Manchester United: The Treble

• Cat.no: MUDVD1
• Cert: E
• Running time: 130 minutes
• Year: 1999
• Pressing: 1999
• Region(s): 1-6, PAL
• Chapters: Too many to mention
• Sound: Dolby Digital 1.0 (Mono)
• Languages: English
• Subtitles: None
• Fullscreen: 4:3
• 16:9-enhanced: No
• Macrovision: Yes
• Disc Format: DVD 9
• Price: £19.99
• Extras : Extensive scene index, Alex Ferguson exclusive interview
  

  ---

  Producer/Editor:

  Craig South

  Narrated By:

  Robert McCaffrey

Manchester United: The Treble is, how the name would suggest, a round up of their 1998/99 football season in which the team from the North became the first ever to win The Treble.

Sir Alex Ferguson’s team, known as The Red Devils, had a 33-match unbeaten run which included beating Liverpool, Spurs and Aston Villa in the Premiership. They won the FA Cup too after overcoming arch-rivals Arsenal and Newcastle and smashed their way through Milan, Juventus and Bayern Munich to achieve the previously-unobtainable.

Normally, by the time the video is released popular football teams don’t have to try to secure a rush of fans digging into their pockets to purchase them. Just putting out a comprehensive review of the year is enough to satisfy the masses usually, but VCI have made themselves worthy of a knighthood like the team’s coach by putting out one of the most clever DVDs to date.

When the cover states “Every Game, Every Goal”, it means exactly that. However, in this case it means you can almost select each goal individually and certainly each game. Choose which of the three championships you wish to browse through, or which month, game or player you want to specify to watch and they’re instantly accessible.

Also included is an exclusive DVD interview with Sir Alex, also split up into numerous chapters depending on the game in hand, in which he goes into detail about the matches in question.

The picture quality is sufficient but nowhere near perfect. Watching each goal that’s all the fans will be concentrating on, but as scenes appear the grass sometimes seems a bit on the blocky side. While the disc’s content is split into many chapters and titles (which group chapters together depending on the subject), there’s sometimes a brief pause on the screen if the content branches between two titles. Selecting individual moments poses no problems though. The picture is in fullscreen for the entire time and I was unable to determine the average bitrate but there’s so much on the disc it’s impossible to quantify it all.

The sound is in mono, so nothing outstanding but it does precisely what’s intended.

Extras :

Chapters : I listed the total as too many to mention because although the total running time is 130 minutes, there’s almost, but not quite, a separate chapter for each goal. Some of the footage is repeated over different parts of the disc as the selections are grouped together, making it impossible to get an accurate figure without trawling through the footage several times over to find the number of unique chapters.

Languages/Subtitles : English (or Scottish when Sir Alex is about) in Dolby Digital mono, but no subtitles.

Menu : Many of the menus have a brief bit of upbeat championship-style music which is repeated a few times and all are static but easy to read. The menus are easy to negotiate in principal but didn’t work well with version 3.0 of the Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM’s software. I have both that and version 2.0 installed which fared better as version 3.0’s tended to go backwards between menus when I was trying to go the other way.

Overall, Man.Utd fans with a DVD player need no further convincing. This is a must-buy and it’ll be interested to see how many other teams try this out for the 1999/2000 season including the Reds.

For me, football isn’t particularly my bag. When I was young, oh so much younger than today, I went to a handful of matches including seeing Sammy MacIlroy score a hat-trick in 1983 (I think – and I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong), when they beat Wolves 5-0, at home. The game didn’t really catch on for me, but as a big fan of DVDs and finding what they’re capable of as being of great interest, I found the structure of this disc fascinating and it’s worth a look for anyone who wants to see what the format can do.

Just don’t expect the multi-angle section to allow you to dress David Beckham in a range of Posh’s underwear. FILM CONTENT : *** PICTURE QUALITY: ***½ SOUND QUALITY: *** EXTRAS: ***** ——————————- OVERALL: ***

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2000