Manchester United show signs of life but Saka helps make it Arsenal’s day

In the days since Erik ten Hag’s unveiling as Manchester United’s next manager the talk has turned, hungrily, to the scale of the task. There is a kind of relish in this. How many years are we talking now? What’s the current bid? I hear five. I hear six. How about ten years. How about a hundred years. How about infinite years.

It is of course a pointless discussion. Partly because it has no content, nothing but numbers plucked out of the air. Let’s face it, if you’re walking in the wrong direction you’re not going to get there at all. But there is also something deeply facile about hiring a first-team manager as a kind of balm. Fix us. Give us “a culture”. Make us like Ajax, while having none of the structures that make Ajax into Ajax. In many ways bolting Ten Hag on to this ailing machine is up there with buying a replica shirt in the hope it might turn you into Johan Cruyff.

And yet as Arsenal extracted from this fun, slightly delirious game a potentially season-defining result, led by the reliably excellent Bukayo Saka; as United thrashed away without any luck at all, it was tempting to wonder. The hundred-year plan, the doom-scenario talk is rooted in an obsession with moral decay, physical cowardice, all the things people love to pick out of the theatre of sport. Is it really this complex?

Moments of theatre. Scorelines. The last thing you’ve seen. All of this has a powerful intoxicant effect. But this is basically a game of talent and money. And the world’s fifth richest football club still has a large helping of both. On a breezy day in north London United might have scored six by the hour mark. They kept hitting bar, post and goalkeeper. They offered, even in an error-strewn 3-1 defeat, evidence of the