Call them what you will, the Class of ’92 or Fergie’s Fledglings, the group of players who emerged from the Manchester United youth academy in the early-to-mid 1990s achieved the rarest of feats.
Winning Premier League after Premier League alongside an assortment of European, FA, and League cups, the group – which included Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, David Beckham, Nicky Butt, and the Neville brothers – became legends not only in their own lifetimes, but through the course of their illustrious playing careers, which as all footballers know come to an end all too quickly.
Everybody and his mother has heard of the likes of Giggs, Scholes, and Beckham, and in recent years the spotlight has shone too on some of the Class of ’92 who never quite made it at Old Trafford.
Some of these, like Keith Gillespie and Robbie Savage, enjoyed Premier League careers elsewhere. Others, such as Simon Davies, Ben Thornley, Chris Casper, John O’Kane, Adrian Doherty, and Kevin Pilkington, despite all their early promise, became footballing journeymen or dropped entirely out of the game.
But one story has not yet been told, one straining voice until now has remained silent. Alan ‘Ally’ McGrally was part of the Manchester United team that won the 1992 FA Youth Cup. Playing alongside Giggs and company, he even scored a goal on the road to the final, an important effort in the quarter-final tie against Bury which he fumbled in off his knee from a corner.
McGrally missed the final owing to a tweaked hamstring, but he probably wouldn’t have started anyway. Because the interesting thing about this once-young-prospect’s story is that McGrally was never much of a prospect at all: unlike all of the aforementioned names, McGrally was a hopeless football player, only ever there to make up the numbers.
‘I almost gave up the game when I realised I’d have to play alongside people like McGrally’, chuckled Paul Scholes when questioned about his former teammate. ‘He tried, but his mind was a bit slow, and his feet couldn’t even keep up with that’, lamented Ryan Giggs. ‘No, McGrally was no good at all’, said Alex Ferguson, ‘He was an odd lad and a bad football player’.
After the 1992 youth triumph Ferguson saw to it that McGrally was never offered a professional contract. He tried his hand in non-league football for a few years, but it came to nothing. McGrally wished he had taken some memento from his time on the fringes of superstardom, a lock of Giggsy’s or a boot of Beckham’s on which he might forge some sort of living. But he hadn’t had his wits about him, and was forced to turn to the blue side of Manchester, briefly becoming a roadie for Oasis.
