Two hours before the first trophy of the season was handed out, the destination of the most important, the Premiership, was conclusively settled.
This was not so much a football match, more a coronation. Sixteen-point leads do not disappear inside 10 matches, not even in the funniest of old games. Even Sir Alex Ferguson as good as acknowledged that the title race, which this season has been more of a stately procession, is over. "They are finished in the league against us," he said of his nearest rivals. "With 16 points and our goal difference, it is impossible for Arsenal to catch us. But it's not prudent to say we have won it yet because the players will relax and you can end up looking a fool and you can't have that."
Should they win their next five fixtures, United will be mathematically champions by 14 April. Not even when Arsenal strolled to the title in 1991, having lost just one game and conceded 18 goals, has a championship been so one-sided. It is impossible to believe that, had George Graham's fabled back four started this match, they would have conceded five goals – three of them to Dwight Yorke – in one of the most extraordinary first halves Old Trafford can have witnessed.
Compared to the defence Arsène Wenger inherited, the Ukrainian-Latvian-French-English partnership of Luzhny, Stepanovs, Grimandi and Cole was a walking-non-talking disaster area.
Ashley Cole's delight at being called into the England squad at the age of 19 was yesterday drowned by the harshest realities of football. He was substituted at half time, while Wenger admitted he had thought about removing Igor Stepanovs but concluded that, since things could not become any worse, he might as well stay. Ray Parlour, however, was not so fortunate, sustaining a hamstring injury which rules him out of England's international with Spain. "There was no leader at the back," admitted Wenger after his heaviest defeat in English football and the worst by an Arsenal side at Old Trafford since 1952, the year Matt Busby won the championship for the first time.
"Nobody communicated or talked to each other; looking at their first and second goals it was like youth-team defending."
Despite the scoreline, Ferguson did not rate yesterday's rout as United's finest performance of the season; he preferred the 3-1 defeat of West Ham on New Year's Day. But as Harry Redknapp, who lost Shaka Hislop on Saturday, would have been the first to point out, Yorke should have been with the Trinidad and Tobago squad preparing for a World Cup qualifier with Jamaica rather than humiliating Arsenal's defence.
He had started just one of United's nine previous games and had last scored in that defeat of West Ham that had so pleased Ferguson. Yesterday, it took him a bare two minutes and six seconds to beat David Seaman, who had not conceded a Premiership goal in six and a half hours of football. The hat-trick took 22 minutes.
Of the three, the first gave Yorke the most pleasure. Gary Neville's cross produced a one-two with Paul Scholes which the Tobagan clattered in off his thigh. The fluidity of the move reminded him of the early days of his partnership with Andy Cole.
The second was the result of a perfectly-driven pass from Roy Keane, finished expertly to give Seaman no chance.
Soccer: Rampant Yorke ends Arsenal's title challenge
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