Alexis Sanchez’s return to the stadium he called home for three-and-a-half years could barely have gone better.
A neatly-taken goal – his first for Manchester United since October’s comeback win over Newcastle – and a win to secure United’s passage into the last 16 of the FA Cup.
Could we, at long last, be about to see the best of Sanchez in a red shirt?
The last 12 months have been the worst period in the Chilean’s 15-year professional career: he’s faced accusations of money-grabbing and premature claims that his legs have gone, and experienced a slump in form that would have seemed inconceivable to anyone who watched him play for the majority of his Arsenal career.
The 30-year-old managed just under a goal a game during his first three campaigns in north London and his final full season under Arsene Wenger saw him notch 30 goals in all competitions.
Sanchez was deployed in a deeper position in his final few months at the Emirates following Alexandre Lacazette’s arrival at the club from Lyon and still managed to notch eight strikes in 22 appearances.
Only the mercurial Eden Hazard could legitimately claim to have been a superior London-based player to Sanchez between 2014 and 2017.
It has previously been suggested that Sanchez’s deterioration had already begun when United exchanged Henrikh Mkhitaryan for the former Barcelona forward, but the statistics prove that isn’t the case.
Sanchez’s dip in form coincided directly with his decision to link up with the pragmatic Jose Mourinho, under whose watch Jesse Lingard was the sole United player to significantly improve.
As flawed as Wenger’s Arsenal teams were in the Frenchman’s final years at the club, they were always sent out with instructions to attack and that, obviously, played into Sanchez’s strengths.
Under Mourinho, Sanchez, like Marcus Rashford and Anthony Martial, was stifled in a rigid, unambitious set-up.
Sanchez is a forward who plays on instinct, gets in and around tight spaces and produces split-second moments of magic. Those moments were rarely a possibility under Mourinho, who had United’s players moving the ball so slowly that attacking openings of any significance were rare.
All of United’s players bar none have progressed under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and Sanchez will have have been champing at the bit to get involved when the Norwegian arrived.