Hansen, honours, a famous comment and those United kids.
To mark his 20 years as a distinguished football columnist at the Daily Telegraph in 2014, Alan Hansen was taken for a very fine lunch by the editor at the Goring Hotel in Central London and presented with an even finer watch. I’d also reached a similar landmark as the paper’s football correspondent, was also present at the lunch which rightly turned into a long celebration of Hansen’s career as player, pundit and columnist. His MBE in the New Year’s Honours for services to football and broadcasting is long overdue.
Hansen was a magnificent, very calm, ball-playing centre-back for Liverpool, winning eight titles and three European Cups. He then became an outstanding pundit on the BBC, especially on Match of the Day. But he has always been associated with a certain controversial comment at the start of the 1995/96 season when discussing Manchester United’s 3-1 defeat at Villa Park. “You can’t win anything with kids,” Hansen infamously remarked on Match of the Day of the sight of so many of Alex Ferguson’s fledglings starting or coming on.
Of all his brilliant insights in two decades at the BBC, Hansen’s broadcasting career is remembered most for this one critique. As a Liverpool legend, his strong take on United was always going to stir debate, and still does. The words soon adorned T-shirts. But was Hansen completely wrong?