Sam Wallace: Ferguson's resolve ensures the chasing pack face epic struggle to shift United from their perch

Talking Football: With hindsight, the notion that Arsenal might represent the single biggest threat to United's hegemony seems ludicrous

Ferguson secured his 12th league title on Saturday (REUTERS)

Of all the things he has said – funny, sour, magnanimous, cruel or in contravention of Football Association rule E3 – there is probably none quite so pertinent to Manchester United today than the line Sir Alex Ferguson uttered about knocking Liverpool off their perch.

A good deal of myth has been generated around when he said it, and to whom, but for the avoidance of doubt I can say, without any shadow of doubt, that Ferguson said it in the week leading up to Saturday, 28 September 2002, when it appeared in The Guardian in a rare interview Ferguson granted the esteemed football journalist Michael Walker.

Ferguson was approaching his 400th Premier League game as United manager, his team were already trailing Arsenal by six points in the league and it had recently been suggested that winning the title that season – which he subsequently did – would be the greatest achievement of his career. What had irked him was that the person who had suggested it, or rather written it in his newspaper column, was the former Liverpool defender-turned-pundit Alan Hansen.

At the time, Hansen's point had been contentious but it had not been outlandish. United had won three titles between 1999 and 2001 but after Arsenal won the Premier League by ten points in 2002, suddenly the picture had changed. United had finished third behind Liverpool. Juan Sebastian Veron, Ferguson's record signing at £28m in the summer of 2001, had bombed. Things seemed to be changing.

Indeed, after May 2001 and until May 2007, United won the title just once, in 2003. So in some ways, Hansen was right. Ferguson did have to re-establish himself all over again among a new order. Not one that was dominated by Kenny Dalglish and Liverpool but one controlled by the new wave – Arsène Wenger, and later, in the summer of 2003, Roman Abramovich and Chelsea.

When Walker put Hansen's theory to Ferguson, his exact published words were thus: "My greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their fucking perch. And you can print that." Which is a rare instance of the original quotation being much fruitier than the one that has passed into folklore.

Since that day in September 2002, Ferguson's team have won five more titles – the fifth coming on Saturday – establishing them as England's leading club, with 19. In September 2002, Ferguson was 60 years old and had a contract at United that lasted until June 2005. Now he is 69 and has a rolling contract at United that is indefinite.

With hindsight, the notion that Arsenal might represent the single biggest threat to United hegemony seems ludicrous. In fact, on current form it is far more likely to be Manchester City, Chelsea and even Liverpool who might overthrow United next season. In 2002, it was unthinkable that Ferguson would go two years without winning the Premier League title. But between 2003-04 and 2005-06 he went three seasons without it and still came back.

Less than two weeks before Ferguson granted that interview in 2002, United had lost 1-0 to Leeds United, their second successive defeat of the season which, it was judged, had badly affected their title chances already. It hardly requires mention that on the weekend that United picked up their 19th league title, Leeds were already preparing for their eighth season outside the Premier League.

Leeds are not the only side who have fallen short since Ferguson began establishing United as the country's pre-eminent club. But his words in September 2002 stand as a lesson to Chelsea, City, Liverpool or Arsenal and any others who would seek to depose him: the first step is the hardest.

It was Jose Mourinho who came closest to finishing off United's dominance with two successive titles – no other manager has ever done that since Ferguson's first in 1993 – but he never looked like he would hang around long enough. By contrast, Arsène Wenger has had the necessary longevity at Arsenal but his determination to stick to self-prescribed budgets looks ever more eccentric.

For Ferguson to get that lift-off in the early 1990s required a perfect storm of contributing factors. Undoubtedly it needed a manger of singular ability and determination but Ferguson was aided by the stock market flotation of United in 1991 that released extra funds, as did the launch of the Premier League the following year. In the all-seater stadium era, Old Trafford's serendipitous location in an industrial park gave United the scope for expansion unavailable to other clubs.

Then there was the post-Dalglish decline at Liverpool. Jamie Carragher has argued it was Graeme Souness's spell as manager that did as much to damage the club as United. But there are other reasons, too. United have not just adapted to modern football, they virtually wrote the book on it. In their last financial results, United's turnover was £100m more than Liverpool's.

Now United occupy the perch, will displacing them be as difficult a job for the pretenders as Ferguson faced against Liverpool? With the bulwark of a huge stadium, a global following and unparalleled success it will be neither simple nor cheap to do it. But then empires crack in the most unexpected ways and sometimes on details that can seem relatively trivial.

Perhaps in ten years' time, Gary Neville will sit on a sofa in a television studio and proclaim that the dominant manager of the day – whoever he is – faces the biggest challenge of his career. To which the polite riposte would be that the biggest challenge any manager outside of United can undertake is deposing the club built by the third Scotsman in history to warrant a statue outside Old Trafford.

Capello will be lost if he suffers from a broken Hart

The curious thing about England's most famous reserve goalkeeper is that he won 61 caps. There were times when Ray Clemence was the first choice ahead of Peter Shilton but 61 caps is not a bad haul given that for all of the 11 years he was an England international he was up against the country's all-time record caps-holder.

These days there is not the ambition among goalkeepers to hang around in the hope that they might pick up a cap here and there when the first choice – currently Joe Hart and surely him for some time – picks up an injury. Ben Foster has all but quit and Rob Green will follow.

Which means that, for all Fabio Capello's best-laid plans, if Hart gets injured, the manager has a major problem.

Tuilagi reveals double standard

No one has yet been able to explain with any clarity why rugby union operates in a different moral stratosphere to football in our country. Watching the brutal three-punch combination Leicester's Manu Tuilagi launched at the head of Chris Ashton in the Premiership semi-final on Saturday made me wonder what consequences there would be for Wayne Rooney if he did the same thing.

The first punch would have merited questions in Parliament. The second would have been a GBH charge. The third would have been denial of bail. As it is, Tuilagi, who remarkably was not even sent off, will get a suspension and, er, that's it. But, hey, at least he shook his hand at the end of the game and remembered not to say any naughty words into television cameras.