Manchester United Finish Second

Dar­ren Fletcher

Although Manchester United did well at Old Traf­ford on Sunday after­noon beat­ing Stoke City 4–0, fel­low title con­tenders Chelsea secured the Barclays Premier League crown after decon­struct­ing Wigan Ath­letic to the tune of 8–0 at Stam­ford Bridge. From the first blow of the referee´s whistle, Manchester United con­trolled the match and Sir Alex Ferguson’s title chas­ing side never lost their focus in their very last game of the 2009-10 campaign.

After 31 minutes of play Manchester United opened the scor­ing when a header from cent­ral defender Nemanja Vidic rico­cheted to strong run­ning work­horse Dar­ren Fletcher who hammered the ball behind the Stoke goal­keeper and into the roof of the net. Although Dim­itar Ber­batov failed to round off the cam­paign with a goal, the bat­ter­ing ram striker delivered the goods in the 38th minute when his accur­ate cross made Ryan Giggs score his 155th goal for Manchester United. The Red Dev­ils con­tin­ued to dom­in­ate the match after the resump­tion and in the 54th minute of the game Manchester born Stoke player Danny Hig­gin­botham man­aged to score an own goal as the unlucky defender sliced a clear­ance from a Wayne Rooney cross into the back of the net. Hampered by groin and ankle prob­lems, Rooney limped off the pitch 13 minutes from time with Ji-Sung Park repla­cing the Eng­land inter­na­tional. The South Korea player then roun­ded off the final match of the Eng­lish Premier League sea­son when he dived onto a cross, mak­ing the score read 4–0 in Manchester United’s favour. Not sur­pris­ingly, there was  plenty of noise at the end of the game due to a loud protest against the con­tro­ver­sial Manchester United owners.

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