R.S.C. Anderlecht

Not a single one of them won the trophy.

Atletico Madrid, Anderlecht, Arsenal, Ajax, Fiorentina, Milan, Parma and PSG all played finals as the reigning champions and lost.

It was pretty much a curse.

That's an incredible stat, isn't it? Because I was going to say, is that because the team that won the cup then often went and got a place in the European Cup instead, right? So like, is it? But no, I mean, all of those teams, could have won that.

Well, what's he done?

He's been an assistant at, uh, Anderlecht.

He's, he's, he nearly took Wales to the Euros.

Nearly.

I mean, I slightly half-jokingly suggested starting Philogene in terms of getting him 45 minutes and being the best player on the pitch and building his confidence.

But, you know, we saw Nunes and Kipray, didn't we, in the previous game against Anderlecht.

So, what are your thoughts on that whole situation? You kind of just hinted there that you think senior players should have been playing.

Yeah, with hindsight, which is a wonderful thing.

I think they should have maybe had one or two, especially players who really need minutes at the moment.

Even playing Cedric Ibrahimi, he's been on the bench the last few games.

He was on the bench, of course, at Man City, and then he played Anderlecht and then obviously Nunes as well, which I was a bit surprised about when I saw the line-up.

There's players like Anderson Metti, Casey McAteer, Sindra, who technically can play because he's 19 or 20 soon.

I thought this game they would lose, but we can touch upon that a little bit later.

Ghent beat Anderlecht 4-0.

We are going to talk about that because some people have claimed something's not going on and some people think things are going on and we need to get to the bottom of whether the thing that is going on isn't going on.

It looked like Cercle Bruges were going to get their first win of the season, didn't it? And then it all just kind of fell apart in Union.

But I guess if you're going to have an injury crisis, you kind of want it maybe nearer the beginning of the season than the end.

But who knows with the kind of new system, maybe that's actually not what you want.

without the playoffs and then yeah as I said we had a game called off which was called like against Mechelen probably some relief that this some people didn't have to spend their Fridays watching those two teams I don't know I'm not speaking for myself here but I'm sure there's plenty in Belgium that were like oh actually yeah I wouldn't have watched that anyway so Friday night viewing probably wasn't affected too much but we're gonna start with Anderlecht because the word crisis is back guys it's back in the kind of the language around this team is we're talking crisis crisis crisis and it's it's bizarre because you look at their form in the league and it's like they've lost one game in five and it was this absolute hammering by Ghent but you just can't ignore like the cup defeat to Beerscot the the loss of Wendina Mozagleb like European losses, I'm always a bit like, you can't, it's hard to judge on this.

It's like, I can't, was it Ghent lost to like, was it Shelbourne a couple of years ago? Or Lana? I can't

You know, Villarreal were looking at their midfield and they were saying, we need to upgrade this now.

So they were willing to spend a lot of money on Nathan Saliba after one season in Anderlecht to bring him in and to be the other answer in Villarreal's midfield.

They played with two central midfielders.

They needed somebody to pop gay, put respect on his name, one of the best African midfielders, one of the best midfielders in La Liga.

He's a player I've always liked.

I remember being linked with him when he was at Anderlecht and then I thought we should have bought him from Leicester and was kind of really happy that he came to us and...

I think the reason Carrick keeps playing him because we lost that experience of Casemiro in the middle of the park and he was hoping that Tielemans would bring that.

You know, he's played for years in the Premier League.

There were no post-match recriminations from the legends, just a disappointment that the club hadn't continued in the European Cup.

Andy Cole would go on to break Lowe's European record when he scored a hat-trick in the opening game against Anderlecht the following season.

United would win the Premier League again, and again and again.

And ultimately, when the club did win another Champions League in Moscow in 2008, there was no prouder man in the Luzhniki Stadium than Sir Bobby Charlton, who had witnessed Ryan Giggs break his appearance record and score the decisive penalty for United before Nicolas Anelka's kick was saved by Edwin van der Sar and the trophy came back to Manchester.