MATCH ANALYSIS

Chelsea may win the championship and everything else that is available to them this season, but it is unlikely that their players will encounter en route the kind of emotion that propelled last night's epic struggle between Arsenal and Manchester United.

Goodness knows what effect such a traumatic defeat will have on the outgoing champions, who took the lead twice in front of their home crowd, only to see their efforts swept away by a tide of relentless energy.

Once more Roy Keane provided the inspiration for a famous victory. The man is supposed to be in his dotage, but again he dominated Patrick Vieira, whose contribution was less than impressive. And on the hour Keane had enough in his locker to provide the simple but beautifully weighted pass that set Ryan Giggs on his way to providing the cross which gave Cristiano Ronaldo the opportunity to score United's third goal, the one that finally ripped the heart out of Arsenal.

Thank goodness they were only playing for second place. Not that you would ever have known it. The intensity, the spite and the sheer unremitting physical commitment spoke of two teams for whom everything might have been at stake last night. It made an enthralling spectacle but also one that contained the potential for an explosion at any moment.

Few would have changed places with Graham Poll, required to arbitrate on the latest instalment of English football's most vicious feud, which reopened with an altercation in the tunnel. Poll's first decision during the match itself came after eight seconds, when he adjudged Darren Fletcher to have barged into Vieira as the Arsenal captain dallied in the centre circle.

And so it went on, each tackle raising the temperature as arms went up and angry voices competed for the referee's attention, all the way to the fifth minute of injury-time, when José Antonio Reyes' foul on Keane provoked a mercifully brief mass brawl. Yet within the maelstrom, a great deal of remarkable football was being played as the two teams struggled for the victory that would keep them in with a theoretical chance of challenging Chelsea for the title.

Rooney's presence in such a match, however, is that of a spark looking for a tinderbox. His covering and closing down were magnificent, but the occasion was always likely to arouse his most combative instincts and it was no surprise when Mr Poll showed him a yellow card for persistent fouling shortly before half-time.

In the second half, however, his contribution was wholly constructive, particularly after the dismissal of Mikaël Silvestre and the arrival of Louis Saha. Having slapped a free-kick against the angle of bar and post, the 19-year-old moved from the central striker's role to a position wide on the right, where he was required to track the runs of Ashley Cole.

As the home side ran out of steam and ideas, however, United were able to establish total control, with John O'Shea's beautifully taken fourth goal providing a final twist of the knife. But as United's players celebrated, it did not escape the attention that Vieira, Henry, Ljungberg and Cole stayed behind to shake the hand of every one of the men who had inflicted such a hurtful and significant defeat.

Oliver Holt in the Mirror:

In the funeral quiet of Highbury, Gary Neville turned his face towards the Manchester United bench, opened his mouth and let out a primal scream of triumph.

Half a season of enmity went into that scream as John O’Shea floated United’s fourth goal into the Arsenal net, half a season of waiting to punish Arsenal for ever thinking they could usurp Neville and his team-mates.

Half a season of hearing Arsenal say United only ended the Gunners’ 49-match unbeaten run through brute force, ugliness and cheating in October at Old Trafford.

Some will say, once more, that too much of this game was ugly but that is to ignore the primitive beauty that existed in this supreme triumph of the will from Sir Alex Ferguson’s side.

Twice behind, United’s defiance was magnificent to behold.

It may be that this enthralling 4-2 win, achieved with ten men for much of the second half, will amount to nothing more than scraps falling from the rich man’s table at Stamford Bridge.

They are eight points behind Chelsea, who play at Blackburn tonight, and even if it is still highly unlikely they will catch them, they will have renewed hunger for the chase.

Arsenal’s hunger appears to have gone. They had chosen to throw their food at Old Trafford but last night they were forced to dine on a fat wedge of humble pie that must have tasted like poison.

Arsenal’s final indignity: Ferguson standing on the Highbury touchline, applauding until every United player had left the pitch. For Arsenal, poison might have been sweeter. For United, victory tasted like nectar.

James Lawton, Independent:

If it should happen that Manchester United do indeed rise up now and chase Chelsea into a serious title race it would be a resurrection of astonishing dimensions. Also, it would be a diamond of effort mined in a football morass.

In the end there was indeed glory in United's 4-2 defeat of Arsenal but to get to it, to leave the spirit and all those once-soaring ambitions of their victims imprinted on the soles of their boots, they had to negotiate the first half of a match that was at one point in danger of representing the nadir of football's descent into a culture of rampant cheating.

The first half was quite sickening in its deceit and its soul-sapping cynicism.

Ashley Cole should have been sent off in the first minutes for a dive that was shocking even by today's vertiginous decline of standards. Graham Poll was entitled to a degree of sympathy because his job was insanely difficult. He didn't have to officiate. He had to pray that someone would find a moral compass.

Maybe Sir Alex Ferguson, who, we know well enough, can sometimes be the most incendiary figure in all of football, may just have been that man. Whatever the Manchester United manager said at half-time, it clearly transformed his team. It brought Wayne Rooney back from the brink of another plunge towards the self-destruction of a sublime young talent. It channelled the maddeningly firefly ability of Cristiano Ronaldo into a match-winning, two-goal performance. It made a team out of a nervy, fractious gang threatening at any moment to turn into a rabble.

Unfortunately, Wenger could work no similar effect. Arsenal in the second half were the same parody of the team that last season persuaded some judges that they might just be the best team in the history of English club football. Last night that idea was caught in the wind and whisked away ­ perhaps for ever.

Independent:

He may - or may not - have been tapped up. But he certainly was not tripped up. Ashley Cole's dive inside three minutes set the tetchy, edgy, inevitable tone. As the Arsenal defender fell to the turf, clearly not having come remotely into contact with Roy Keane's foot, the first Manchester United player over to him was Cristiano Ronaldo and the Portuguese teenager frantically waved his arm as if showing an invisible yellow card. The referee Graham Poll was unmoved.

But then the two players have history. Just 40 seconds into the game at Old Trafford last autumn Cole had clattered into Ronaldo, having earlier said "a hard tackle" was the best way to deal with his trickery. Although Cole could hardly be blamed for the ensuing nastiness, it did not help then and it did not help last night.

But then Sir Alex Ferguson did a clever thing. He made Ronaldo and Ryan Giggs switch flanks. It meant Cole could not negate the pace of the former and would face the guile of the latter instead. It also meant that Ronaldo's speed would be a test for Lauren. That both United wingers scored was vindication for their manager even if, until his goals, Ronaldo had cut a forlorn figure. For both, he was supplied by Giggs.

After Mikaël Silvestre's dismissal, Ronaldo was sacrificed. Cole stayed on and was finally given the licence to try to salvage the match for Arsenal having been shackled by Ferguson's tactics.