ARSENAL and Manchester United resume their double-pronged assault on the Holy Grail of the European Cup on Wednesday. United have not won it since their solitary victory in 1968. Arsenal have never won it. Their European record over the years can hardly compare with Manchester United, yet at the moment, they seem to have the Indian sign over Alex Ferguson's team.
Though the season is young, they have already thrashed them twice, having last season robbed them of the Premiership title. In the process, they have seriously undermined Ferguson's reputation as the country's dominant manager; while Ferguson himself, over the years, has been subject to strange untypical errors in Europe.
Using Eric Cantona that time as a lone striker away to Juventus; Omitting Peter Schmeichel in Barcelona, when four goals were conceded.
For all that, Arsenal have a long way to go to match United's European achievements. They did nothing of note when they were previously champions, were once humiliated at Highbury by Benfica, and began their present quest uneasily, with no better than a draw away to a Lens team which lost several stars last summer. This, even with Dennis Bergkamp, who will miss any distant away games through fear of flying.
Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, and Ferguson have engaged in verbal crossfire and Wenger has stood up well in the face of the United manager's abortive attempts at psychological warfare. When Wenger dared to suggest the season should not be shortened to accommodate United, Ferguson responded that Wenger, a foreigner come lately, hadn't earned the right to state such views.
Shades of a Manchester United-Liverpool match after which Ferguson was bewailing United's misfortune when Kenny Dalglish, then Liverpool's manager, walked past with his baby daughter in his arms, and said: "You'll get more sense out of her!" Though Kevin Keegan proved more vulnerable.
Twice already this season, once in the Charity Shield, once at Highbury last weekend, United have conceded three goals to Arsenal. Another three were given away, whiting out what seemed an unassailable lead in the European fixture at home to Barcelona.
All very well for Ferguson to talk about an expensive excess of caution, in the second half, of the ball being passed backwards to the fullbacks rather than forward. Isn't a manager, not least one so respected and experienced, meant to sort out that kind of thing? It was perhaps ironic that last week should see the screening of the second part of an engaging television profile of Ferguson; his triumphs at Aberdeen, his early problems at United, his later refulgent success.
Personally, I saw a sadness in the metamorphosis of Ferguson from a young, fresh-faced smiling conquerer arriving from Pittodrie into the dour, troubled, touchy figure which he cuts today. It is not only fools who are not suffered gladly, any kind of criticism meets resentment.
Last week Ferguson said he hoped to manage United for another five years which seemed to be tempting fortune. It has been rumoured that Juventus want him as their manager to follow Marcello Lippi, who is expected to join Lazio next summer, but would it work?
If Ferguson thinks he is the victim of malign criticism in England, let him just try the inferno of Italian football, where even an equitable fellow as Roy Hodgson lost his sang-froid at Inter.
After the game at Highbury, Ferguson spoke of how brilliantly United played in the first half against Barcelona. Fair enough; the games do tend to last 90 minutes.
The fact is, surely, for the third time in his long, impressive career at Old Trafford, Ferguson seems to be going through a kind of crisis in terms of both tactics and transfers as his side prepare to take on Bayern Munich in Germany on Wednesday.
As the documentary showed he was under brutal pressure from United supporters back in 1989. But then United won the FA Cup and the good times rolled.
Subsequently, he brought off one of the most remarkable transfer coups in the history of English football when he picked up the dissident Eric Cantona from Leeds United, where Howard Wilkinson had been quite unable to handle him, for not much more than £1m and, against all the odds, largely domesticated him. It was Cantona, indeed, who had the last, fulsome word in the documentary, praising Ferguson as the finest manager he had ever known. Then there was the summer of 1995, when Ferguson sold three key players, Paul Ince, a reluctant mover to Inter, Mark Hughes (Fergie said he was abroad and didn't know about it) to Chelsea and Andrei Kanchelskis to Everton.
There is no doubt this seriously weakened the team even if, at the end, United took the Championship almost by default.
Ince, whom Ferguson in the documentary castigated as a Big Time (as opposed to Good Time?) charlie in a pre-match talk, flourished at Inter. Kanchelskis, though never the easiest of players to handle, had a justified grievance over a mis-diagnosed injury which forced him to go to Jim McGregor, the physiotherapist United had sacked. As for Hughes, the way Ferguson continually left out a player so vital to the attack with a capacity to hold up the ball and distribute it, was always puzzling, not least when Hughes was omitted from a match at Chelsea because four days later he would be suspended from a European game in Budapest. Without him United lost in London.
Ferguson's recent transfer policy has been erratic; £10.75m for Holland's Jaap Stam seemed spendthrift at the time, still more after the World Cup finals, Charity Shield and now the debacle at Highbury; not to pay £12m for the incisive Chilean striker, Marcelo Salas, then to pay it for Dwight Yorke made little sense. The £3m paid last year to Spurs for Teddy Sheringham may have seemed a bargain at the time, but there is little doubt now who got the best of it.
As for tactics, there have been some strange lacuna. Leaving Schmeichel out of that disastrous defeat in Barcelona was one; at Highbury, Ferguson told us that he had used Ryan Giggs as a central striker, hoping he could trouble Arsenal's two big centre backs, but when it became quite clear that he couldn't why wasn't he moved out to the left wing, where he could surely have troubled Lee Dixon?
Nor did it seem sensible to keep David Beckham out on the right wing when neither of the two central midfielders, Roy Keane and Nicky Butt is a particular passer of the ball.
The irony of it is that United, making allowances for poor struggling Stam, who did better against Liverpool in the 2-0 midweek victory, have probably a more talented squad, a higher potential than Arsenal's. Their admirable youth policy continues to turn up stars; for this, too, Ferguson is to be commended. But for all his undoubted achievements, it is not a happy moment in his career. Wenger, the cosmopolitan sophisticate, has manifestly out-flanked him.
