Ferguson faces up to 'almost impossible' task

An earnest young woman was handing out leaflets at Old Trafford on Saturday, as the club's ambitions of retaining their Premiership title were gripped by terminal convulsions. She was not, as you might imagine, demanding that Sir Alex Ferguson, who has overseen Manchester United with a puritan ruthlessness Robespierre would have recognised, be carted off to the guillotine. The leaflets advertised supporters' packages for trips to Nantes and Oporto in the Champions' League.

Yesterday's lead item on Manchester United's official website was that Ferguson had signed a rocking horse to be auctioned for charity, while the fanzines carried no sense of crisis. The Red Issue's front cover boasted of a feature on United's greatest songs.

With a quarter of an hour remaining, the Stretford End began a chorus of ''Sing Your Hearts out for the Lads'', a chant that has hardly ever been heard at Old Trafford and not just because United fans never sing their hearts out for anyone. It is sung when your team are losing and when there seems no way of them winning other than being lifted by their supporters. It seldom works.

Saturday's 1-0 defeat by West Ham triggered the last rites for Manchester United's championship hopes, although it is as well not to write the obituary just yet. When in 1978 Liverpool were knocked out of the European Cup by Nottingham Forest, Granada Television enraged Kenny Dalglish by playing The Party's Over as his beaten team hauled themselves off the pitch. Liverpool then won the title in a season in which they conceded 16 goals. Fabien Barthez has already picked the ball out of his net 27 times and Ferguson recognised what the statistics meant.

"It is almost impossible for us to win the league now. It will take a miracle," he admitted to the club's television station, having chosen once again not to speak to the written press. "We cannot lose another game until the end of the season. It might be possible, we have done it before (in 1996 they won 13 of their last 15 matches to overhaul Newcastle's 12-point lead) but that result was a real shock to me."

It is possible for a team to take the championship after losing more than six games; in 1995 Blackburn did it with seven defeats. Derby's 1975 championship side lost 10. Bill Shankly took his first title to Anfield in 1964 despite 11 defeats and in 1932 Everton were acclaimed as the best side in England after losing a dozen matches; they did, however, boast a striker called Dixie Dean and a goal difference of plus 52. That Ferguson chose not to select his best striker, Ruud van Nistelrooy, or his most expensive signing, Juan Sebastian Veron, while preferring Luke Chadwick to David Beckham for a game he had to win horrified those around the club.

"Alex Ferguson does not make many mistakes but he is making them all at the same time," said George Best. "Leaving out Van Nistelrooy, Veron and Beckham did not work against a team with the league's worst defensive record.

"It was a disastrous result at this stage of the season. All this talk about resting players is nonsense; they are fit athletes who are getting well paid for what they do with 60,000 people screaming them on. They should be able to go on adrenalin. We are only a third of the way through the season, God knows what it will be like with two thirds gone. Will they be more tired and will he leave more out? I said a couple of months ago they would win nothing. It might be for the best if they don't because the person coming in to replace Ferguson will start with a clean slate. These are desperate times for United."

Stuart Pearson, who provided the spearhead to Tommy Docherty's United side, echoed Best's concerns: "I cannot understand why he left Van Nistelrooy and Veron out; I was worried when I saw the team sheet as Chadwick is far from ready. I work in corporate hospitality here and people were gutted when they heard Veron, Van Nistelrooy and Beckham were not playing."

The list of candidates to succeed Ferguson is fast shrinking. Arsène Wenger has tied himself to Highbury, Ottmar Hitzfeld has his eyes on leading Germany into the 2006 World Cup and Martin O'Neill has successfully sued The Observer for suggesting he has met with United's representatives. Yesterday, Sven Goran Eriksson said he would not break his contract. "I have never talked to Manchester United and have heard nothing about it," he said. "I will be with England for a long time."

The few months preceding Eriksson's arrival in England ought to provide a clue as to why a United squad which skated to the last two championships should have imploded. His Lazio side that had captured Serie A collapsed domestically and in the Champions' League once Eriksson revealed he would be quitting at the end of the season. Only when he went in January did they recover to finish third.

Crucially, Ferguson's farewell has lingered for two years and Steve McClaren's departure for Middlesbrough has forced him to soldier on alone. When he has had to take training he has more distractions than most managers. Jaap Stam remembers Ferguson being on the phone more than anyone he had ever met. This year his attentions have been diverted by securing his own role at Old Trafford after retirement, his racehorses and the moves made by his friends, J P McManus and John Magnier, to secure a greater stake in the club. In this context the statement by United's director of communications, Paddy Harveson, that Ferguson was abandoning his media duties "to concentrate fully on team affairs" almost makes sense. However, since Harveson uttered those words, Ferguson has lost three out of four league games.

United's collapse could almost be predicted. The lives of the great teams are measured in 10-year spans. From 1950 to 1960 Stan Cullis's Wolves were never out of the top four, suddenly they fell apart. The dominance of Don Revie's great mechanical team lasted precisely a decade; from 1965, when Leeds finished second to United, to the 1975 European Cup final, which triggered a shocking disintegration. The Liverpool side that conceded 16 goals in 1979 was 10 years later becoming unmanageable. United's decade is almost up.