Manchester United 3 Basel 3

Ashley Young

Man­chester Uni­ted 3 FC Basel 3, Old Traf­ford, UEFA Cham­pi­ons Lea­gue Group Sta­ge, Septem­ber 27, 2011. A goal by Ash­ley Young earned Man­chester Uni­ted a 3-3 draw ag­ainst FC Basel in the Cham­pi­ons Lea­gue. Uni­ted went in­to a 2 – 0 lead at ha­lf-time thanks to a Dan­ny Wel­beck brace, but as the sec­ond ha­lf wore on the Swiss be­came much more of a threat.

Man­chester Uni­ted, who missed the in­jured Way­ne Roo­ney, took the lead when vet­er­an Ry­an Gig­gs set up Dan­ny Wel­beck who fou­nd the cor­ner of the net in the 16th min­ute of the clash. A mere min­ute la­ter, Gig­gs once ag­ain pro­vided the as­sist as his ac­cur­ate de­fence-split­ting pass al­lowed Wel­beck to ham­mer the ball in­to the back of the net giv­ing Yann Som­mer in the FC Basel goal no chan­ce. At 2-0 down, most te­ams would prob­ably have ac­cep­ted that it just was­n’t go­ing to be their day. Af­ter the break, how­ever, the vis­it­ors ma­naged to score two goals in a two min­ute span. Fa­bi­en Frei pulled one back as he took ad­vant­age of a clear­ance in the 58th min­ute be­fore name­sake Al­ex Frei con­ver­ted a cross just a couple of min­utes la­ter. Wi­th four­teen min­utes left on the clock, Switzer­land in­ter­na­tion­al stri­ker Marco Streller ev­entually won a pen­alty which the ir­re­press­ible Frei sub­sequently con­ver­ted in­to a goal. Man­chester Uni­ted threw every­thing but the kit­chen sink at the vis­it­ing si­de dur­ing the clos­ing sta­ges of the con­test and they were re­war­ded when new boy Ash­ley Young head­ed a clev­er cross ball from fel­low wing­er Lu­is Nani in­to the net af­ter 90 min­utes of play. Wel­beck al­most sco­red his third goal of the night in stop­page time, but his glan­cing head­er went mar­gin­ally wide. Man­chester Uni­ted Te­am: Da­vid de Gea, Rio Fer­dinand, Fa­bio da Silva, Phil Jones, An­tonio Va­lencia, Ash­ley Young, Pat­rice Ev­ra, Oli­veira An­der­son, Dan­ny Wel­beck, Mi­chael Car­rick, Ry­an Gig­gs. Sub­stitutes: Dar­ren Fletch­er, Ji-sung Park, Lu­is Nani, Di­m­it­ar Ber­batov, Mame Biram Di­ouf, Mi­chael Owen, An­ders Linde­gaard. FC Basel Te­am: Yann Som­mer, Da­vid Ab­ra­ham, Alek­sandar Dragov­ic, Joo-ho Park, Adilson Varela, Fa­bi­an Frei, Markus Stein­hofer, Gran­it Xhaka, Al­ex­an­dre Frei, Marco Streller, Jacques Zoua. Sub­stitutes: Ra­doslav Ko­vac, Taulant Xhaka, Arlind Ajeti, Scott Chip­per­field, Pas­cal Schurpf, Kwang-ry­ong Pak, Massimo Colomba.

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