Before United's domination, the Double was still a relatively rare occurrence. Do you think United's first Double in ’93/94 laid down a marker for the rest of English football?

“Well, Arsenal won it in 1970/71, and before that Tottenham Hotspur won it in 1960/61. I think our first Double in 1994 proved not only our ability, but our tremendous strong will, too. We actually lost the League Cup final to Aston Villa that season so it could have been a domestic Treble as well. We've now done three Doubles in total, so it's a fantastic level.”



And then, the defining season of your United career so far is naturally the 1999 Treble season…

“It's difficult to imagine it will be done again by anyone. You need all the little bits of luck going, and the luck we got was that in the run-in to all three competitions we had very few injuries. Roy Keane was injured in a league game against Middlesbrough and he missed one game against Blackburn Rovers. Obviously he wasn't available for the European Cup final, and eight minutes into the FA Cup final against Newcastle he got injured again, after a tackle by Gary Speed, so he had to come off. But other than Henning Berg, who picked up an injury before the final, we were relatively lucky. “



And the squad was strong enough and confident enough that there were always players who could come in and do a job anyway...

“Well, what a lot of people forget is for the FA Cup semi-final replay against Arsenal we left out four players – we left out Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs, Dwight Yorke and Andy Cole. Scholes and Yorke were on the bench, but we had that luxury. When teams are strong, confident and winning regularly you can make changes like that. It was a fantastic achievement and I think winning that semi-final replay, given all the circumstances, galvanised us. We should have won the first game. We had a goal chopped off in that match which was absolutely unbelievable and we should have had the replay wrapped up; we should have been three or four-nil up at half-time. We were by far the better team, but when go you down to 10 men you're never sure.”



Do you think winning the replay against Arsenal in such an exciting way gave everyone the confidence to go all the way?

“Winning that game galvanised everyone. It got us to the first final, because we still had to play Juventus in the European semi-final, but there was something there, and we knew the opportunities were there. Then when we had the run-in with three games in 10 days, the last game in the league was against Tottenham, and that was a really nervous day. Although Tottenham fans wanted us to win and beat Arsenal, the Tottenham players wanted to beat us, and that's good, that's only fair. The game would be in a bad way if teams were lying down, they'd only be disgracing themselves.”