Boys with one thing on their minds

IT HAS been a characteristic of Manchester United's march to further football domination to report it in terms of others' failure, to point out that the season, so far, appears to have been one long shoe-in by rivals not up to the job.

Last Saturday, Liverpool played with the tactical acumen of your local park under-nines, on Monday night at Coventry, Arsenal looked drained of ideas and stamina and Porto turned up at Old Trafford for the European Cup quarter-final with Dave Beasant's Portuguese second cousin in goal.

Whenever anyone actually gets an act together (Newcastle, Derby, Juventus), United seem to be there for the taking. So tonight, against a Dortmund squad containing half a dozen Euro `96 winners, we shall see what happens when some real opposition turns up.

Whatever those around Old Trafford keen on fostering a siege mentality might assume, however, this analysis is not arrived at out of any anti-United malice. Rather, it is because of all the teams Alex Ferguson has constructed during his time in charge, this one is the most undemonstrative and business-like.

There just isn't the same adrenalin blast watching Roy Keane construct those tight midfield passing triangles as there was seeing Andrei Kanchelskis, Paul Ince and Ryan Giggs tear into the counter-attack in 1993. Nor with his haunches thickening and his speed ebbing, is Eric Cantona these days the eye-openingly inventive match winner of the past.

Often you study this United outfit as they win and wonder how they did it. At first you assume their opponents must have blown it. Then it slowly dawns that everywhere, in every position on the pitch, they are doing the simple things right. Which, in the percentage long haul of a football season, is the mark of a very accomplished side.

Clearly, it is the type of side Alex Ferguson has been seeking to build throughout his decade at the club: tactically astute, flexible, above all efficient. In short, German-like. And he has done it without ceremony or ostentation, almost on the sly.

This is not only the result of the most successful youth production line in Britain, it is also because when he has got his cheque-book out, he has been careful to the point of parsimony.

Between them, Peter Schmeichel, David May, Cantona, Ronnie Johnsen and Ole Solskjaer cost less than John Hartson. Or, as the United fans' terrace chant, sung to the tune of You Are My Sunshine, puts it: "Now Alan Shearer may be dearer/But don't take my Solskjaer away".

Indeed, in a sort of paradigm of the old adage that the title cannot be bought, Ferguson's least convincing performer is also his most expensive: Andy Cole.

The result of constructing a team of young lads, bits-and-pieces players picked up from elsewhere and foreigners whose potential had not been spotted by others, is that they all share one similarity - they owe the Boss for their big break and are thus happy to do his bidding.

The development of Giggs is typical. Once prone to over-elaboration, he has listened and changed. Now less liable to bring you to the edge of the seat in expectation, he is none the less now much more effective.

There is something else this team has picked up from their leader, too: a single-minded dedication to the cause. Nowhere is this more evident than in comparison with Liverpool.

At Anfield on Saturday, the press box was so full, some of us were accommodated in an over-spill section in the main stand. This was obviously the place where the home side's girlfriends are billeted. It was like sitting in on a Vogue casting session there, everywhere you looked were legs and hair and expensive dentistry. In 1997, a cover girl in your Porsche Boxster, rather than medals in the side-board, it seems, is the essential pre-requisite for the Liverpool player.

This may be harsh, but you can't imagine the Nevilles, Nicky Butt or Paul Scholes attracting that kind of support. In an era of pop star footballers, at a club better poised than any to exploit commercially the celebrity of its players, they appear, as a group, to be utterly focused on the task in hand. Which may well explain why, this season, as in the past three, they beat their nearest title challengers home and away.

Even all this may not be enough to overcome a team as capable as Dortmund tonight. A semi-final in the European Cup, seasoned observers believe, is about the limit of this United team's competence.

However, for the first time since those Liverpool and Nottingham Forest teams of old mastered the art of doing the simple things well, it makes a change to see a British team in Europe who will make the opposition beat them, rather than doing it for themselves.