Football Daily | The Battle of the Buffet: Manchester United v Arsenal, 20 years on

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Step into the passenger seat of Football Daily’s DeLorean, pull shut the gullwing door and watch as we go from nought to 88 in as long as it takes to generate the 1.21 gigawatts required for our trusty flux capacitor to send us hurtling through the mists of time on a journey to exactly 20 years ago on 24 October 2004. The very fiercest of rivals whose contempt for each other could not have been more mutual, Manchester United had just beaten Arsenal at Old Trafford, ending a record run of 49 matches unbeaten for Arsène Wenger’s side in the Premier League. Ruud van Nistelrooy’s cathartic, hotly disputed penalty and a goal for birthday boy Wayne Rooney, 19, had secured the points in a bruising encounter that, were it played today, would almost certainly prompt the kind of highly strung and overwrought football fanboys you find on social media abominations to swoon like Victorian ladies while vigorously clutching their pearls.

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