Chris Smalling says top four minimum requirement for United

Chris Smalling

Chris Smalling insists Manchester United's 2-1 win at Arsenal has created a platform for them to finish in the top four this season.

The success in north London was United's first on the road under Louis van Gaal, achieved with a makeshift defence led by Smalling.

And the England man, who lined up alongside rookies Paddy McNair and Tyler Blackett, believes the win has given the squad some real belief going forward.

He told the Manchester Evening News: "We showed a lot of character, we did not play that well and we will go through the video to see what we could have done better, but it will be on the back of having taken three points.

"Given the manager and the players we have got, we should be playing better than we are, with more points.

“We have to take each game as it comes, that is our first away win. We know we have two home games coming up, and we need six points, then we can have a look at where we are in the table. We need to win our games.

"The manager has said we worked hard and we need to make sure we take maximum points from our next two home games, then we can look at it from there. The top four is always a minimum for this club.”

Van Gaal’s men play two home matches in the space of four days - against Hull City on Saturday and Stoke City next Tuesday - following their confidence-boosting victory at the Emirates.

And captain Wayne Rooney wants a 100 per cent return from their back-to-back home games before the Reds travel to Southampton on December 8.

“It has been a bit of an indifferent start for us this season and we hope now to go on a good run of games and judge the position we are in after Christmas,” said the 29-year-old skipper.

“We have got two home games coming up at Old Trafford and we feel like we should be taking six points out of them. We want to try to build a bit of momentum going into the New Year so the Arsenal win was a massive result in terms of starting that.

“It was a very important victory. We weathered the storm at times, especially in the first half, and then we knew we could hit them on the counter attack. We knew they were vulnerable on the break and we did that.

“We rode our luck, our goalkeeper (David de Gea) was fantastic for us but we hit them with two good goals. It was quite a difficult game, they had a lot of possession but we hit them on the break and that was our game plan.

“We knew we had to get as many players into the defence as we could and we did that by putting five at the back. We had a bit of experience in myself, Michael Carrick and Marouane Fellaini in the midfield to try and protect them and I felt we did that well at times."