After Arsenal had won that trophy for the first time in season 1997-1998 United won it three times on the trot. Arsenal retained their grip in 2002. United took the title back in 2003. And in 2004 it returned again to the north Londoners, who completed an unbeaten season with 26 wins and 12 draws.

The Gunners rumbled on the following season, and by the time they arrived for the sharpest of needle matches at Old Trafford they were seeking to extend their unbeaten run to a landmark half century of matches.

Didn’t happen.

Seventeen minutes from time a challenge by Arsenal defender Sol Campbell on his England team-mate Wayne Rooney was adjudged - unfairly from the visitors’ point of view - a penalty and Ruud Van Nistelrooy did the honours.

A late goal by Rooney secured a 2-0 win - after which, in the players’ tunnel, tempers frayed and things got broken. Although in the latter case we were only talking about pizza, which was thrown at the Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson.

Arsenal’s manager Arsene Wenger, whose habitual self-control always served to make more shocking his occasional forays into fury, told reporters that Rooney had dived to win the penalty and criticised the performance of the referee, Mike Riley. He was later found guilty of insinuating that Van Nistelrooy was a cheat and was fined £15,000 ($20,600/€17,720) by the Football Association.

While the undefeated nature of Arsenal’s title victory the year before had been, strictly speaking, matched by Preston North End in season 1888-1889, their 49-match run remains an English Premier League record.

The next best in the English Premier League, Liverpool went 44 matches unbeaten before losing 3-0 at Watford last year.

Between 1920 and 1923, Czech side Sparta Prague had a winning streak of 51 matches. More recently Steaua Bucharest went 106 games unbeaten in the Romanian League from June 17, 1986 to September 9, 1989.

All sports cherish their unbeaten or winning records. In the National Basketball Association the consecutive win target is the 33 victories earned between November 5, 1971 and January 9, 1972 by Los Angeles Lakers.

Arguably, however, it is individual winning or unbeaten records that resound most tellingly in the arena of sport…

And few resonate like Jahangir Khan, who made men’s squash his domain in the early 1980s. When Khan retired in 1993 he had won the World Open title six times and the British Open ten times.

But, uniquely, he had also put together one of the great sporting runs - a total of 555 wins, stretching from 1981, when he was 17, to 1986, when, in a seismic result for the sport, he was beaten by Ross Norman of Australia in the World Open final.

Khan beat Norman in the final of the next event, and went another nine months without defeat…

Khan’s record might never have started, as, after the sudden death of his brother and coach, Torsam, he had considered quitting the sport but had decided to press on with renewed ambition as a tribute to his sibling.

While that family reason may have given a unique intensity in Khan’s quest for victories, similarly eye-catching efforts have been achieved in other sports generated by less emotional but no less determined motivations.

In the arena of the Paralympics, the Dutch wheelchair tennis player Esther Vergeer retired in 2013 unbeaten in 470 matches over 10 years.

In professional boxing credit for the longest winning run is given to Mexico’s light welterweight Julio Cesar Chavez, who earned 87 victories from February 5, 1980 to September 1993, when he drew against Pernell Whitaker.

In terms of the longest run without defeat, that honour is given to flyweight Jimmy Wilde of Wales, who went 103 bouts unbeaten from December 26, 1910 to January 25, 1915.

Talk about winning runs - literally - in athletics, and it will be but a moment before the name Ed Moses is given voice.

Between 1977 and 1987 this super-talented 400 metres hurdler from Dayton, Ohio won 107 consecutive finals, and 122 consecutive races in total.

During that time he set four world records, lowering the mark from 46.74sec, which he ran in winning the 1976 Olympic title in Montreal, to 47.02, set in Koblenz in 1983.

The United States boycott of the Moscow Olympics meant Moses was unable to defend his title in 1980, but when the Games arrived in Los Angeles four years later he regained his title, with fellow American Danny Harris taking silver.

Three years later it was Harris, whose huge potential was never realised because of a cocaine habit, who ended the Moses run by winning in Madrid on June 4, 1987.

Like Khan, Moses reacted to defeat in the manner of a habitual champion, going on to win 10 races in a row and retaining his world title in Rome.