After Saturday's victory Roy Keane has afforded the team a little chink of hope and for the first time this season it sounded as if he believed it:
"I would rather our deficit wasn't as large as nine points but we've been down this road many times before. We will keep plugging away and we'll see how it takes shape in the New Year, when we hope we are still in with half a chance."
"There is a lot of confidence in the team — but we know we need to keep it up," Keane added.
Not surprisingly Gary Neville pushed the case a little bit harder:
"We've done it before from a position like this and I wouldn't put it past us to do it again."
"Scoring our first goal is so often the key. Once we make a breakthrough, teams have to adopt different tactics and we then find there are more openings for us to exploit. That's what happened here."