ENGLISH PREMIER LEAGUE: Manchester Utd 1 Sunderland 0EVERYONE HAS a favourite Roy Keane story and they don't come much better than the time Phil Taylor came across him on a tour of Manchester United's training ground. This was 2003, the one year out of 11 when the PDC world championship trophy was not on Taylor's mantelpiece and he was introduced to the players as world darts champion.

Keane was injured, in one of his coalmine-black moods, pounding away on an exercise bike. He lifted his eyes for only a second. "Ex-champion," he replied, then started pedalling again.

That was the thing about Keane: he liked to say it how it was. Sometimes it endeared him to us; other times you found yourself wincing. Mostly, Keane made sense in a sport where so many other managers tend to say nothing and see even less. He had no time for the cliché claptrap or PR gimmickry in which other football people indulge.

So what would Keane, as a man whose managerial status now also includes the prefix "ex-", have made of a match in which his old side managed zero efforts at goal compared with 23 for the opposition? The answer will probably never be known as Keane embarks on one of his Trappist-like periods of silence, but it is fair to say he would not have fallen into the trap of thinking Sunderland played with distinction. Competitive courage, yes. But distinction? Not in a game in which, attacking-wise, they contributed absolutely nothing.

In football, the injury-time winner is about as brutal as it gets. It leaves nothing but a sense of helplessness and, having already lost their manager, it would take a stone-cold heart not to understand Sunderland's suffering. But it is a strange set of circumstances when a team can be so utterly dominated yet somehow feel so pleased with themselves.

Dwight Yorke, who helped Ricky Sbragia select the team in Keane's absence, could hardly have been more effusive. "The important thing was to come out of the game feeling positive," he said. "We could easily have folded, but we didn't do that. There are a lot of positives."

But then consider that Edwin van der Sar, United's goalkeeper, did not have a fleck of mud on his kit at the final whistle. Or that Sunderland, according to the official match statistics, had a measly 28 per cent of possession and did not force a corner until the 89th minute. Naturally, it was taken short to fritter away a few more seconds, with only two of their players daring to enter the area.

Perhaps the real issue is the imbalance of talent in England's top division. Sunderland, after all, were just doing what they thought was right to keep the game scoreless. It was an exercise in damage limitation. Or to put it another way, they were trying to avoid a good old-fashioned hiding.

It nearly worked, too. Yorke and Sbragia put out a team that played with fire and determination. Okay, they barely mustered half a dozen successive passes, but whoever replaces Keane - and the club have received more than 30 applications - should be encouraged by the players' sense of togetherness.

That said, nobody could seriously argue that United's superiority did not warrant that dramatic late flourish when Michael Carrick's deflected shot struck the frame of the goal and Nemanja Vidic scooped in the rebound. Vidic had spent the last 10 minutes playing as an auxiliary centre-forward on the instructions of Alex Ferguson, who may have been banned from the dug-out but still had a telephone link to the bench. As gambles go, this one worked beautifully.

The importance of that moment could be gauged by Vidic's manic celebration in front of the Stretford End. United fly to Japan after Saturday's game at Tottenham Hotspur for the World Club Cup and a draw here could conceivably have meant them being 10 or more points behind Liverpool and Chelsea (albeit with two games in hand) by the time they returned.

Wayne Rooney's fifth booking of the season means he will miss the trip to White Hart Lane, while Patrice Evra is banned for the next five domestic matches and Cristiano Ronaldo injured his hip on Saturday.

But it could have been much worse. Instead, the champions were left to wonder whether, come May, they will think of what happened in the 91st minute as one of the season's decisive moments.

• Guardian Service