For a fleeting moment Manchester United's trouble between the sticks seemed over. Thoughts of knock-kneed Italians and lardy Aussies began to fade from the collective consciousness as Peter Schmeichel, owner of the largest pair of hands in United history, was spotted back in town.

Rumours of his permanent return to Old Trafford, though, were ill-founded. On Tuesday lunchtime he stationed himself in the Trafford Centre, Europe's biggest shopping mall, just down the road from his spiritual home, to sign copies of his autobiography for more than 500 eager fans and then make himself available to the press.

Through all the palaver spinning round him Schmeichel remained remarkably calm, sanguine, unfailingly attentive and polite. Rather at odds, indeed, with the image he used to project in moments of crisis in the United defence when he would scream, bawl and howl. And that was just at team-mates.

But then that was the reason he left, to escape the debilitating pressure that life at the top of the Premiership had become.

So how was he finding things at Sporting Lisbon? Had he, for instance, yet learnt Portuguese to shout at the defence? "I'm learning," he says in his perfect Mancunian-edged English. "One or two of them don't speak English. And it has cost us goals because of communication problems. So it's my responsibility to learn their language."

However many goals he has leaked he looks very relaxed. Life, then, appears to be the breeze he had been anticipating after the hurricane of winning the treble.

"I'm enjoying it, but it's been a very, very difficult start," he says. "The coach had five games, then he was sacked. Then the entire board stepped down. So we're without leadership.

"It all started because we played a very bad game against someone we were supposed to beat and we drew 1-1. The fans reacted very badly. They threatened the directors physically; they escaped into the boardroom and had to stay there until about three in the morning."

Blimey, and he thought there was pressure in England.

"It's a different kind of pressure," he says. "It's not a more relaxed environment, no way. We train longer, we have to go and stay in a hotel the night before games, so it's not like I have tons more time, it's not that. But I feel a big, big physical difference. I wake up every morning fresh, no pains anywhere. Whereas in England by this time in the season I'd have pains.

"I don't think it's just the English system overheating, it's the whole system: there's more Champions League, there are more nations now, that means more international games, more qualifiers. I think everyone in football, they'll all have to sit down and face this problem: we're overexhausting our players, we are going to pay the price in terms of quality."

But surely, for anyone involved in United's treble run last season, the intensity was part of the excitement? "Definitely," he says. "But you're talking about Juventus in the European semi-final with Arsenal in the FA semi the next week and in between Chelsea in the league. Yes, I loved it. But remember before that there had been three months of hard work, of games you need to slog through to be in that position to enjoy the icing on the cake."

Though he is too circumspect to discuss his successors in public, he believes some of United's defensive frailties that have followed his departure are down to the relentless nature of the football calendar.

"When you talk about defence, you want to keep the same players all the time," he says. "Of course the treadmill means you're much less likely to keep the same players, it won't be as settled as you would like. That will become a larger problem as they add all these games."