An excellent Chris Smalling symbolizes the mediocre game between Arsenal and Manchester United

Smalling in action against Arsenal

If time travel was a reality, very few people who endured the 90 minutes of mind-numbing point-sharing that occurred when Manchester United paid a visit to Arsenal on Wednesday night would not have been, at the final whistle, queueing up to relive their evenings at a restaurant, at the cinema, or just repeatedly punching themselves in the face in a darkened room.

Alas, the time machine remains in the realm of science fiction, and so the burden of trauma will have to be carried by all. My name is Alex Hess, and I sat through Arsenal-Man United.

Given each club’s humiliating and high-profile results the previous weekend, it was tempting to view the match as a meeting of a pair of punch-drunk boxers staggering backwardly into each other, still reeling from their recent beatings. Unfortunately, an encounter that could’ve played itself out as a circus of point-hungry lunacy instead opted for a rather less neutral-friendly look: a requiem of risk-averse damage limitation.

That Chris Smalling was one of the game’s standout players says a great deal about both the quality and nature of the meeting. Make no mistake, this is Chris Smalling: the centre-back who has been derided, and with decent justification, as having no rightful place in the first-team of a supposedly title-challenging club. The same Chris Smalling who, decent as he may be, surely lacks both the technical quality and assertiveness of character to establish himself at the elite level.

And yet there he was, standing tentatively on his tiptoes as the tallest of the collection of victory-shy dwarfs that populated the Emirates pitch on Wednesday night. Conservative, limited and safety-first, the game suited Smalling to a tee.

To clarify: these qualities do not make Smalling a particularly bad player – and he isn’t one. But for a defender like this to linger in the memory from a clash that featured no particularly memorable defensive performance from either side is simply a measure of the game itself, and the approach of both teams. This was no backs-to-the-wall job from United, they simply defended competently against a team that had no special desire to attack them.

When, in the latter stages of the first half, Rafael da Silva – an exciting, incisive full-back – lay injured and unable to continue, David Moyes was faced with a choice of how to affect the climactic half of a tepid and winnable game: to introduce Rio Ferdinand to the field, shift the Smalling to the flank, and to prioritise a clean sheet; or to introduce the rousing Adnan Janzaj, revert Antonia Valencia to right-back, and prioritise goals. It being an away trip to Arsenal and it being David Moyes, the first option was deemed the most appropriate.

It was a shame not only for a legion of onlooking neutrals (not, it should be remembered, Moyes’s responsibility) but also the swarms of United fans who have waited, and continue to wait, for their four leading attacking lights – Januzaj, Juan Mata, Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie – to take to the stage together. Instead Ashley Young was considered worthy of the continued occupation of a first-team place for Manchester United, and goals neither arrived nor looked likely to.

Smalling, now occupying the flank, put in as honourable a shift as could be expected. He may not have been faced with Arsenal’s band of elusive creators at their most defence-eluding, but keeping a lid on the likes of Mesut Ozil and Santi Cazorla remains nothing to be sniffed at.

Chris Smalling vs Arsenal

It was hardly a flawless showing from Smalling, though, who still performed his magic trick of stifling his own team’s attacks as soon as he involved himself in them. The fact that the further forward his position was, the more directly backward his passes went is indicative not just of the game’s tedium but of the inevitable excitement-vacuum that comes with playing a limited centre-half at full-back.

Santiago Cazorla vs Manchester United

Nonetheless, that his nominal opponent, Santi Cazorla, was largely ineffective – playing his only really telling pass from the other side of the pitch – is a credit to Smalling’s solidity.

That said, it is difficult to applaud the decent showing of Smalling without reverting once again to its broader indications. Without regressing to cliché, this was is the fixture that was once dominated by the fearlessness of Roy Keane and Patrick Vieira, the animosity of Ruud van Nistelrooy and Martin Keown, and was a fixture whose result – tugs-of-war between two teams utterly desperate for victory – often decided the destination of the league trophy.

That these two sides – both, it should be remembered, with hugely significant prizes to make a chase for – could willfully and mutually agree to this point-apiece outcome in mid-February speaks appallingly of the recent nosedive taken by each club’s ambition and force of personality.

Now let us never speak of this again.