Light Upfront.
Throughout most of 1992, Manchester United were at least one striker short. After leading the First Division for most of the 1991-92 season, the Reds were overtaken by bitter rivals Leeds United, inspired by the goals and skills of Eric Cantona. A fixture pile-up, a crippling injury list and a strike force whose goals had dried up all played a part in ensuring that United’s wait for the title went past the quarter-century mark.
Several strikers were mentioned, but the man Fergie tried to sign on more than one occasion was Sheffield Wednesday’s David Hirst. Make no mistake, this lad was top drawer, he had everything you needed to be a world-class centre forward. Primarily left-footed but could hit it just as well with his right. Great in the air, explosive pace, strong as an ox, could dribble and create space and also had the knack of being in the right place at the right time. There is no doubt he would have added a different dimension to the side, the type of striker it seemed we were crying out for.
Early Beginnings.
Born in 1967, Hirst joined his local side, Barnsley and was fast-tracked into the first team at the age of 17. After just one season, in which he scored 9 goals, Sheffield Wednesday manager Howard Wilkinson decided to take a punt on the young striker, and paid £250,000, which was a hell of a lot of money for a teenager in 1986. Despite a tough start, he soon became a fan favourite with Owls fans and is still revered by them to this day.
In spite of the goals by Hirst, Wednesday regularly battled against relegation, and in 1989-90, the Owls lost the fight and would spend the following season in Division Two. Hirst stayed at Hillsborough and scored 32 goals as Wednesday were promoted back to the top flight at the first time of asking, managed by former United boss Ron Atkinson. In addition to this, he lifted the 1991 League Cup at Wembley after beating Manchester United 1 – 0 in the Final.
It wasn’t going to take long for his goalscoring exploits to be noticed by both club and international managers. In the summer of 1991, Hirst was called up by England and there was a big buzz that the Three Lions had found the natural successor to Gary Lineker. The late, great, Sir Bobby Robson was quoted as saying: “It’s not a question of who will replace Lineker, but who will partner David Hirst”.
With Wednesday back in the top flight, Hirst continued his scoring form hitting 19 goals and helping the Owls to a third-place finish. Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson had been watching Hirst’s progress with interest and was a keen admirer.
It’s all Downhill from here.
As United faltered at the final hurdle in the 1991 – 92 title race, Ferguson bemoaned his inability to add to his strike force. In the ten league matches leading up to the Liverpool game, which the Reds lost and confirmed Leeds as champions, McClair had scored just twice, and Hughes hadn’t scored at all. Fergie had tried to buy Mick Harford from Luton Town as a quick fix to the problem, but this never quite came off.
Ferguson spent most of the close season in the summer of 1992 looking for the man who would give his side the extra dimension up front. Having lost out to Blackburn Rovers in the chase for Alan Shearer, he again tried to buy David Hirst, having already had two or three previous enquiries rebuffed. This time, he offered a British record £3.5 million, but Wednesday manager Trevor Francis wasn’t interested, instead wanting to build on the achievements of the previous season and seeing Hirst as key to those ambitions.
Instead, United were contacted by Cambridge United, who were in a bit of financial trouble and needed to sell their star player, Dion Dublin. After watching several videos, Ferguson was impressed enough to sign the striker for £1 million. Dublin had a good start, scoring against Southampton to seal United’s first win of the Premier League era, but a little over a week later, he was hit by a tackle by Crystal Palace’s Eric Young, suffering a broken leg which ruled him out for the season.
United struggled on, but the inconsistency in front of goal that had haunted them the previous season returned. Even Peter Schmeichel was quoted as saying, “if we don’t sign a striker, we aren’t going to win anything”. The message was not lost on the United manager, who tried to tempt Wednesday again, with a bid rumoured to be in excess of £4 million, and again this was rejected by the Hillsborough club.
In November 1992, Alex Ferguson was discussing potential targets with United chairman Martin Edwards when Bill Fotherby, the CEO of Leeds United, called to enquire about the possibility of signing Denis Irwin. This enquiry was met with the same response that United had gotten from Wednesday, but Ferguson prompted Edwards to enquire about Eric Cantona. Rumours were circulating that he wasn’t happy at Elland Road, and United swiftly concluded the transfer for a bargain £1.2 million.
Aftermath
In August 1992, Hirst was hit with what was described as a “horror tackle” by Arsenal defender Steve Bould at Highbury, which left the England striker with a broken ankle. Although Hirst recovered from this fairly quickly, this was the start of various injury problems throughout the remainder of his career. He still scored 15 times that season, including one in the FA Cup Final against Arsenal, which Wednesday ultimately lost after a Replay. Unfortunately, every time he got injured after that, he seemed to spend longer and longer on the sidelines.
