PREMIERSHIP/Manchester U 4 Hull C 0:THE ANSWER to the question of where Manchester United would be without Wayne Rooney is third in the Premier League, eight points behind Arsenal and Chelsea. And that is just by working out how many points the champions owe to his goals.

Without him, they might be anything up to €114 million better off but the one positive thing about Manchester United’s debt is that it is so brain-numbingly vast, it cannot be eliminated through player sales.

And, in any case, it is hard to imagine any team that Rooney might join. He may be among the best footballers in the world but he is not what Ruud Gullit called a “world footballer”, equally at home in Madrid, Milan or Manchester.

And that is perhaps what Alex Ferguson meant when he responded to a question about how Rooney had blossomed in the absence of Cristiano Ronaldo, now that he was “the main man” at Old Trafford. The United manager was dismissive.

“I don’t think that comes into it,” he said. “He always was the main man.”

What Ferguson meant was that however brilliantly Ronaldo shone, he knew his time at Old Trafford was temporary and that, in fact, Manchester United did well to keep him for six years. Rooney was always for the long term.

Rooney said he had never scored four before in professional football – a glance through the statistics for Everton Boys’ 1995-96 season reveals that he scored nine in a 15-0 win over Preston and eight against Leeds. He is almost as important to his team now as he was in that season, in which he celebrated his 10th birthday.

He arguably occupies the position in this United side that George Best did 40 seasons ago, as the supreme footballer in a team on the turn. In 1970 Best scored six times at Northampton – a performance that in part assuaged the pain of being beaten in a League Cup semi-final by Manchester City.

Anthony Gardner was marking Rooney on Saturday, and the Hull centre-half did reasonably well until the 82nd minute, when the floodgates opened.

“He is crucial to Manchester United’s title hopes,” Gardner said. “You can see him cutting through teams week in and week out. He has all the attributes you need – great awareness and strong on the ball; he even scored with his head. He has everything.

“Rooney is hard to mark because he goes deep and operates as a kind of floating striker. As a defender, sometimes you want someone who goes right up against you but when Rooney goes into the hole you can’t pick him up and it can disturb where you are on the pitch.”

The truth was that after Rooney’s early goal, driving in a half-saved shot from Paul Scholes, Hull were not overly disturbed until the end of the match, when everything came crashing down. For United, Nani, finally, produced a performance of note while Michael Owen disproved Ferguson’s theory that he and Rooney are not natural partners.

Nevertheless, just before United’s second, when Rooney and Dimitar Berbatov combined just as they did for the fourth, Gardner sensed a goal coming. But he thought it would be scored by the team in amber.

His manager, Phil Brown, who has been charged by his chairman, Adam Pearson, with cutting €9 million from a wage bill that is bigger than Bolton’s and which dwarfs Burnley’s, might be correct in his thinking that this game was not critical to Hull’s survival. But he acknowledged that Saturday’s match at home to Wolves would be.

Some of the more stilted passages of play, at a stadium shrouded in a thin mist that did not conceal the second-lowest league crowd of the season, were perfect for the “Glazer out” chants, some of which were uttered by supporters wearing the green and gold of Newton Heath, the club that became Manchester United.

If those supporters had read Ferguson’s programme notes, in which he had made a passionate appeal for unity, they chose to ignore them.

However, at Old Trafford at least the champions are still knocking over the makeweights of the division. Their previous home games in the league had pitched them against Wolves, who last won at Old Trafford in 1980; Wigan, who have never beaten United; and Burnley, who last won here in 1962. Hull’s last victory here came 10 years before that.

Next up at Old Trafford in the league are the bottom side, Portsmouth, and there are plenty of tickets available to see a team who last picked up a point here in 1957.

If, as Rafael Benitez half-jokingly suggested, Ferguson controls the fixture list, he could not have selected a more straightforward series of games.