None of the punches thrown by Nicky Barmby and Jimmy Bullard as the pair fought by the Humber Bridge was as well timed as the blow to Hull's solar plexus delivered by Nicklas Bendtner. For the sixth time in five matches Arsenal scored in stoppage time and if they are to astonish perhaps even themselves by winning the title, their template will be the one fashioned by Manchester United.
It is not just about the late goals, which have long been a trademark of Sir Alex Ferguson's sides, but the realisation that as long as you beat enough teams, it doesn't really matter who they are. Ten months ago Manchester United were acclaimed as the best club in England after winning the title despite the fact they had won only one of six games against Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool.
Now, if they can keep their nerve in their final eight fixtures, an Arsenal side who have lost home and away to their nearest challengers could repeat that feat. The way their players gathered in front of those who had journeyed from London to make a present of their shirts suggested they thought this was a pivotal moment.
However, when asked about a run-in that someone called "comfortable", their manager, Arsène Wenger, raised a sardonic eyebrow and said: "You saw the 'comfort' we had out there. These kind of wins strengthen our belief but I think it is more a consequence of our spot-on attitude. It comes from the desire to win something. This team hasn't won anything yet: we started to build it three or four years ago and now people are saying, 'Yes, but what did you win?'
"As long as you have not won anything it will play on your mind. But we have lost the spine of our team [William Gallas, Cesc Fábregas and Robin van Persie] and we can still turn up and win games."
Managers, in Ferguson's view, have to keep professing optimism until the moment they are dragged from their dug-out. Wenger was asked whether, after the crushing defeats handed out by Manchester United and Chelsea six weeks ago, he had really kept believing.
"I knew that I would not give up and I knew that they [the players] would not give up," he said. "But, at some stage, we needed results to start going for us and you could not have predicted that, frankly. The rest of the season will be tight, interesting and exciting, and that is all you need when you work in newspapers."
The newspapers on Humberside and beyond had been full of the fight between Barmby and Bullard which was carried out in full view of members of the Women's Institute as they walked across the Humber Bridge. Following a 5-1 rout at Everton the previous Sunday, team-mates brawling with each other was taken as a sign that Phil Brown's side were falling apart.
It was, however, not too much of a surprise that Hull should have fought Arsenal to a standstill despite playing for more than 50 minutes with 10 men, after George Boateng, already booked for clashing off the ball with Bendtner, launched himself at Arsenal's right-back Bacary Sagna with predictable consequences.
The former England cricket captain Mike Brearley, perhaps the greatest student of dressing-room dynamics sport has known, once said that the force that powered his Middlesex side to four County Championship titles was that quite a few of its members could not stand one another. Having grown up in South Shields, supporting Sunderland, Brown would have heard stories of how the great Len Shackleton so detested his centre-forward, Trevor Ford, that he would deliberately misplace his passes just to make the Welshman look foolish. But that, said Brown, rarely happens. "Far from it. If I told you about my dressing-room hatreds, you would be shocked. I never showed them. You just get on with it."
Brown had been at the Emirates on Tuesday evening and confessed to being awed by the quality of Arsenal's play against Porto in the Champions League, which for the first 20 minutes of this game they repeated on the banks of the Humber. The flats on the skyline had started to glow pink in the sunset when Andrey Arshavin danced through Hull's defence to score a delightful opening goal.
The stadium prepared itself for the kind of rout Goodison Park had witnessed the previous Sunday but it never came. Had Sol Campbell been dismissed for the foul on Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink that conceded the equalising penalty, it is debatable whether Arsenal would have handled the situation as coolly and intelligently as did the side fighting for their lives.
