Manchester United 4 Milan 0

Man­chester Uni­ted 4 AC Mil­an 0, Old Traf­ford, UEFA Cham­pi­ons Lea­gue Last Six­teen Sec­ond Leg, Mar­ch 10, 2010. Man­chester Uni­ted taught Mil­an a les­son as they be­at the Serie A club four-nil at ho­me. Un­der­stand­ably, Mil­an Pres­id­ent Silvio Ber­lusconi was not par­tic­u­larly pleased wi­th his San Siro si­de af­ter the heavy loss to Sir Al­ex Ferguson´s men.

Man­chester Uni­ted had edged out Mil­an three-two in the fir­st leg at San Sairo and were fa­vour­ites to pro­gress thro­ugh to the quart­er-fi­nals sta­ge of the com­pet­i­tion. Uni­ted entered the sec­ond leg fix­ture fresh from a clo­se one-nil vic­tory over Wolver­hampton Wan­derers at Mo­lineux, whi­le Mil­an had ma­naged a goal­less draw ag­ainst old rivals Rome at the Olympic Sta­dium in the etern­al city. The al­ways en­thu­si­ast­ic Silvio Ber­lusconi had high hopes ahead of the en­counter in Man­chester, but the con­tro­ver­sial me­dia mogul could on­ly sit and watch his dreams of The Red and Blacks reach­ing the quart­er-fi­nals dis­ap­pear in front of him and he was la­ter re­por­ted to have be­en so frus­trated wi­th his team´s per­form­ance that he had switched off his tele­vi­sion set in sheer an­ger. The Itali­an Prime Min­is­ter may have be­en ex­cused, how­ever, as Man­chester Uni­ted rea­ched the next ro­und of the tour­na­ment by out­classing the Serie A out­fit by four goals to nil. On the oth­er hand, the multi-tal­en­ted politi­cian should have re­membered that a man who lives by hope, will die by despair.

On a night that saw pre­vi­ous Man­chester Uni­ted star Da­vid Beck­ham re­turn to Old Traf­ford, Way­ne Roo­ney proved that he was the new hero of The Theatre of Dreams. And even tho­ugh Berlusconi´s Mil­an had ar­rived on Eng­lish soil wi­th some sort of at­tack­ing in­tent, the vis­it­ors col­lapsed com­pletely when Roo­ney head­ed an ex­cel­lent Ga­ry Ne­ville cross pa­st away goal­keeper Chris­ti­an Ab­bi­ati af­ter just thir­teen min­utes of ac­tion. Man­chester Uni­ted con­tin­ued to push for­ward fol­low­ing the re­sump­tion and doubled their lead sixty sec­onds in­to the sec­ond ha­lf as Lu­is Nani cros­sed for Roo­ney to put the ball pa­st Ab­bi­ati one more time, ma­king the score­board read two-nil in fa­vour of the hosts. Then, in the fifty-ninth min­ute of pro­ceed­ings, a su­perb pass from Paul Scho­les fou­nd fel­low mid­fielder Ji-Sung Park who re­gistered the third goal of the clash. Al­though Man­chester Uni­ted went on to dom­in­ate the rest of the ga­me, Beck­ham al­most ma­naged to net a con­sol­a­tion goal for Mil­an in the sev­enty-third min­ute of the con­test, put­ting vet­er­an shot stop­per Ed­win van der Sar to the test wi­th a fe­ro­cious ef­fort. The Reds ad­ded one more goal to their tally, tho­ugh, when Dar­ren Fletch­er­’s late head­er from a Ra­fael da Silva cross com­pleted a spec­tac­u­lar sev­en-two ag­greg­ate suc­cess. Sir Al­ex Fer­guson: “It was a mar­vel­lous per­form­ance from all my play­ers, es­pe­cially in the sec­ond ha­lf when our sec­ond goal ef­fect­ively ended the ga­me.” Man­chester Uni­ted Te­am: Ed­win van der Sar, Ga­ry Ne­ville, Ne­manja Vid­ic, Pat­rice Ev­ra, Va­lencia, Rio Fer­dinand, Dar­ren Fletch­er, Paul Scho­les, Ji-Sung Park, Way­ne Roo­ney, Nani. Sub­stitutes: Jon­ny Evans, Ra­fael, Dar­ron Gib­son, Di­m­it­ar Ber­batov, Mame Biram Di­ouf, To­masz Kusz­czak. Mil­an Te­am: Chris­ti­an Ab­bi­ati, Ig­nazio Abate, Daniele Bonera, Thi­ago Silva, Massimo Am­brosini, Math­ieu Flamini, Marek Janku­lovski, Ron­ald­inho, Marco Bor­ri­ello, Klaas Jan Hunte­laar, An­drea Pirlo. Sub­stitutes: Gi­useppe Favalli, Gi­an­luca Zam­brotta, Da­vid Beck­ham, Gen­naro Gat­tuso, Clar­ence Seedorf, Fil­ippo In­zaghi, Dida.

Manchester United Quickfacts

Reign­ing Fir­st Di­vi­sion Cham­pi­ons Man­chester Uni­ted lost 4-0 to Mil­an in front of a 80,000 crowd at San Siro Sta­dium in an Euro­pean Cup Semi Fi­nal Sec­ond Leg mat­ch on the 14th of May 1958.

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