Manchester U 2 Wolves 1:ONCE, WHEN he was at Bayern Munich, recovering from a broken leg, Owen Hargreaves got into his car and drove through the autobahns, autoroutes and autopistas and did not stop until his Porsche had reached the Spanish coast. He was giving vent to a frustration that threatened to consume him but, compared to what he would suffer at Manchester United, it would prove a mere inconvenience. On Saturday night, after a comeback that had lasted only five minutes, the rain-slicked carriageways of Manchester's outer ring-road would have seemed curiously appealing. There would have been a part of him that would have wanted to drive.

It had been 26 months since he last started a game for the club who had paid Bayern Munich €20 million for the services of a player who had been the ruby in the dust of England’s miserable 2006 World Cup campaign.

The tendinitis that has plagued and taunted him for two years had allowed him a token minute as a substitute in United’s penultimate game of last season at Sunderland and now this surprise start had finished when he attempted a low cross, pulled a hamstring and told the bench he could not continue.

When summing up his decision to throw him into the fray, the manager, Alex Ferguson, used words like “gamble”, “disaster” and “unbelievable”. It was hard to disagree. Fabio Capello was in the directors’ box at Old Trafford and Hargreaves, who both on and off the field is one of the country’s most intelligent footballers, should have provided the midfield backbone for Manchester United and England for three seasons now.

However, his contract is up in June and you wonder, however much he feels for his player, whether Ferguson can afford to renew it. He had supported Ole Gunnar Solskjaer through similar setbacks, although the Norwegian striker eventually bowed to his body’s demands.

“It is possibly because of a lack of match fitness,” said Ferguson of an injury that could cost Hargreaves another four weeks. “Maybe a bit of anxiety at playing his first game had a bit to do with it, too. We pulled Ryan Giggs into the squad but unfortunately he was feeling his hamstring a little bit so he was too big a risk.

“Paul Scholes was not fit enough to start so we looked at the situation with Owen. He has been training very well and the doctor thought he was fine to play, but unfortunately he lasted only a couple of minutes.”

Had Park Ji-sung, running at a line of gold shirts in the final minute, chosen to cross – which was his first thought – rather than drive his shot into the corner of the Wolverhampton Wanderers net, this would have been a disastrous afternoon for Manchester United.

Laid low by the flu that had flattened his squad and which would have made him search out Beechams Powders rather than his regular post-match glass of claret, Ferguson would have contemplated a gap with Chelsea that even on the 24th anniversary of his accession might have seemed insurmountable.

In this, as in nothing else here, this was classic Manchester United; horribly below-par, wheezing through a match they might have lost but playing as always to the final whistle to force a sixth successive victory.

On Wednesday comes the Manchester derby and the club that Ferguson dismissed as “noisy neighbours”, although these days City’s noise comes from squabbles among themselves.

It would have escaped neither club’s notice that in both of last season’s league encounters, United snatched victory in the final minute. There was no point trying to reason with the Wolves manager, Mick McCarthy, that his team had deserved their first point here in 30 years.

“I am not interested, we got zero, zilch, zip,” he said.

He had lost and any other words would have been superfluous.