The defeat to Liverpool was, in many ways, a watershed moment. Manchester United, a once proud institution, had been brought crashing to its knees at the home of its arch nemesis.

The identity of the opposition only poured vats of salt into the open wound of a 19-point gap to the top of the Premier League by December. Not even under David Moyes did their ebb ever sink so low.

It was a result and a performance so drastically bad that Jose Mourinho lost his job, but an opponent so unthinkable that members of the assorted media simultaneously lost their minds. “Manchester United don’t have a central midfield player that can pass a football,” said Gary Neville without a hint of hyperbole. “None of them can actually receive the ball and pass the ball. I just find it absolutely staggering.”

Roy Keane approached the situation with about as much remorse and restraint as an argument with Mick McCarthy over a tackle on Alf Inge Haaland. “I certainly believe a lot of their players are not good enough to be playing for Manchester United,” he snarled. “They’re good players but not good enough for Manchester United.”

Eight straight victories since Mourinho’s departure suggests otherwise. If wins over Cardiff, Huddersfield, Bournemouth, Newcastle, Reading and Brighton could be written off as clearing the lowest of bars, beating Tottenham and Arsenal away in the space of a fortnight proves that the spring is back in United’s collective step.

The most impressive aspect of another 3-1 victory at the Emirates is that Ole Gunnar Solskjaer wrote the exact same story but cast two different actors in the lead roles. Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial were both afforded rests as Alexis Sanchez and Romelu Lukaku started, but United’s approach did not change: here was the same delightful counter-attacking unit with those familiar defensive flaws.

To integrate Sanchez and Lukaku into a successful side was perhaps Solskjaer’s last great challenge in the short-term. The pair had played 91 and 161 minutes respectively under the interim manager, forced to take back seats to more natural fits in a fluid, team-based system. United’s three-pronged attack lends itself to the selflessness of Jesse Lingard, the dynamism of Rashford and the skill of Martial, not the individualistic talents of Sanchez or the more rigid Lukaku.

“I never saw him as a United player,” said Paul Scholes of Sanchez in October. “I saw him as a bit selfish, someone who played for himself sometimes.” Yet here the Chilean was a bundle of altruistic energy, thriving off the boos that greeted his every touch. Ainsley Maitland-Niles fared well against his former teammate until he didn’t, playing Sanchez onside for the opening goal.

That should take nothing away from a sublime assist from another player Scholes wrote off. “I don’t think his play outside of the box is good enough,” he said of Lukaku three months ago, yet the Belgian’s pass was inch-perfect, allowing Sanchez to round Petr Cech and tap into an open goal.

Two minutes later came the forward’s pièce de résistance. Lukaku has always been surprisingly adept as a winger but excelled himself in leading a piercing United counter-attack, haring down the right-hand side before having the wherewithal to pull the ball back for the lingering Lingard. Two glorious assists, both from outside the box, as if to prove a point.

Let us not forget the goalscorer, a player former big-time Charlie Paul Ince described as “a prime example of everything that’s wrong at Manchester United” just last month. This player. Lingard, a youth product who has been at Old Trafford for 19 of his 26 years, did not seem to be too inhibited by launching a clothing line or having a Twitter account when he cleverly checked his run before slotting past Cech.

Arsenal would never fully recover, and can now add Sokratis and Laurent Koscielny to a crippling injury list. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang pulled one goal back but United were never in true danger of surrendering their lead.

Solskjaer’s substitutions were crucial, with Martial putting the result beyond doubt in the closing stages.

Yet even as United strolled into the fifth round of the FA Cup, Trevor Francis was in a TV studio in Dubai telling Richard Keys and Andy Gray how “Pogba, you know, for me, will never ever give you the opportunity of winning trophies or championships because I think he’s a luxury player. He’s not a Mourinho player.”

But he is a World Cup winner, a four-time Serie A champion, and the scorer in a Europa League final under the very same manager he was apparently incompatible with. ‘Luxury player’ has become luxurious player under Solskjaer, playing a key part in United’s third after winning the ball himself and forcing Cech into a low save.

This was never a squad that warranted such bizarre critiques, never a set of players that deserved to be described as unable to “pass a football”, nor held as “a prime example” of all the club’s myriad problems. They were not performing to the requisite standard, but in their haste to absolve a supposedly elite manager of blame, it was Mourinho’s cabal of pundits who threw the players under the bus in the end, not the Portuguese himself.

It has taken just a couple of months for hindsight to shed a more truthful light on such hyperbolic, hysteric reactions.

And if the suggestion was that these players stopped playing for their manager, then the opposite stands to reason too: that the manager stopped managing these players.

Solskjaer has wasted no time in righting both of those wrongs. These players certainly look more than “good enough for Manchester United” now. With each game, so does this manager.

Matt Stead