These are moral trophies.
No one gives a shit who finished 2nd in a one horse race title. No one will give a shit about the "2nd best team in England" when the gap between the first and second is 12 points. No one gave a shit about this when we finished 2nd 19 points away from City few years ago, and no one cared about City last season when they finished 2nd 18 points away from Liverpool. These only get any kind of importance when you're actually challenging for the league, we're not. It's a one horse race so yeah, 2nd from 4th in this situation doesn't matter except boosting some egos here. Neither us nor Leicester, Chelsea or whatever are challenging City. No one will care for us or them.
We have lost 5 points against the two teams at the bottom of the league and 2 points against Everton when we were leading 2-0 at half time. Get these 7 points and we would be 5 points away from first spot and a possibility of title challenge would still be on.
It's our responsibility that the gap reached 12 points. We aren't at 12 points gap just because City won 14 games in a row. We're where we're because we fecked up in very easy games. We have ourselves to blame.
United has a good enough squad and team to challenge for the league and we were showing that till we fecked up once we actually found ourselves leading the league.