“I’m proud of the young players – they never stopped battling”

Manchester United’s elderly statesman Ryan Giggs has expressed pride in the performance of his younger team mates, after Manchester United were knocked out of the Capital One Cup last night.

In line with his usual policy Sir Alex Ferguson fielded a team of  players in need of minutes as well as youngsters, including a center back pairing of 19 year old Michael Keane and 21 year old Scott Wootton.

With just seconds to go United lead an almost full strength Chelsea side 3-2, only for Wootton to give away a penalty.

From that moment on Chelsea would be in the ascendancy, going on to win the game 5-4 but despite the role he played in 2 of Chelsea’s 5 goals, Giggs has included Wootton in his praises and believes the defender, as will the number of other youngsters that took to the field last night, will benefit greatly having been involved as he told MUTV:

“I’m proud of the young players who played though – there were some great performances. They will have learnt a lot and you learn more from losing as well.

“You try and take the positives from a game like that but there are a lot of disappointed lads in there and rightly so because they put in good performances.

“But they’ll learn from it and the experience they’ll gain from this is more than they could ever get from a Reserve game.

“Out of the two sides they probably had the most experienced players with a lot of quality to come off the bench. They had to stick all their big guns on in the end to make an impact which they did.”

But rightly Giggs is disappointed in the manner in which United surrendered the tie as victory as merely seconds away:

“It’s tough to take.

“When you score four goals away from home more often than not you win the game, but it just seems to be one of those weeks in the Cup.

“We had the game in the bag with seconds to go. We had the ball deep in their half, lost it and they went up the other end and got the penalty. When it goes to extra-time it’s anyone’s game.”