LONDON: Manchester United already had Wayne Rooney, this past summer they bought Robin Van Persie and now they have rediscovered Javier Hernandez.

Manager Sir Alex Ferguson has set his team a target of 100 goals in this Premier League season and they are on course with 29 so far at an average of  2.6 per game. That would compute to just a century by next May.

But Rooney, Van Persie and Hernandez and their colleagues will need to maintain that scoring rate for another reason: United’s defence is so fragile, the midfield protection so weak that the strikers will need to keep on hitting the net just to stay ahead of the pursuit.

At Aston Villa on Saturday evening United went two goals down for the eighth time this season – to Austrian Andreas Weimann – and hit back, yet again, to win 3:2 and end the match knowing they would maintain top spot whatever pursuers Chelsea and Manchester City might, or might not, achieve within the next 24 hours.

Mexican ‘Chicharito,’ after an anonymous 2011-12 season, has goals seen goals in the last five successive games in all competitions. He might have had a hat-trick on Saturday as a second-half substitute but one of his ‘goals’ was ascribed later as an own goal by Villa defender Ron Vlaar.

Ferguson said: “The tenacity of our performance in the second half was brilliant. I think the evidence of the second half is we never give in. Anyone who plays against us knows they have to play to the 95th minute.”

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