FERGUSON'S CHALLENGE

In his smart and informative autobiography My Life In Football Gordon Strachan discusses the anxiety that torments even the greatest of managers. He recalls being a player at the 1986 World Cup when Scotland stayed in a hotel with flimsy walls and he was kept awake by the sound of Alex Ferguson's nervous cough in the next room.

The disagreements between the pair are famous, but that was not intended as a derogatory tale. The book is quite conciliatory towards a person who was a kind of mentor at Aberdeen as well as a tormentor. Strachan underlined the point in an interview. "Whatever is said," he insisted, "I do believe that he's the best manager of his generation. By a million miles."

There are several excellent footballers at the club and, in former times, United would have been deemed to have a squad capable of winning the league. Nowadays there is virtually no one who holds such a view of the Premiership. Ferguson ought to be clearing his throat as stressfully as he did 20 years ago. Thanks to Chelsea's domination, he is under more scrutiny than at any stage since it took the 1990 FA Cup win to restore job security at United.

Despite the £10.2m fee paid by Real Madrid for Ruud van Nistelrooy and the reported compensation of £12m negotiated with Chelsea to settle the John Obi Mikel affair, the sums available from the Glazer regime appear limited. In the circumstances, Ferguson's use of modest funds is the subject of fierce scrutiny and many fans were bewildered when he moved to bring in a left-back, Patrice Evra, and the centre-half Nemanja Vidic in January.

In practice the manager is in a situation he could never have envisaged when he announced, after winning three consecutive Premiership titles, that he would retire in 2002. The change of heart arose from the unspoken conviction that the long-term prospects were too promising for Ferguson to surrender his stake in it.

Ferguson, blazing with youth and purpose, overthrew the Old Firm when he was in charge of Aberdeen, but toppling the Stamford Bridge side is at least as great a challenge. He undertakes it at a point when his energies must have subsided a little. The initial decision to stand down was proof that Ferguson felt, temporarily, that he had had enough.

Success could not bind him to the club as tightly as failure does now. It would be excruciating for him to leave as a failure after knowing so many years of mastery. None the less, the threats go on accumulating. Rafael Benítez, already a Champions League winner at Liverpool, has been spending his transfer budget with a gimlet-eyed pragmatism.

A rejuvenated Arsenal could be a worry as well. With the Glazers unlikely to be ousted, many United supporters will be grateful that Ferguson's continued presence guarantees a trace of stability. Who, after all, can be sure a replacement of the very highest repute will be talked into taking over the job?

Ferguson, for his part, has to pray that youngsters flourish, that older players such as Paul Scholes have one last season of splendour and, most of all, that Chelsea self-combust. Otherwise a man who cannot stand to tear himself away while things are going so poorly at Old Trafford may find that the Glazers simply cut him loose.