Jesper Blomqvist, Manchester United Champions League winner, arrives at his pizza restaurant at midday sharp, and knocks the snow off his boots. He wants to make coffee for us but first he must start the fire in the custom-built Neapolitan pizza oven that has been cold for two days. To do that he chops up some of the logs in a pile alongside it and when he is done with the axe, the wood is arranged, and eventually the flame leaps.

We are in Lidingö, an island 20 minutes east of central Stockholm where one of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s old team-mates has found a new passion after all those years of injury and uncertainty that followed his part in United’s magical treble season 20 years ago. Then Blomqvist, whom Sir Alex Ferguson bought in the summer of 1998 at the third attempt, played in so many of the big games for United. They included the Champions League final against Bayern Munich and also the FA Cup semi-final against Arsenal, when Ryan Giggs came on for him to score one of the competition's great goals.

It has been a hard road for Blomqvist, in Sweden’s 1994 World Cup team at the age of 20, who jokes ruefully that his career ended that night in Barcelona when Solskjaer, the club’s current manager who faces Arsenal in the Cup again tomorrow evening, scored the winner against Bayern. By the pre-season his right knee was swelling, the start of the articular cartilage problem that four operations and years of rehab could not solve. His friend Solskjaer would later suffer the same problem, but for Blomqvist it was effectively over at United and so began the decline via Everton, Charlton Athletic and then back to Sweden.