Ole Gunnar Solskjaer Retires

Man­ches­ter United striker Ole Gun­nar Sol­sk­jaer has retired at age 34 after bat­tling knee injuries for four years. He had announced ear­lier that his inten­tion was to intends to see out his cur­rent con­tract with United, which runs until June 2008.

His knee woes begain against Charl­ton in Sep­tem­ber 2003 and, despite play­ing and scor­ing against Panathi­naikos in the Cham­pi­ons League three days later, he was seri­ously injured. Sol­sk­jaer missed five months and, hav­ing returned to action in Feb­ru­ary, re-injured his knee the fol­low­ing sum­mer. He missed the entire 2004-05 sea­son and played only five games in 2005-06. Known as the “Baby-Faced Assas­sin”, Sol­sk­jaer looked to have turned the cor­ner last sea­son mak­ing over 30 appear­ances and scor­ing 11 goals, seven in 19 Pre­mier League appear­ances. How­ever, he suf­fered a set­back in his recent attempt to recover from yet another knee injury and has decided to call it a day.

He can retire know­ing that he accom­plished as much as any player could ask for in club foot­ball. Man­ches­ter United’s chief exec­u­tive David Gill said it best: “Ole has pro­vided us all with some excep­tional mem­o­ries dur­ing his time here at the club. Nobody will ever for­get his dra­matic win­ner in Barcelona, but much more than that his ded­i­ca­tion and pro­fes­sion­al­ism make him one of the great role mod­els in football.”

Sol­sk­jaer joined United from Molde for £1.5m in 1996 and the for­mer Nor­way inter­na­tional has made 366 appear­ances for United, scor­ing 126 goals. He col­lected six league cham­pi­onship, two FA Cup medals and a Cham­pi­ons League medal with United.

He will always be remem­bered fondly by United fans for scor­ing the win­ning goal in the Cham­pi­ons League final against Bay­ern Munich in 1999 and a late, late win­ner against Liv­er­pool to keep United’s FA Cup run alive in the mag­i­cal sea­son that pro­duced The Treble.

The retire­ment of Sol­sk­jaer leaves United with only three estab­lished strik­ers — Wayne Rooney, Louis Saha and Car­los Tevez. Tevez is cur­rently the only one fully match fit. Saha’s sit­u­a­tion is par­tic­u­larly trou­bling for United as he has started only one Pre­mier League match since Jan­u­ary 1 and, although he should be fit to face Sun­der­land on Sat­ur­day, his per­sis­tent knee prob­lems are caus­ing con­cern, par­tic­u­larly in view of a pos­si­ble call-up to the France squad next week for Euro 2008 qual­i­fy­ing matches.

Sir Alex Fer­gu­son has been rumoured to be con­tem­plat­ing a move for Bolton’s Nico­las Anelka and Spurs striker Dim­i­tar Berba­tov, although Berba­tov has stated that he intends to stay at White Hart Lane. United have sold fel­low strik­ers Alan Smith to New­cas­tle and Giuseppe Rossi to Vil­lar­real dur­ing this trans­fer windown.

Sol­sk­jaer will remain at the club as a coach and as an offi­cial ambas­sador for the club, sim­i­lar to the role Sir Bobby Charl­ton holds. Sol­sk­jaer has worked with United’s youth teams dur­ing his recent injury spells and he has indi­cated that a career in man­age­ment would inter­est him when his play­ing days were over.