Less than a year ago, for reasons he will never properly be able to articulate, Wayne Rooney allowed his "people" to issue a statement suggesting that the quality of Manchester United's players no longer matched his ambitions. His form had been wretched, the offers were enticing and Manchester United were stumbling in Chelsea's wake.
The champions – something Rooney never expected they would become – have won their opening four games by a collective score of 18-3 and the lad himself has scored eight of them without the need to learn Spanish irregular verbs or be stalked by balaclava-clad United fans outraged by a move to Manchester City. This was his second successive hat-trick of the season.
After his last, against Arsenal, he said he wanted to overtake Sir Bobby Charlton's record of goals for Manchester United. He now has as many hat-tricks for United – seven – as the man who is arguably the club's greatest footballer.
This is not how Sir Alex Ferguson's sides generally operate. Usually on the principle that the Premier League is a marathon, they jog on the shoulders of the leaders before accelerating away in the new year. This time, however, they have begun as if prepared for a long-distance nine-month sprint.
Having started the season with a 4-0 victory at Queens Park Rangers, Bolton have faced both Manchester clubs and Liverpool and lost by increasing margins. "Are you Arsenal in disguise?" chanted the away support as Owen Coyle's side were systematically taken apart. It may once have been a source of quiet pride for the Bolton manager to be compared to Arsne Wenger but these are different days.
There was one similarity. The 8-2 disembowelling of Arsenal was marred by the loss of Danny Welbeck to a hamstring injury and now Ferguson saw another young talent, Tom Cleverley, taken off with a suspectedbroken foot after a tackle from Bolton's captain Kevin Davies.
"It was a bad tackle," said Ferguson, who said Jonny Evans was doubtful for Wednesday's encounter with Benfica in the Champions' League. "We endured that but we kept playing our football, that was the main thing. The important thing is that Wayne has started to mature. He is 25. When a player gets to his mid-20s he starts to get more authority into his game. He is controlling the situation now."
Just before what was never really a contest began, Javier Hernandez knelt on the centre-circle and prayed. Perhaps those in white shirts should have invoked their own gods because they were soon to need protection.
It took little more than five minutes for the young Mexican's prayers to be answered with the first of his two goals. Nani, who like his full-back, Phil Jones, was to be given a lethal amount of space down the Bolton left, cut in and his cross was met by a perfectly timed run. Coyle pointed out the beauty of Hernandez's movement, noting how he first pushed his marker,Gary Cahill, into the six-yard box before pulling him back out and then dashing back in to score.
"I don't think there is any doubt they were ruthless and clinical," Coyle said. "If you allow easy shots into the box, you are going to be punished and good as United were, we kept shooting ourselves in the foot." And when Rooney stabbed home the third, Manchester United were actually ahead of the furious schedule they had set against Arsenal.
Two were created by Phil Jones. The first was devastatingly simple, a run that might have been cut off but was not, a cross and Rooney judging his run as well as Hernandez had his a quarter of an hour before. For Dedryck Boyata, who was meant to be the covering defender, this was to be a tortured debut.
What followed was even better. Jones has the physique and confidence of someone rather older than 19 and driving into the Bolton area, he left Zat Knight on the grass before his shot pounded into Jussi Jaaskelainen's boots. The rebound, however, fell to Rooney's footwear six yards out and his seventh goal of the season was something of a formality. When in the 68th minute he met Nani's pass and curled it past Cahill's body and into the net, he celebrated his second successive hat-trick with both arms raised to the sky.
This was not to say that Bolton offered no resistance. Coyle argued they had double the number of attempts at goal and three times the number of crosses. They struck the bar and had a shot cleared off the line. However, in the statistics that matter, they were overwhelmed.
Ferguson worried by pitch in Romania
Manchester United's manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, believes that Tuesday's game away to Benfica in Portugal will be his club's hardest in Group C, although he is also concerned about the state of the playing surface on which they must take on the little-known Romanian champions, Otelul Galati, next month.
Ferguson said that the English official Howard Webb, who refereed Romania's European Championship match against France there in midweek, had reported the pitch to Uefa as being below standard.
Moreover, the United full-back Patrice Evra, who played in the goalless draw, told Ferguson large divots were coming up all over it.
"Patrice said it was terrible," Ferguson said. "That's part of the problem you'll get in Europe. I watched Ireland against Russia [in Moscow]. We played on that pitch and I thought it was all right but the other night it looked really difficult to play on."
United were initially pleased that their match in Romania had been moved to at the national stadium in Bucharest rather than 140 miles further east in the port of Galati, but they now have to hope the playing surface will be improved in the next few weeks.
Steve Tongue
Bolton Wanderers (4-4-2): Jaaskelainen; Boyata, Cahill, Knight, Robinson; Eagles (Pratley, 61), Reo-Coker, M Davies, Petrov; Klasnic (Tuncay, 75), K Davies (Ngog, 65).
Manchester United (4-4-2): De Gea; Jones, Ferdinand, Evans (Smalling, 61), Evra; Nani, Cleverly (Carrick, 24), Anderson, Young (Giggs, 61); Rooney, Hernandez.
Referee Andre Marriner.
Man of the match Rooney (Manchester United).
Match rating 8/10.
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