When he did get an extended run in the team, it was clear something was missing from his game. He was still a good striker, but before the injury problems, he was described as “Shearer, with pace”. That tells you everything you need to know about how highly he was rated. One of the reasons Alex Ferguson rated him so highly was that every time we played Sheffield Wednesday, Hirst always seemed to score against us.
From the beginning of the 1993 – 94 season, he played just 25 games over the course of two seasons. He would occasionally show glimpses of what had made him such a sought-after player, including a brilliant winner against United at Hillsborough in October 1994, but he could not stay fit long enough to sustain any kind of form, and Wednesday’s league form suffered as a result.
In 1995, David Pleat was installed as Wednesday manager, and it seemed that Hirst had turned a corner, having declared himself fit for pre-season, scoring 14 times throughout the campaign. In 1996, against old nemesis Arsenal at Highbury, Hirst hit a shot against the crossbar that was recorded at 114 MPH, the fastest ever recorded at that time. But it soon became clear that he was not central to Pleat’s plans, and in October 1997, just two months short of his 30th birthday, Hirst was sold to Southampton for £2 million.
Upon his arrival at The Dell, Hirst found a resurgence of form, scoring nine goals from 28 appearances, but it was not to last. As United won the Treble in 1998 – 99, Hirst played just twice that season, which would be his last as a professional footballer. In January 2000, following medical advice, David Hirst announced his retirement from the game aged 32.
What Would Have Been Different?
There are two possible scenarios here because Alex Ferguson was so keen to sign David Hirst that he actually made about five or six attempts to sign him. Before the tackle by Steve Bould, Hirst was hardly ever injured, and if United had signed him in the summer of 1992, as they had tried to do, then Hirst would not have played in that game and wouldn’t have received that tackle. If that had been the case, you would have to think that Hirst would have made the most of his explosive talent, and with players like Hughes, Giggs, Kanchelskis, Ince and Sharpe around him, he probably would have thrived in United’s team.
Of course, this is all based on the assumption that nobody else would have done a similar tackle on him and that he wouldn’t have froze in the pressure cooker atmosphere of Old Trafford, like so many strikers before him. Assuming this is the case, the goals that were proving so hard for United to find would have started flowing, and United would have been winning the matches that they had previously been drawing or losing. Would it have been enough to win the Premier League title? Probably, because he was one of the best strikers in England at that time. Whether he would have had the same impact that Cantona did is very debatable because Eric wasn’t an out & out striker like Hirst. He was a footballer first and foremost, whose favoured position was upfront.
Ferguson also tried to sign Hirst again, shortly before he bought Cantona, and this was after he had suffered the injury. If that had happened, United would have probably spent the next two years trying to get him fit, and back into the team. If they had been successful with their final bid for Hirst, it’s a safe assumption that they probably would have missed out on the title once more. Even if they had won the league that year, Hirst’s injury problems from 1993 onwards show that he wouldn’t have been available for selection over the next two years, so the domination of English football that followed wouldn’t have happened.
Could United still have signed Cantona the following year? You would have to guess not because there had been rumours in the weeks leading up to his transfer that he was unhappy at Elland Road. Despite his reputation as being a disruptive influence in the dressing room, at just £1.2 million, you would have to think that somebody would have taken a punt on him, and he probably wouldn’t have been available by then. If that was the case, it’s doubtful that we would have dominated English football the way we did back then.
I sometimes wonder if Hirst looks back and wonders what might have been given the success that United enjoyed over the next few years, but looking back, he wasn’t actually pushing for a transfer to Old Trafford. He actually seemed quite settled at Hillsborough (not surprising given his Yorkshire upbringing), and even now, he doesn’t seem to express any regret that the transfer didn’t happen. You also have to wonder what Sheffield Wednesday as a club, who haven’t seen Premier League football since their relegation in 2000, might have achieved had they been able to keep him fit. There is also no doubt that England would have benefitted greatly as well.
It is a shame, however, that he isn’t revered in the same way that Shearer, Fowler, Cole, Wright, Sheringham and Ferdinand, who are the names that always crop up when people discuss the top English strikers of the 1990s. He is unfortunate in this respect, as most of his greatest moments came just before the Advent of the Premier League, when the top flight was known as the First Division.
All of the above are just possibilities, but there is one thing that is pretty certain – if United had signed Hirst, they wouldn’t signed Cantona. As brilliant as Hirst was, and however well he might have done at Old Trafford, he was no Cantona.
For that reason alone, it’s probably a good thing that we didn’t sign him.
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