David de Gea has little choice but to clear his head and knuckle down

By Daniel Taylor for The Guardian

After all the finger pointing, the headlines of “Ridículo” in two of Spain’s leading dailies and an escalating dispute that has caused enough friction between Manchester United and Real Madrid to jeopardise future dealings between the clubs, the bottom line for everyone at Old Trafford is that they should be grateful the Spanish authorities have refused to bend in the way their English counterparts almost certainly would have.

Plainly, it is not going to be easy de-cluttering David de Gea’s brain after the tortuous, sometimes torturous, process that ended with his transfer unravelling so spectacularly there is concern among United’s directors that it could have ramifications the next time they go back to Madrid for Gareth Bale or, the ultimate target, Cristiano Ronaldo.

Yet it is also fair to assume the Old Trafford crowd will feel considerably more assured should De Gea return to the team for their next game, against Liverpool on Saturday week, providing the Spaniard, to use the phrase of this transfer window, is in the right frame of mind.

De Gea may need some time to shake his head clear and no one should be under any doubt he will be returning to England against his wishes but Old Trafford, despite the impression he has given recently, is not a five-star prison and his goalkeeping has been so exceptional over the last couple of seasons the benefits to his team will be considerable if he can snap out of his mood.

The mind goes back to Ronaldo’s final season in Manchester when he, too, sometimes gave the impression he was ticking down the days. Ronaldo still scored 25 goals that season and, though it took a few months for the crowd to forgive the perceived disloyalty, he quickly re-established himself as the team’s outstanding performer. Ronaldo did have one fit of pique when he was substituted during a game against Manchester City but that was mostly because he was locked in a battle with Nicolas Anelka at the time to finish as the Premier League’s highest scorer.

In De Gea’s case, his importance to the team can be gauged by how many points his performances saved last season, when he was arguably the outstanding goalkeeper in the league. Liverpool’s last visit to Old Trafford was a case in point. United won 3-0 yet De Gea was indisputably the man of the match, not just because of his remarkable hand to eye coordination but the way his best saves came in key periods of the game.

Sergio Romero has already shown he is a substantial downgrade despite his status as an Argentina international. Likewise, it was telling that people behind the scenes at the Bernabéu had strong misgivings about whether Keylor Navas, the bait in the player-plus-exchange for De Gea, was cut out for English football. Navas’s agility, reflexes and reading of the game were not in question, but the Costa Rican’s ability to control his penalty area did count against him. At 6ft, he would have been unusually short for a Premier League goalkeeper and United’s late, unexpected interest in the 28-year-old smacked of the club trying to make the best of a bad situation.

Undoubtedly, De Gea will still think of it in those terms but, if anything, he is entitled to wonder first of all why Madrid have spent several months tailing him with the ubiquitous agent Jorge Mendes – football royalty, evidently, to those at the higher end of the sport – prominently on the case, only to wait until lunchtime on the final day of the Spanish transfer window before making their first bid.

The answer is that Madrid had guessed United’s owners, the Glazer family, would rather take a knockdown fee at that stage than lose De Gea for nothing at the end of the season. For a while, it looked like an astute tactic. United abandoned their asking price of around £33m, accepting a joint package with Navas worth a total of £29.3m, and if the relevant documents had arrived a few minutes earlier it would have been seen as another show of Madrid’s strength in the transfer market.

Instead, that slight delay beyond the midnight deadline means De Gea will return to Manchester once the latest round of international fixtures is out of the way. Desperate to make the move, he is the loser in all this, particularly as he turned down a new contract last season that would have multiplied his salary, as one of Old Trafford’s lowest earners, to around £250,000 a week. That contract would have been backdated to 2014, meaning De Gea will ultimately miss out on two years of the higher pay – in excess of £10m. The rumoured £12m signing-on fee when he joins Madrid as a free agent – and United heard a while ago that the terms were already agreed – will help to make up for that loss, of course.

In the meantime De Gea really has little choice but to knuckle down and, whatever his grievances, he will not lack motivation when there is a European Championship to come next summer. No one will see him kissing the United shirt this season but he can still wear it with distinction.