United break-up may be way forward

After Manchester United had lost a Champions League quarter-final to Bayern Munich last season Roy Keane declared that their football had become too predictable and something more was needed. That something duly arrived in the shape of Ruud van Nistelrooy and Juan Sebastian Veron, who between them cost United £47 million.

This season Keane's wish has been fulfilled although it was probably not quite what the United captain had in mind. Either way few could have predicted that by the end of April Manchester United's only interest in the fag-end of the football programme would lie in delaying by one match Arsenal's usurpation of their Premiership title while hoping to secure second place and automatic qualification for the next Champions League.

In theory, a highly fanciful theory, manager Alex Ferguson's team can still win a record fourth successive championship. Reality, however, suggests even if Arsenal fail to regain the title by avoiding defeat at Old Trafford on Wednesday they will make sure when Everton visit Highbury on Saturday week.

So United are about to suffer their first season without a trophy of any sort since 1989, and their first without a major title since 1998, the year Arsenal completed a league and FA Cup double which they are hoping to repeat over the next five days. United's reaction then was to go one better and achieve a unique treble of league, FA Cup and European Cup the following year, but for this to happen again Ferguson will surely have to have a further rethink about how he wants his side to play and who he wants to play in it.

Keane described Tuesday's defeat as a "disaster" and he did not try to hide behind the limp excuse of bad luck as Ferguson had unashamedly done. Instead he pointed the finger of blame directly at himself and his United team-mates. Even Ferguson's post-match praise - "I just wish I had 10 Roy Keanes" - could not console the captain.

"This club deserves to win European Cup finals and we blew it," Keane said. "It's as simple as that. We had a great opportunity and these sort of chances don't come along very often. This club belongs in the European Cup final and it's a disaster and very disappointing.

"It was probably not the standard we expect of ourselves over the two games," he said. "It's very hard to win the European Cup if you give goals away like we did in the semi-finals. If we had gone in at half-time 1-0 up we would have been pretty confident, but scoring just before half-time gave them a lift."

Perhaps Ferguson was right to sell Jaap Stam as the Dutch centre back had hardly been in Italy five minutes before he failed a drug test. But buying the ageing Laurent Blanc as a stop-gap replacement proved to be the equivalent of plugging a leak with a sponge.

Add to this a series of eccentric errors by Fabien Barthez and injuries to Wes Brown, Ronny Johnsen, Keane and, latterly, Gary Neville and David Beckham and United's ability to prevent goals was bound to be affected.

Scoring them has not been a problem. Van Nistelrooy proved sufficiently prolific to drag United from mid-table just before Christmas to the top of the Premiership by mid-January.

How to give van Nistelrooy the most effective support has been one of Ferguson's most intractable riddles. Time and again he has used the Dutchman as a single striker with Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs or Ole Gunnar Solskjaer playing off him. Other leading European teams operate this system so why not United? Yet so much depends on Giggs and it is no coincidence that in both legs of the semi-final against Leverkusen the Welshman was unusually ill at ease on the ball.

Then there is Veron - or not as the case may be. On Wednesday night the Argentinian was pushed forward to support van Nistelrooy. Anyway that seemed to be the theory. In practice Veron failed to put himself about. After the match the PA system belted out the Anfield anthem You'll Never Walk Alone. To which van Nistelrooy might have retorted: "You do if Juan Sebastian is your partner."

Before the start of next season, then, Ferguson surely has to consider the possible consequences of trying to pick up a thread of success which had been unbroken for four years while retaining the collective services of Barthez, Blanc and Veron. And the longer the season has gone on the more United have regretted not being able to persuade Teddy Sheringham to stay.

Guardian Service