Manchester United up to fifth after Jadon Sancho fires winner at Leicester

For all of the talk about the ways in which Erik ten Hag may or may not revolutionise Manchester United, for now it seems his team are quite happy grinding out results, as they recorded their third straight Premier League victory for the first time since before last Christmas.

It was largely as gutsy as it was a pretty performance but Jadon Sancho’s superbly taken first-half strike was enough to secure United successive away wins for the first time since last September.

For Leicester, who remain bottom, it was another dispiriting result and they were roundly booed off at full time. Even still they could have grabbed a point had James Justin shot on target after latching on to Patson Daka’s clever pass into stoppage time.

For Ten Hag, who spent much of the game surveying the scene hands in pockets on the edge of his technical area, the buzz word after victories over Liverpool and Southampton was standards, with the Dutchman stressing the importance of maintaining them.

Ten Hag has acknowledged United remain a work in progress but they do look increasingly comfortable in their own skin. Sancho seems a different player to the one weighed down by expectations and, after a torrid time, Marcus Rashford appears to have rediscovered the fearlessness that helped him burst on to the scene. Ten Hag named an unchanged team, meaning Casemiro, Cristiano Ronaldo and Harry Maguire again began on the bench.

More often than not programme notes amount to nothing more than empty platitudes but the Leicester chairman Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha used his to address some of the questions that have surrounded the club throughout a trying and at times destabilising summer in which Wout Faes, a £15m arrival from Reims, represented their only