Manchester United slays mighty Zorya Luhansk, quest for Europa League glory continues

Manchester United’s painstaking crawl back to the top of European club soccer leads through frozen and bumpy fields in towns of less than 500,000 on the very eastern border of Ukraine.

And when the Red Devils – winners of 13 Premier League titles, three European cups and two world cups for clubs since 1991 – went there, they even needed a result in the final group stage game of the Europa League just to ensure that they reached the knockout stages in second place of their group.

Such was the plight of Jose Mourinho’s team on Thursday, traveling to Zorya Luhansk necessitating at least a tie, just in case Feyenoord beat group-leaders Fenerbahce. They got a hard-earned 2-0 victory to reward them for their toil and utter dominance against a stoically unambitious opponent.

This is where United is now. Two seasons after not being in Europe at all for the first time in decades, and a year after crashing out of the Champions League in the group stage and the Europa League in the round of 16 – to Liverpool, painfully – Mourinho needed to field a strong lineup just to make it to the final 32 in Europe’s secondary tournament from four wins and away losses to Fenerbahce and Feyenoord.

All of attacking talent – plus Wayne Rooney – was necessary to unlock Zorya, which had nothing to play for but the distinction of giving United a hard game on their mostly brown home field.

United totally controlled the game. But it mustered little else in the first half but a bunch of speculative long shots by Paul Pogba, most of which he got horribly wrong, an attempted chip from Juan Mata from an impossible angle, and a late Marcos Rojo volley that he couldn’t get his weight over and airmailed.

Then, just after half-time, Henrikh Mkhitaryan picked up the ball by the halfway line on good defensive work from Rojo, ran all the way to goal and simply beat goalkeeper Oleksiy Shevchenko for the first goal.

It was Mkhitaryan’s first goal for United and a bit of vindication for the Armenian attacking midfielder, who struggled to find playing time early in the season because of an injury and trouble convincing Mourinho of his worth – in spite of being named the Bundesliga’s Players’ Player of the Season with Borussia Dortmund last year.

United continued to boss the game but long refused to get an insurance goal, as so very often this season. Zorya didn’t have the wherewithal to bag an equalizer though, even if it had a brief flash in front of Sergio Romero’s goal midway through the second half.

Until the 88^th minute, United got no closer than Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s late shot, zinging just over the bar. At length, the 35-year-old Swede was played into the clear by Pogba and scored just as coolly as Mkhitaryan had.

So United ambled into the last 32 of Europe’s secondary tournament. And going into the game, even that hadn’t been a given.