Ferguson rally must be rattling Mourinho

Sideline Cut: The speed with which another Premiership year has all but disappeared is frightening.

Like many people, I thought we had all been reliably informed that Chelsea had won the blasted thing months ago, but the mad glint in Alex Ferguson's eye this week would suggest differently. The Scotsman really is the most ferocious competitor.

He must be at least 116 years old now, at least in football terms, and he was almost giddy with excitement at the faint chance of somehow picking the pocket of Roman Abramovich as the English league season enters its last frantic month.

Manchester United may not have completed Sunderland's nightmare season in only drawing with them at Old Trafford last night, but Ferguson has at the very least managed to orchestrate the kind of climactic finish the FA and Sky have been begging for and it offers Jose Mourinho baiters an opportunity to observe his behaviour under true pressure. The pity for neutrals is Chelsea are not facing an opposition more illustrious that Bolton Wanderers this afternoon. As Ferguson went to pains to highlight on Thursday, Sam Allardyce's crew are honest and ultra-competitive and only United have managed to score two goals in the Reebok stadium.

But they are also the kind of muscular and relatively unimaginative team Chelsea have been habitually breaking down for the past two years and 1-0 will do Mourinho just fine. Hard as Ferguson might wish for it, it is difficult to envisage a bunch of players as manically driven and together as Chelsea have been under the stewardship of John Terry collectively swooning at the hot breath of Manchester United.

Even if he does not achieve what would come to be regarded as his most famous league win, Ferguson has at least rescued a season that had threatened to lapse into absolute free-fall, toppling his own reputation in the process. There must have been days in the recent past when Ferguson struggled to recognise his own empire.

The fallout caused by the takeover by the Glazer family, less munificent benefactors than Chelsea's Abramovich, the dismayingly early exit from the Champions League and the abrupt and icy parting of the ways with Roy Keane all indicated that Manchester United's old patriarch had all but lost his grasp on power. Keane's quitting of Old Trafford could have been interpreted as a sign of Ferguson's paranoia as much as anything else. The Irishman was merely doing what he had always done at Ferguson's behest: constantly demanding, chiding and provoking his team-mates towards higher states of play. But because Ferguson's position was weakened by the need for better results and by the pressures of a soccer climate that had been thrown into turmoil by the sudden reinvention of Chelsea, his warrior's stinging words now felt like an attack.

There can be no doubt that when Ferguson is in relaxed and sentimental mode, maybe enjoying a fine claret with a trusted companion or two, he will continue to speak mistily about what Keane, with all pistons thumping, represented to Manchester United and to modern football. But in terms of the immediacy of this season, forcing the Irishman out of the club and brutally sundering the most famous manager-player relationship in the English game was a cold gamble by someone who knew instinctively the old ways could not work anymore.

It was, as Keane recently admitted in this newspaper, just business, just one more instance of the player as commodity in a sport that manages to pay constant homage to the past without having one shred of sentiment. And Ferguson must have felt vindicated by his decision as he followed the stop-start fortunes of Keane's halting Celtic career north of the border and more so when the players he had left under him began to blossom and achieve the league results Manchester United are accustomed to.

At the time, however, the terminal breakdown in understanding with Keane and Ferguson's implacable Friday afternoon press performance just minutes after his captain had walked away from the club suggested a house in turmoil. It was whispered then that the old man had finally grown too rusty for the game and, more ominously, that Manchester United no longer had the financial muscle or the allure to attract the players they wanted.

Wayne Rooney's decision to sign a long-term contract with the club was beginning to look as if it would hamper the most exciting local prospect to emerge from the English youth academies in a generation. The burning question surrounding Manchester United concerned who might succeed Ferguson - and if the Scotsman could be persuaded to accept the gold watch and the handshakes and move upstairs willingly. The one thing he could not let go of was his stubborn streak, as evidenced in his battle of wills with Ruud van Nistelrooy earlier this year, when he sat the classy Dutch man week after week. (And it was interesting that van Nistelrooy was one of the few United players who publicly spoke out in support of Keane during those tumultuous weeks last autumn).

How different it all seems now. With Chelsea widely portrayed as the nouveau enemy with a cocky manager in need of comeuppance, the thought of Manchester United winning the league is suddenly being conceived of as a romantic possibility. This is daftness in its own right: United led the charge in creating the entity of an English superclub. They thrived on a fine youth academy, on some brilliant acquisitions and 20 years' worth of shrewd and sometimes great and sometimes lucky management by Ferguson but they also thrived on having more money at their disposal than their rivals.

That privilege belongs to Chelsea now and is why Manchester United's spring surge has caught on among soccer fans desperate for some proof that the competition is not merely about the richest owner (just the second richest).

Of course, a string of league victories does not mean all is perfect again within Manchester United. Despite the one-man-show abilities of Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo is a mercurial and infuriating kind of player and farther back the team does not appear to have the kind of bullying, arrogant characters who defined Ferguson's teams in the 1990s.

It is hard to see United challenging for Champions League honours next year and if Chelsea land Michael Ballack, another player coveted by United, they will be even stronger when the whole show cranks up again next August. The League Cup might well be the only prize worth polishing in the United trophy room this summer, a meagre display in comparison to the great years. But despite the prevailing and gloomy resignation that Chelsea would win the league in runaway fashion, Ferguson has managed to ride the kind of pressure other men would find intolerable.

Big-time coaching is a tough business: just this week, the American basketball coach Larry Brown, who answers for the hapless and overpaid New York Knicks, collapsed in the second half of a game and was rushed to hospital. There were many Saturday and Sunday afternoons when you looked at Ferguson, cherry-faced and fuming, and feared he would blow a gasket in a similar way. But he turned it around, if only for a while, and the world considers him the boss of United once more. For that much, you have to take your hat off.