Manchester United’s Ole Gunnar Solskjaer wants Uefa Europa League loss to act as ‘springboard’
- ‘The performance wasn’t good enough to win the game,’ Norwegian says after penalty shoot-out loss to Villareal
- Work to be done by Old Trafford boss for team to challenge for titles but he’s already back at it after bad night in Gdansk
The pickup vans worked their way through Gdansk’s beautiful city centre on Thursday night, stopping to collect branded Manchester United, Villarreal and Uefa signage for the 2021 Europa League final.
There were giant pictures of each finalist to pack away while the United and Villarreal flags which flew from the front of every bus, tram and lamp post were replaced with the flags of Poland and Gdansk.
As the city where the first shots of the Second World War were fired and where the Solidarity movement brought profound social change in Eastern Europe, Gdansk has enough history of its own. The word will be celebrated in Villarreal, just as Rome, Berlin, Paris and London are at Barcelona’s Camp Nou, with lounges in their names.
In United’s history, Gdansk will forever be associated with failure. Rotterdam, another vast port, is celebrated because it was where United won their second European trophy in 1991, but Wednesday’s defeat after 21 spectacular penalties became the third defeat in United’s eight European finals.
Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was deeply disappointed when I spoke to him after the game as Villarreal’s players celebrated behind him. He needed that first trophy.
“I could have stood here and been really happy if the penalties had gone in but the performance wasn’t good enough to win the game,” he said. “We had two shots on target, they had one. It was a final where we were feeling out each other. We had the majority of the possession and the pressure but we didn’t create enough good chances.”
Solskjaer’s Man United rebuild mission laid bare by Europa League agony
Asked what happens next, he said: “There’s two ways you can go. You can feel sorry for yourself and go on holiday and come back sulky for next season. Or you can use this feeling as a springboard to give even more.
“Most of them (the players) have been really good and working really hard. The coaches have been fantastic and we’ve come a long way from the bad start we had but now the feeling is that I need tonight to reflect and analyse. And then tomorrow I’ll probably be more positive again and look forward.”
He joined his players on a flight chartered by club sponsors Aeroflot straight back to Manchester. He arrived home at 7am. He slept for a little over two hours and went back to United’s training ground by midmorning where he planned in more detail for next season with assistant manager Mike Phelan.
Solskjaer spoke with John Murtough, the closest thing the club have to a sporting director about some of the changes he wanted to happen to continue what he sees as improvement. Third and a European semi-final last year, second and a European final this year. That sentence will convince few United fans rightly reeling from Gdansk, but those are the hard facts – United are improving under him season on season.
Solskjaer needs more. He needs a trophy, he needs to mount a genuine title challenge. United, one of the three biggest football clubs in the world, should be in Uefa Champions League finals, not Europa League finals.
His side, blessed with supreme attacking talents, needs to learn to break down stubborn defences. The home form needs to improve, the away form is astonishingly good. The team needs to stop going behind in games, conceding sucker goals from set pieces.
Solskjaer hopes ‘nights like this’ will make goal king Cavani stick around
And to do that he’s said consistently that he needs to bring better players in. I asked him about this at 1am on Thursday morning.
“There’s no doubt about that,” he said. “The majority of the ones who played here tonight played almost every game this season. They’ve been fantastic, robust. We had a couple of injuries. Then throughout the season we had ones who played maybe not enough. We couldn’t challenge City; we couldn’t get the last win today. And as I said, penalties, that can happen. That’s not about performance, it’s about luck.”
He started to unravel in that last segment because he was understandably reluctant to be explicit about what he really thinks: that his squad of top-quality players is not sufficiently strong to compete with the best. That he relies on too few players of a sufficient level. He has six central defenders and no ideal pairing.
He doesn’t have a prolific forward. He’s too dependent on Bruno Fernandes. He needs more leaders and stronger characters. He needs more Bruno-class quality, not emerging talents that point towards a brighter future, not fringe players who take a year to adjust to English football like Fred did or Donny van de Beek, but players for now. It’s on him and his job.
Gdansk wasn’t a major upset. United had done well to reach the final and overcome some difficult teams, but they’d been out of form going into the game and failed to create a winning momentum. Marcus Rashford to name one from several on that pitch were exhausted and when they needed to perform against Spain’s seventh best team, too few of them did.
They can take the hurt and come back stronger like Alex Ferguson’s final title winning team did after losing the league in 2012 to Manchester City, but they need the tools to do that.
