Five-nil - tell me you were surprised by the result at Old Trafford on Saturday, because I wasn't?

Losing 7-2 at White Hart Lane, now that was a shock, but for Saints to be whitewashed for five at the home of the champions, well all you can do is to shrug your shoulders in abject resignation at how the Premiership gulf is growing wider and wider.

It was mortifying to see the way Manchester United cruelly punished Saints' woeful inability to keep possession.

You could only marvel at Teddy Sheringham's cool finishing, cringe at Paul Jones's gaffe and look on with envy at a United substitutes' bench containing Solskjaer, Yorke, Wallwork, Silvestre and Van Der Gouw.

At times United toyed with Saints the way a child plays with his food on a plate.

Facts which all add credence to Glenn Hoddle's belief that there are three tiers to the Premiership, with Saints currently occupying the bottom tier of perennial relegation strugglers with the likes of Derby, Bradford, Middlesbrough and Coventry.

There's the middle tier - Tottenham, Aston Villa, Leicester and Everton, teams capable on their day of beating the big guns, but whose main hope of season's glory rests with the cups.

And the top tier contains Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and Leeds, the only realistic candidates capable of sustaining a championship challenge.

Never mind Premiership survival, Hoddle reckoned earlier this season that Saints' initial target has to be reaching that middle layer. Achievable, it most certainly is, but the longer they take to bridge that gap, the wider this chasm becomes.

Sadly, football can never turn back the clock as this new pecking order becomes entrenched, rooted by the obscene amounts of money swilling about in the game.

Football was once an unpredictable sport, the fledgling Premier-ship or the old Division 1 was a competition where every team, on their day, had the capability of beating the other.

Now that is often no longer the case. The Premiership has become polarised and it says something about the current state of the game when you see scores such as Chelsea 6 Coventry 1, Arsenal 5 Manchester City 0, Manchester United 5 Saints 0 and you're not the slightest bit surprised.