Relentless United swap style for substance

IT may contrast jarringly with Manchester United’s traditional, swashbuckling values but their charge for an 18th league title is being built on the belligerence that was once the trademark of George Graham’s Arsenal.

It will be a while before ‘1-0 to the United’ is sung as lustily at Old Trafford as it was at Highbury but a hard-earned — if scrappy — victory here was their seventh win by that slender margin in the Premier League this season.

It is a pattern that suggests the freedom of last year has disappeared but 1-0 victories are always preferable to the goalless draws that Liverpool seem to specialise in.