A teenage prodigy no more: Football's boy wonder turns 20 today. Shielded from the press, Ryan Giggs has developed his prodigious talent. But will he be a man wonder? Jim White reports

Try this at home. Place a football on the ground and roll your left foot over it three times. Repeat the process with the right foot, this time nudging the ball forwards with your heel. Next, wiggling your hips as you go, step over the ball and, whipping your right foot around behind your left, kick it crisply. Then run after it at full pelt. If you are still standing.

Ryan Giggs can do this. But when he does it, it is not in front of the bedroom mirror, it is in front of 44,000 people. When he last performed the trick, he left two Arsenal defenders in his wash, staring at the turf where the ball had been. 'Just watch his legs if you can,' wheezed the breathless commentator, as a replay of the incident rolled on live television. 'It's hard to see exactly how he does it.'

And that was in slow motion.

Since he arrived in Manchester United's first team as a 17-year-old in 1991, Ryan Giggs has regularly done things with a football that could qualify for an Arts Council grant. Among the concrete house builders of the British game he stands out like Michelangelo.

Even worse for us mortals, he is, in his manager's words, 'a photogenic boy'. Details of his life appear as often in Just Seventeen magazine ('favourite food: pasta; favourite pastime: buying clothes') as in 90 Minutes ('height: 5ft 11in; weight: 11 stone 6lbs').

In a country where the usual form is for footballers to look like troglodytes and run around like beheaded poultry, the elegant, economical Giggs is assumed to be too flash, too handsome, not serious. When United lost in Turkey recently, on the flight home Giggs and a team-mate got hold of the pilot's intercom and made giggly announcements in posh accents. Some of us thought it showed an admirable ability to maintain a sense of proportion after defeat. But when the news leaked out, anguished callers to David Mellor's 6.06 radio programme said it proved he did not care enough.

Today Giggs turns 20. Since the stuffing in Turkey, he has been occupying United's substitutes' bench (although he played from the start on Saturday). Seeing Giggsie on the sidelines, the faithful in the grandstands at Old Trafford are worrying themselves silly. What's happening to their boy wonder? Will he make the transformation, as tricky as one of his dribbles, into a man wonder? Oddly for a child prodigy, Giggs was a late starter. No Mozart, he didn't play football until he was 10. His dad, Danny Wilson - like Shirley Bassey, from Tiger Bay and of West African descent - was a spectacular fly-half for Cardiff rugby club. It wasn't until Wilson signed for Swinton rugby league club, and invited his girlfriend, Lynne Giggs, and their two young sons north with him, that young Ryan addressed a spherical ball. He found he was useful at it. On his debut for the B team of a Salford boys' side, he scored six goals: the following week he was in the A team.

News travelled fast. Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, called at the Wilson house to sign Ryan the moment he turned 14. He was sharp: at the time, Manchester City were sizing him up for one of their shirts.

Word soon spread among United fans that there was something special in the youth team. Most football followers are fonder of players their club finds as youngsters than those bought in as adults. At United the passion is felt as keenly as anywhere since, over a quarter of a century, expensively acquired outsiders have failed to match the feats of discoveries such as Duncan Edwards, Bobby Charlton and, most of all, George Best. This wizard Wilson appeared to be their heir.

By the time he made his first team debut, Wilson had become Giggs. The name switch came by chance. At the start of a foreign tour, it was found that the star of the youth team did not possess a passport. One had to be hurriedly issued, and the name on his birth certificate was his mother's. As his parents had just split up, it seemed a good time to start again. Whatever the moniker, the United faithful loved the boy, especially when he scored on his first full outing. Against Manchester City.

From the start, Alex Ferguson protected his protege, playing him sparingly and stopping him talking to agents, commercial sponsors and, much to the chagrin of Desmond Lynham, who whinged about it weekly on Match of the Day, to the media. The press corps made the assumption that the boy was being protected from something else: himself.

Being British and gifted in the feet, you are expected to go off the rails up top. There's Bestie with his drink and women; Gazza with his ice-cream and hair extensions; and most deviant of all, the teetotal, God-bothering Glenn Hoddle.

As yet the only indication that the photogenic Giggs might be going wobbly is his taste in loud checked jackets and his declared ambition to follow his team-mate Eric Cantona on to the catwalk. Off the field he does not exhibit any signs of uncontainable ego. When United flew into Budapest for a European Cup tie in September, while the other senior players chatted with the press posse, Giggs stuck with the three youth teamers whose role was to act as pack men for the first eleven. In the foyer a Hungarian fan brandishing an autograph book ran past him as he pushed the luggage trolley and pounced on another first teamer walking behind.

At the beginning of this season, Ferguson relaxed his paternalistic controls slightly. A commercial agent was appointed, a pounds 400,000 deal signed with a boot manufacturer and an interview appeared in the men's magazine FHM.

'It's good, yeah. It's great,' said the long-silent genius when asked how it feels to exercise such skill. 'It's weird. It just either happens or it doesn't'

This last month, however, it just hasn't happened. When United drew at home to Galatasaray in the European Cup, Ferguson alluded to some of his players not knowing when to stop pleasing the crowd. We knew whom he meant. Later, Giggs was marked out of the game in Istanbul. Meanwhile, he was replaced in the United line-up by the Ukrainian winger, Andrei Kanchelskis, whom Ferguson praised lavishly.

Some observers began muttering that all the protection of Giggs was to keep the truth from being outed: the boy was flattering to deceive. He might be able to juggle, but he couldn't cross, couldn't pass, couldn't finish.

Fortunately for Giggs - fortunately for the rest of us - Alex Ferguson does not share this belief. He reckons this is just a hiccup: the genius is not yet complete. He has been coaxing Giggs back into form by supplying extra coaching. And, judging by the killer pass he supplied for Eric Cantona with his first touch as subsitute against Manchester City a fortnight ago, it appears to be working.

'He has such a wonderful attitude,' Ferguson explained recently. 'Such desire to realise the greatness within him. At the moment he reminds me of a lad who knows all those card tricks. But has still to learn how to play cards.'

As in the case of David Gower, what really infuriates the puritans is that skill appears to ooze from Giggs without any effort. So when he excutes a piece of fancy, like the dance steps against Arsenal, they have to point out that he immediately lost the ball. But for those who prefer to believe in football as an art form, that sleight of feet was the highlight of the season. Happy birthday, Giggsie.

(Photographs omitted)