The 'dinosaur' who is outwitting the thinking man's coach

Manchester United manager's demonic demeanour belies a care for supporters and pride in work that stem from earliest apprenticeship

If Manchester United maintain today and next weekend their advantage over Arsenal, a somewhat fanciful football morality tale will have been shattered. Victory for the good guy, and the force of light he is said to represent, will be lost.

Indeed, if Sir Alex Ferguson tramples back to the mountain-top, spewing bile, wrestling down demons, and drawing the kind of feeble censure administered this week by Uefa, who fined him £4,500 for implying publicly that their whole damned organisation was crooked, it will be asserted that it is the year of the bully.

And of financial muscle. The latter point is underscored by the latest statement of accounts from Highbury, which showed a debt load of £40m.

But if Arsène Wenger has continued to fight a brilliant battle against the weight of Old Trafford and its rampaging commander, history will need to get a better grasp of Ferguson's achievements than the critic who wrote recently, when it seemed that Arsenal were much more likely to repeat their double success of last season, that the French manager had won a victory of both the spirit and the mind.

In a parody of easy judgement, Wenger was the aesthete, the thinking man's coach, while Ferguson was the dinosaur.

In a sense that last point is accurate, if not true to anything but the superficialities of the moment. In football Ferguson's natural operating time has gone, but it is his glory not his weakness that he has fought, like nobody else, to maintain that which he considers most important in the game, that which has occupied the core of his life since he completed a meticulous apprenticeship in an engineering shop in his native Glasgow. Ferguson has not created his own values. He inherited them from shipbuilding stock. They came with his toolbox and he could no more reinvent them than he could himself.

The point may be worth making at the end of a week which has seen Ferguson utterly unrepentant over his role in the David Beckham controversy to the point of banning those newspapers which made great play of his recent eruption when the subject was raised at a press conference. For him, the Beckham circus is at the very best a wearisome distraction. He is as much bewildered as outraged by a life in football that increasingly seems to revolve around the power to attract attention in a way completely divorced from performance.

It meant that when Ferguson shocked much of the football world by leaving Beckham out of the important games with Newcastle, Arsenal and the second leg against Real Madrid, he was doing no more than follow the basic instinct of his managerial career. It is to pick those players whose desire to win, and ability to deliver a significant effort, has imprinted itself most strongly on his mind. For Ferguson, the Beckham furore was created by nothing more, or less, than the player's inadequate performance in the first leg in Madrid.

Of course, he was not surprised by the reaction to his decision or the breast-beating it would cause at the heart of United plc. But he was appaled by what he interpreted as a failure of effort and will by the England captain at the Bernabeu and he acted correspondingly. Possibly there was lingering rancour over Beckham's grand-standing martyrdom after an angry Ferguson had sent that flying boot on to a forehead that was for days scrupulously bared with the help of an Alice band. But the essential question concerned Beckham's level of performance out on the right, and how it compared, currently, to that of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.

If there was a pivotal point in this season of redemption it was probably Maine Road on 9 November, when City beat United 3-1 and Ferguson raged at the lack of effort of his team. If ever there was a time to stand and fight for those imperatives of his Glaswegian youth, pride and honesty in performance, that was surely it. There had been similarly disquieting performances in the previous, futile season when Ferguson had plenty of time to digest the consequences of his decision to announce what proved to be a premature plan to retire. But now, restored to full authority, Ferguson raged long and hard, and the players could no longer relax in the knowledge that this was a man who had ceased to determine the future course of their careers.

That defeat at Maine Road opened up an old, deep wound, the 5-1 loss on the same ground in 1989, when Ferguson, after three slogging years, had still to make the breakthrough with United. It was a tormenting breakdown of the values he had tried to impart. "Believe me," he said, "what I've felt in the last week you wouldn't think should happen in football. Every time somebody looks at me, I feel I've betrayed that man. After such a result you feel you deserve to sneak around corners, feel you are some kind of criminal. But it is only because you care – care about the people who support the club."

It is such care that has carried United to the brink of their eighth Premiership in 11 seasons. Care that has been exemplified by Ruud Nistelrooy and Paul Scholes and young John O'Shea. Care that money cannot buy. Care that comes not from the brain but the heart.