The celebrations continued into the early hours, after Cristiano Ronaldo had swept the board at the club’s Player of the Year awards ceremony on Sunday, but, after a well-earned day off yesterday, Manchester United’s players will return to training today intent on compounding Chelsea’s misery at the Champions League final a week tomorrow.

Sir Alex Ferguson was enjoying another victory last night when his tenth Premier League title in 16 years earned him the Manager of the Year award from the League Managers Association. When his mind does return to work, Ferguson has said that his most difficult job over the next eight days will be to decide which of his players to leave out of the 18-man squad for the final in Moscow.

John O’Shea, Darren Fletcher and even Anderson, the talented Brazilian, are among those in danger of missing the cut. But as well as shaping his plans for next season, which may include a bid for Luís Fabiano, the Seville and Brazil forward, Ferguson will be desperate to ensure that his players do not rest on their laurels as they aim to beat Chelsea to the prize again.

When Ferguson said on Sunday evening that United would be “bouncing” into the final — recalling how deflated his team had been when they went into the FA Cup Final against Everton in 1995, and lost, having been beaten to the league title by Blackburn Rovers the previous weekend — he seemed to be making a point about what might be Chelsea’s mental state. Even if there are more recent precedents that suggest otherwise — not least last season, when Chelsea, having finished as runners-up to United in the title race, ended the season by beating them in the FA Cup Final — it was a theme that Ryan Giggs was eager to embrace.

“We lost the league in 1995 and it affected us going into the FA Cup Final a week later,” Giggs, who will overtake Sir Bobby Charlton’s record of 758 appearances for United if he plays in the final, said. “I don’t know how this will affect Chelsea. We just hope to maintain our momentum.”

Patrice Evra, the France full back, suggested that United had been and would continue to be inspired, rather than daunted, by the challenge they have faced from Chelsea in recent weeks. “It could have had an inverse effect if we had won the league without a challenge,” Evra said. “It could have given us an excess of confidence. They [Chelsea] won’t want to end the season without a trophy and, above all, to let us win two.”

Evra is all but guaranteed a place in the starting line-up in Moscow — along with Edwin van der Sar, Wes Brown, Rio Ferdinand, Nemanja Vidic, Michael Carrick, Paul Scholes, Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney. The remaining two places, are likely to be contested by Giggs, Owen Hargreaves, Park Ji Sung and Carlos Tévez, but Ferguson has suggested that his most difficult decisions will concern the identity of his seven substitutes.

“It’s terrible,” the United manager said. “The hardest part won’t be leaving players out of the team. It will be leaving players off the bench. At Wigan, we had to leave out players like O’Shea, Fletcher and Anderson. [But] someone has to make a decision and that’s the manager’s job.”