Keith Duggan/Sideline Cut: Fear seems to be the underlying motivation for the barrage of criticism and analysis that followed Arsenal's comprehensive loss against Inter Milan on Wednesday evening.

Coming just days before the meeting of the two great minds of the Premiership, Arsene and Alex, the concession of three goals and the general haplessness of Arsenal's play during that torrid first half period does not bode well.

Arsenal's visit to Old Trafford has been enthusiastically flagged as a key game in this season's "race" for the title. That a September game in a competition that supposedly climaxes late next spring should be portrayed as so crucial is an indictment of the Premiership.

More than ever, a league that has gone stale needs Arsenal. If Manchester United, surprisingly ebullient from the first whistle this year, visit another brutal lesson upon the Londoners, then even Sky television, narrators-in-chief of the lie that the Premiership is wholesome and stellar sporting entertainment, will be hard pressed to perpetuate the notion.

The metamorphosis of the 1970s/'80s football stars of the defunct first division to television pundits has helped to oil the illusion that the Premiership has just evolved naturally from those darker and more prosaic, but much more understandable, days.

Men for whom the frontier of glamour meant a photo spread in Shoot magazine, with its attendant questionnaire revealing Fave Food to be steak and chips and Fave film to be The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Talking up English soccer is not a bad way for an old pro to earn a buck but deep down they must struggle to recognise this extravaganza, more full of lurid colour and hot air than an MGM musical production.

There is no doubt that since the creation of the Premiership, English soccer has become a more pleasant entity. Although the most barbaric period of hooliganism had spent itself anyhow and the shift towards football grounds that did not resemble zoo cages had already begun, the Premiership brightened up the face of the game immeasurably.

The arrival of foreign stars to the humdrum clubs of the English provinces was novel and fun and added lustre to fixtures that had for years become pedestrian. The arrival of Arsene Wenger at Arsenal seemed to encapsulate the higher possibilities of the Premiership. Through players like Lee Dixon and Adams and Steve Bould, Highbury still carried echoes of George Graham's grim, Calvinist legacy and the way Wenger enriched that concoction with his own Gallic influences seemed to catch the students of the game a little off guard.

It was the first sign that money was not necessarily king in the Premiership world. Arsenal are hardly representative of the game's paupers but Wenger's appointment and instant success was a lesson in thrift and a welcome tonic to the monopoly that Manchester United had exercised on the league for most of the 1990s.

With Liverpool floundering, United, at last capitalising on its latent potential, had a worthy foe in Arsenal. Except now the wheels would appear to have come off.

Wenger's loyalty to the London club is as manifest as Ferguson's is to Manchester. The Frenchman, though, seems to draw the ire of the English press through his episodic fits of pique and his maddeningly polite refusal to ever reprimand his player's more petulant excesses in a way that Ferguson's often graceless utterances never do.

Already this season, there had been an extraordinary focus on Arsenal, from Sol Campbell to Robert Pires's penalty box antics to the struggle to finance Ashburton Grove. With Arsenal financially tied to the new stadium until 2006, it will take all of Wenger's persuasive powers to ensure players like Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira remain at the club for what will be the peak years of their sporting lives. The team that were torn asunder by Inter during the week looks terribly precocious and brittle even on paper in comparison to Wenger's championship winning sides.

Arsenal's dismal Champions League record is one thing but the more immediate worry is that they might slide towards the kind of twilight zone that Liverpool have occupied for all too long, perennially shaping, achieving the occasional spectacular afternoon but getting caught out on the bread and butter days.

If that happens, if Campbell gets injured, say, and Ashley Cole continues to struggle and Pires goes cold and if strong and muscular and well-organised teams can go to Highbury and pinch a point, what then for the Premiership?

English football does not need another championship going to Old Trafford. Manchester United does not even need another championship going to Old Trafford. After the thrills of their quarter-final exit against Real Madrid last year, their subsequent league celebrations seemed a little bit forced and jaded.

The pleasure United players get out of winning the title now would seem to be based more on the denial of the title going to players they meet week-in, week-out more so than any euphoria that comes from being the best in England. The players at Manchester United do not need the league trophy for that assurance.

The window for winning the Champions League during the autumn of the Roy Keane era is narrowing all the while and United's time must be now.

With Arsenal facing daunting trips to Russia, the European competition might be of academic interest to them much sooner than they would hope, denying them much needed revenue. But that would also mean wholehearted concentration on the home league while United would presumably grow ever more diverted and consumed by the quest for broader glory.

Which is why Arsenal's decline against Inter has been scrutinises so thoroughly and with such alarm over the past few days.

The re-emergence of the Italian philosophy last May has made a virtue out of defence again and it seems as if Wenger is being chastised for his cavalier failure to uphold that principle.

Old Trafford tomorrow has rightly or wrongly become the litmus test of all that Arsenal stands for and for where the club is going over the next few seasons.

Another drubbing is unlikely but far from impossible and, if it transpires, the most serious casualty will be the Premiership. The prospect of Manchester United cantering along at the top of the table with just one eye on the ball would make the domestic English season seem much too insubstantial and pointless to make tolerable the barrage of noise and images that keep it afloat.

Arsenal have always been the best bet to keep alive the hint of intrigue, to keep alive the veneer of the kind of barbed and heartfelt rivalries that at least felt more deep-rooted and local and meaningful back when English football was uglier and poorer and darker. But suddenly the Gunners aren't looking so hot and with Liverpool fast losing its identity and Chelsea likely to combust somewhere along the way, a fall by Arsenal could leave a vacuum that will take some time to fill.

So for once the hype on Sky will be justified. A massive day at Old Trafford looms, the very pulse of the league as a real competition on the line.