How deep did his celebration run? How much was it damaged by the suspicion that Arsenal were about to complete the first stage of their Double in the Millennium Stadium? We may not know the answer to those questions until a few furlongs of next season, when we can see whether Ferguson ­ and his team ­ have found themselves able to put back the blinkers which shut out all else but the need to be winners again.United’s rehabilitation presumes certain vitally necessary steps. They include the arrival of someone of the authority of Alessandro Nesta or Fabio Cannavaro at the heart of United’s defence and the departure, with some genuine sighs of regret, of Juan Sebastian Veron. The leakage of goals devastatingly undermined United’s season ­ and scandalised Ferguson’s traditional belief in the importance of defensive integrity. Veron brought shafts of brilliance but also a prevailing restlessness of the spirit. He plainly wondered if he was in the right place at the right time, and, perhaps for the first occasion in his footballing life, so did Paul Scholes. Other requirements of a re-charged United include a fully motivated, and contractually content David Beckham, and a sense in Roy Keane that he is once again leading a team which understands all the requirements of being the best.Keane has, yet again, been the conscience of United and it was significant that in the angst which came with defeat by Arsenal and the formal concession of the title the Irishman again attacked what he considered a fatal lack of full commitment in the dressing room.That, you had to believe, was the first bugle call of United’s charge back to the high ground. It is one which will be inevitably enhanced by Ferguson’s resumption of permanent command.

Of all United’s problems this season there can be no doubt the most pervasive was the sense that something had come to an end, that the man who had shaped an extraordinary winning ethos was no longer in charge of the destiny of the players he had shaped so profoundly. Such doubts have been extinguished now, but in their place are new ones.Having relaxed his hold on the reigns once, how tightly can Ferguson regain it? And if he does win back all of his appetite, how effectively can he transfer it to players such as Beckham and Scholes, Giggs and Butt who now, in their late 20s, look back on a landscape of unparalleled success. In this area, Ferguson’s great edge over all his rivals has faded somewhat. He can no longer take for granted the hunger of youth which he exploited so brilliantly back when he scrapped his old team of Paul Ince and Mark Hughes and Andrei Kanchelskis. Now his promptings have to be a little more subtle.But then so do those of Ars? Wenger. He has had a brilliant success, but, after four years of drought, was it not due? This time last year, with much more formidable evidence, the talk was not of a shift of power but the complete annexation of it by Manchester United.We have seen clearly enough the effects of such presumption on United’s season. We have seen the dwindling of that hard edge of ambition which was once the property of United but has been so marked in the play of Arsenal down the last stretch.

In a few months’ time Wenger must rekindle, as Ferguson has been required to do for 10 years, that fire of ambition, It will not be so easy. The World Cup, with its quite separate challenge, will have intervened and Arsenal will tell themselves, as they did four years ago, that they have reached the mountain-top The reality is that they have a foot-hold, no more. In a perfect football world it is something they would remember when they take their lap of honour today.. A well-heeled Spanish businessman enters a smart restaurant in Madrid At least, he looks like a Spanish businessman. He is wearing an impeccably cut dark suit over a comfortable paunch.