When David de Gea walks out at Selhurst Park on Sunday he will move to within 13 games of becoming only the 11th player to reach 500 games for Manchester United. It will be the third time in four seasons that De Gea has been involved in every Premier League fixture and only Cristiano Ronaldo can stop him from winning a fifth player of the year award.
The Spaniard might only have one Premier League title to his name for all those years of toil, but his status as a United great isn’t in question. He has been one of the very few players to emerge from the wreckage of this season with any credit in the bank, but rewind to last summer and it could all have been so different.
For the first time since he established himself as United’s undisputed No. 1, De Gea faced a major challenge last season from Dean Henderson, an academy graduate with ambitions of dethroning the Spaniard.
