THEY ARE THE RESURRECTION

Thirteen months after their season kicked off, and 12 hours after Europa League elimination against Sevilla, Manchester United players landed back at the city’s airport after their 61st and final competitive game of 2019-20. It was an arduous campaign which started on pre-season in Australia and finished in Germany.

United players waited for 30 minutes near a baggage carousel within the discreet private terminal, decked out in their dark-red training kit. The Spanish speakers, David de Gea, Juan Mata and Sergio Romero, huddled together while Marcus Rashford and Jesse Lingard messed around in another group. There was relief that a marathon season was finally over, but major disappointment that it had yielded no trophies following a third semi-final defeat.

Not everyone was present on that heavy mid-August morning. Bruno Fernandes, the man who changed United’s season for the better after his January arrival from Sporting, went straight to Portugal. The rest would be escaping on holiday after picking up their families in Manchester. Captain Harry Maguire, youngster Brandon Williams and Rashford were off to the fashionable Greek island of Mykonos, where Maguire would end up in police cells facing charges but pleading innocence, amid headlines he could have done without.

The long campaign had ended with only United’s second defeat in 25 matches since a January home loss to Burnley. The other was their FA Cup semi-final defeat against Chelsea, as United became the first English team to lose three semi-finals in a season. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s side rose to a season high of third by winning at Leicester on the final day of the Premier League campaign, however, securing automatic Champions League qualification for 2020-21 and a hefty £75 million revenue boost.

“Third always looked like a struggle, so we did well to finish there,” assistant manager Mike Phelan tells FourFourTwo. “To reach three semi-finals but no final was a major disappointment, yet also remarkable that we got to that stage. But when you do, you get greedy – the history of this football club means you have to push, push and push. It hurt not to reach a final, especially against Sevilla, because we felt we created many opportunities on the night but just ran out of steam. Some clinical finishing would have put us in the final.”

United were better against Sevilla in 2020 compared with 2018, when they crashed out of the Champions League after a miserable home 2-1 defeat, but were still at sixes and sevens for much of the season. The majority of fans didn’t expect a top-four finish at the beginning of it: a mere 12.3 per cent of those polled on the Reissued forum thought United would make the top three, while 22 per cent predicted 8th or lower.

THE STERN-FACED ASSASSIN

As he waited for his own bag at Manchester Airport, Solskjaer seized the opportunity to talk with some of his players. He told Daniel James (right) to get his head together over the two-week break before United players returned