SOCCER: The third week of September is a little early to be facing a fixture that could help to define the season but, after capitulation to Inter Milan, Arsenal's visit to Manchester United on Sunday represents not only the Old Trafford club's chance to overtake the current leaders but a potentially definitive test of the north Londoners' morale.  Arsene Wenger said as much in the aftermath of Wednesday night's catastrophic start to Arsenal's Champions League campaign.

Having watched his side being comprehensively out-thought and outfought, first he talked a surprising amount of nonsense about how isolated incidents - such as the chance Freddie Ljungberg failed to take after 15 minutes - can decide such matches. But he got to the point when he said how important it had become to "get something" from Sunday's visit to Manchester.

Perhaps Arsenal will choose this weekend to justify their position at the top of the table. But as a European force they still looked several years behind United and the trouble is that, after registering their sixth successive home Champions League game without a win, they are showing no signs of being able to close the gap.

Wenger had obviously taken note of the promise made by Hector Cuper, Inter's coach, to field a counter-attacking side at Highbury.

So the Arsenal manager stuck with the fleet-footed Kolo Toure at centre-back alongside Sol Campbell, instead of calling on the vastly more experienced but ageing Martin Keown to start the match.

It was just about the only thing Wenger and Arsenal got right all night. Three times the devastatingly quick 18-year-old Obafemi Martins raced on to passes designed to send him clear of the Arsenal back line; three times Toure matched him for pace and saw off the danger.

The one time Martins faced Campbell rather than Toure, he scored. Without Toure's presence Cuper's team might have won by five or six goals.

Arsenal looked curiously complacent and, when the chips were down, even clueless. Having spurned a good opportunity through Ljungberg's vacillation, they conceded three goals in 19 minutes and, despite being handed the initiative in the second half by Inter's decision to concentrate on defending their healthy lead, never looked like finding a way back into the game.

A drunk man, wending his way home through Highbury Fields a couple of hours after the game, may have had a good point when he addressed a tree on the subject of the hunger of French players who, having won the World Cup and the European Championship, perhaps now feel they have little left to prove. To call the contributions of Robert Pires and Sylvain Wiltord peripheral would be to err on the side of generosity.

More puzzling was the form of Patrick Vieira, who began as though he wanted to make a point but soon seemed to be undone both by his own inaccuracy and by the constant attentions of Cristiano Zanetti and Emre Belozoglu, who harried the life out of him.

He received little help from Gilberto Silva, another World Cup winner who opened his career in England so brightly with the winning goal in the 2002 Community Shield but whose performances now rarely rise above the humdrum.

Inter's two central midfield players established a mastery that provided the platform for both attack and, after half-time, defence.

Neither were Wenger's substitutes able to contribute anything of substance. The sight of Dennis Bergkamp and Nwankwo Kanu arriving simultaneously in the 64th minute, replacing Pires and Gilberto, can hardly have struck terror into the hearts of those among Inter's staff and travelling fans old enough to remember the Dutchman and Nigerian as failures at San Siro.

Did Martins's influence on the match make Wenger ponder his own apparent failure to develop talented young players of his own? Jeremie Aliadiere, a gifted forward who arrived at Arsenal from the French national academy at 16, is now 20 and still on the fringes.

On Wednesday the squad looked badly in need of fresh blood in all departments.

In defence, the most problematic area of the team, there will be no new faces - at least until Philippe Senderos, the 18-year-old Swiss prodigy, has recovered fitness.

"We know we have to do well with what we've got," Wenger said. "I think it's possible. We have to stick together and concentrate on our next game. It will be a good opportunity for us to show our character."

And it will be a very bad day to repeat the mistakes that gave Inter Milan their flying start in Group B and which will now put the whole Wenger regime, which began seven years ago next month, under the microscope.