A desire to erase the memory of Sunday's humiliating 3-0 defeat by Arsenal was Manchester United's motivation behind their victory last night.

United defender Gary Neville admitted: "It's not nice coming off a performance like Sunday. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were not nice days for us. Tonight, we've gone a little bit of the way to putting that right. But we're not there yet, we've still got a lot to do as a team."

Neville, moved to centre-back to cope with the pace of Liverpool danger man Michael Owen, added: "We've improved tonight from Sunday, that's all we could have done really. We let ourselves down, we let everybody down with the way we performed on Sunday. Full credit to Arsenal, who played well, but I don't think we showed anything like the commitment or the desire that we have tonight."

United went ahead with Denis Irwin's first-half penalty but were forced to defend desperately as Liverpool fought back.

"That's something we've been working on," said Neville. "We know that teams like Liverpool and Arsenal are going to have periods of pressure against us. We've not been soaking those periods of pressure up in the last month. Our forwards will always create chances and score goals for us. We've just got to give them a platform."