” Sharpe tells The Athletic. He needed to see it again to be reminded of it. Sharpe jigged in celebration and, minutes later, crossed for Mark Hughes who hit the post.

“We settled and created chances,” striker Brian McClair tells us as he recalls that the game wasn’t the pushover generally imagined. “It’s a cliche about certain grounds being tough places to go, but Luton was tough. They’d had the plastic pitch, they had a good youth system and their ground was the smallest in the league. It wasn’t a welcoming place.”

Still, so far, so good — or at least until defender Paul Parker went off injured at half time.

“Never have Mick Harford’s leadership, aggression and goals been more needed for Luton in their hour of need,” said Brian Moore, commentating on TV. He also told viewers that referee Martin Bodenham was the owner of a Cornwall guest house, since top-flight referees were not professional at the time.

United had the best defence in the league but it looked jittery when Mick Harford outjumped Irwin and struck the bar before heading in the rebound five minutes into the second half.

“Mick was a Sunderland lad but Manchester United were his second team,” says McClair. “He had outstanding aerial ability but he also held the ball up and brought everyone into play around him.”

Harford was the biggest danger, but Luton were no mugs: their side featured former Manchester City player Imre Varadi (on loan from Leeds), bright hope Mark Pembridge, veteran Brian Stein and defender Chris Kamara. In midfield was club legend David Preece, who spent 11 years at Luton and would later have a stand named after him at Kenilworth Road after dying of cancer aged 44. David Pleat was in his second spell and tenth year managing the Hatters.

Ryan Giggs certainly doesn’t remember his own performance with pride: “I was awful and played up front against Trevor Peake,” he tells The Athletic, yet Giggs set up Hughes with a deep cross, only for Hughes to head the ball across the goal rather than into it. The match thus ended in an unexpected draw. It was to mark a turning point, although naturally, as Paul Parker revealed no one thought so at the time.

Although it was the full-back’s last appearance of the season after he had limped off, he “still thought that it was only a matter of a few games before I picked up a league winner’s medal to go with my Rumbelows Cup award.”

If only.

United lost at home against Nottingham Forest two days later, then drew at West Ham. “Shockers,” was how Ferguson described these games. United had picked up 48 points in the first half of the season but only 30 in the second. Their fate was sealed when United lost at Liverpool and Anfield sang: “Have you ever seen United win the league?”

United would win the league 13 times before Liverpool would do so again, but that title seemed elusive in 1992 as Leeds United finished stronger and were crowned champions.

As McClair points out: “People remember Alan Hansen’s quote about not winning anything with kids, but I remember him after that game in Anfield in ’92. He said that United had just missed their best ever chance to be champions. I remembered that and couldn’t wait to get playing again in the following season.”

As for the fanzine, UWS were rightly mocked for the premature celebrations on their front cover. Thankfully, there was no social media around then.

Luton went down and would eventually sink as low as spending five seasons in non-league. They’re now in the second tier – an achievement for a club who have failed to move on from their Kenilworth Road home with its now even more restricted capacity of 10,300. They haven’t troubled England’s top flight since May 1992, but will entertain United for the first time since then on Tuesday in the Carabao Cup. Harford remains at Luton, where he’s in charge of recruitment.

Three months after the draw at Luton, this 18-year-old journalist was somehow found himself in the presence of a man he’d previously only dreamed of interviewing: Alex Ferguson. We’d written to him stating that we’d be on the pre-season tour of Norway and would like to interview him. And he replied – saying that he didn’t usually like fanzines, “I don’t know why I should let people criticise my players”, but that he’d read ours and tolerated it.

“Come to the dressing rooms in Lillestrom after the game,” were our instructions. The dressing room was shrouded in mist out of which Ferguson emerged with a towel around his waist to say hello.

“Let’s do it in the hotel in Trondheim. 7pm tomorrow.” We nodded without realising that Trondheim was eight hours to the north. That meant getting up very early and standing on a train packed with boy scouts.

We arrived at the hotel wearing United shirts and armed with a large, red, tape-to-tape ghetto blaster to record the interview. Ferguson laughed at us, but was generous with his time and introduced us to his players. As he did, Steve Bruce came flying down from his hotel room to celebrate Linford Christie winning gold in the Barcelona Olympics.

We dug the interview out for this article to see how bad it was and what he said about that Luton match in the aftermath.

“Losing the league was disappointing,” he said. “I had a feeling, though, because we were drawing too many games. As a manager you definitely have a sixth sense about things. Parker got injured at Luton and (Paul) Ince against Southampton. We needed our strongest team against Forest and West Ham. With Parker and Ince, I’m sure we would have done it. You can’t include Robbo (Bryan Robson) because he’d been out a long time. A lot of it was bad luck, fate, the fixture pile-up… but a lot of it was our own fault. We really should have seen off teams.”

Ferguson later added, with the benefit of hindsight: “We had taken an away point at Luton but there was no rhythm in our play. We moved into a lead we didn’t deserve but still couldn’t win the match. Luton played to avoid relegation and, looking back, it was an ominous result for us.”

Still, United would be champions within a year, but there was a further twist. In his 1999 autobiography, Ferguson explained that a few months before that ill-fated trip to Bedfordshire he had tried to sign Mick Harford as “a man who could give us aerial deadliness”.

“Sadly, I did not show enough resolve to push the deal through,” said Ferguson. “If I had acted as purposefully as I should have done, we would have won the league…”