Jose Mourinho credits referee Michael Oliver for saving Manchester United’s season due to his red carding Ander Herrera in the FA Cup quarterfinal loss at Chelsea.
Mourinho sees the Herrera send-off as critical to United’s elimination from the FA Cup and thus reduced the high workload his team had to put in this season.
Manchester United stayed alive in four different competitions (Europa League, FA Cup, EFL Cup and Premier League top four) for most of the season. The Red Devils were in contention for three competitions an overwhelming majority of the campaign. All those matches took a lot of wear and tear out of this unit.
Fixture congestion was a prevailing theme for the Red Devils this season, and it resulted in some matches having to be rescheduled. All the extra minutes logged by so many players led to numerous injuries, including season enders for Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Marcos Rojo and Luke Shaw.
Mourinho will go down as the first United Manager ever to claim a trophy in his very first season on the job, and should United triumph May 24th in Stockholm over Ajax, they will get trophy number too.
It would also be the first Europa League trophy in the history of Manchester United. Tomorrow, versus Southampton, United will play their 62nd game, and all in all the final total will be 64. Mourinho points out it could have been even more overloaded had United stayed alive in the FA Cup quarters.
“You know that, in all of my career, I was never out of European competitions in the group phases, and in the last 16 I was out only once,” Mourinho said. “So I reached the semifinals 10 times and I go always until the end of competitions.
“In the League Cup I normally go far. In the domestic competitions cups I normally have a lot of matches.”
“But like this, I never have. This situation of you play a final and the game that you should play that day is going to be postponed until the last week, for the last week.”
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net and TheBank.News, partnered with FOX Sports Engage Network. and News Now. Banks, a former writer for the Washington Times, NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com, currently contributes to WGN CLTV and KOZN.
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