Giggs and Scholes Win a Battle of Nostalgia With the Shadow of Vieira

When it comes to slow football, the world knows that no one does it better than an Italian side – even one containing only two actual Italians. So perhaps Sir Alex Ferguson was merely setting himself an extra challenge last night when, in a crucial Champions League tie, he sent out a side seemingly ill equipped to perform at the kind of high tempo usually held to be ­characteristic of Premier League teams, and of Manchester United in particular.

Luckily for him, perhaps, last night's opponents were Internazionale, a club and a squad capable of making even Jose Mourinho look like just another run-of-the-mill European coach. Elimination at the first knockout stage while heading for the Serie A title makes Mourinho no better than Roberto Mancini, the man he replaced last summer – not to mention the 17 others who have tried to take this strange club in hand during the 22 years since Ferguson arrived at Old Trafford.

As they wrote out their team sheets in preparation for last night's match, both managers appeared to have come to the same conclusion. This, they clearly believed, was an occasion on which ­experience would demonstrate its value. The sort of panache that is fueled by raw pace would not be the key to success in this vital engagement. It turned out to be a self-fulfilling ­prophecy as the match fizzed and sparked without actually catching fire, the high number of shots from both sides – 17 from United, 14 from Inter – never adding up to a real spectacle for the 74,769 spectators.

Ferguson selected a midfield including the 34-year-old Paul Scholes and the 35-year-old Ryan Giggs, two of the players who represented United when they eliminated Inter in the quarter-finals 10 years ago, while Mourinho opted not just for the qualities of his 35-year-old captain, Javier Zanetti, another survivor of those matches, but – much more surprisingly – for the memory of what Patrick Vieira used to be.

Back in the days when Vieira was a regular visitor to Old Trafford, the Senegal-born midfielder arrived with a sense of expectation. Knowing he would be in for a fierce individual battle with the equally combative Roy Keane, he could draw confidence from a useful record against United in Arsène Wenger's early years. Last night, aged 32, he returned in a very different guise, as a member of a team that may be running away with Serie A for the fourth season in a row but still struggles for coherence and even competence at the highest level of European competition.

Since he left for Italy in the summer of 2005, Vieira's reputation has lost its sheen to such a degree that you had to wonder what was in Mourinho's mind when he gave him a place in last night's starting line-up. In a single season with Juventus, where he suffered from a recurring groin injury, the Frenchman lost more than half his transfer value. The £13.5m that took him from London to Turin was reduced to £7m when, following the ­relegation enforced on Juventus as a result of the Calciopoli scandal, he left for Milan a year later.

The injury blight followed him across northern Italy, making his inclusion against United an unexpected sign of faith by Mourinho. But to see him jogging on to the pitch with that long-limbed gait was a marvellously nostalgic sight, and as Inter took the initiative in the second quarter there were times when he made the kind of decisive intervention reminiscent of his Highbury days.

He was replaced at half-time by the more attacking Sulley Muntari, and within three minutes of the restart United had doubled a lead that had been looking increasingly fragile. Had he still been on the pitch, it is possible that he might have intervened at some stage in the very deliberate process through which Giggs and Scholes put Wayne Rooney into position to deliver the cunning cross which Cristiano Ronaldo headed home.

That second goal brought relief to a side who had seemed in danger of becoming the victim of one of Ferguson's occasional tactical miscalculations on big occasions. Inviting Scholes to take up a position at the base of midfield guaranteed a supply of accurate long balls to Ronaldo on the right wing, but it also created the likelihood of missed tackles and fouls in the most dangerous area of the pitch. On this night the little man's short passing also let him down, inviting Inter to create openings from which Dejan Stankovic and Adriano should have scored. Giggs, too, was generally lacking the sort of zip that has made his 18th season as a first-team player one of his most satisfying, and United were lucky that wayward ­shooting rendered their opponents unable to take advantage of the home side's sluggish air.

Mourinho took this showcase for veterans a stage further when he introduced, almost certainly for the last time on an English stage, the stately figure of Luis Filipe Madeira Caeiro Figo, who set a world transfer record when he moved from Barcelona to Real Madrid for £38m in 2000. Now 36, Figo replaced the irascible and ineffective Mario ­Balotelli, who turned 18 in August, but the great man's guile, or whatever remains of it, could do nothing to hinder United's deserved if somewhat downbeat progress.