Lady Luck threatens to take masochistic thrill out of title race

IT had been brass monkeys weather all week in Manchester until the day Chelsea arrived, when the thermometer shot up eight degrees.

I think it was the result of the reflected heat reaching us from Liverpool after Rafa Benitez’s head exploded on Friday but you can never be sure. That Anfield comedy hour certainly set our Sunday up nicely, as did LFC’s blundering about at Stoke and Arsenal’s continued failure to find their old swaggering form.

Yet not even the most optimistic of us had dreamt of anything as embarrassingly definitive as United were to provide at Old Trafford.