Drawing any certainties from a summer tour game can be foolish, so the shrewdest conclusion to offer from this encounter is that those new signings of Manchester United and Arsenal who featured can be content with their outings.
And if pre-season is a phoney war, at least this meeting could be cast as a little more real due to Erik ten Hag, United’s manager, and his Arsenal counterpart, Mikel Arteta, identifying the other’s team as a rival when the new campaign begins next month.
