Soccer: Writing on the wall for great Man United dynasty?

Manchester United's Wayne Rooney walks off the pitch after their Champions League group D soccer match loss against Lille at the Stade de France. Picture / Reuters

The best interview that Sir Alex Ferguson has given over the last three years - and you can be sure it was not on MUTV - was an in-depth newspaper piece, conducted in the one building most football reporters never expect to see the inside of: the Ferguson family home.

The Manchester United manager said a lot of revealing things about his life, his past and his profession but, of the lessons in leadership that stuck in the mind, one stood out above all others.

"The manager," he said "can never lose an argument."

Ferguson has won them all over the years. He enters any disputatious situation like an undefeated welterweight, vaulting the ropes and beating his gloves together. His string of knockouts includes managers, players, chairmen, too many reporters to remember and lately the BBC.

At his wedding reception in 1966, someone parked their car in the spot a 24-year-old Ferguson had identified as his first choice so, naturally, there was only one thing for it. Ferguson had an argument with the driver in question and only the intervention of his brother, and best man, Martin, saved the new groom from beginning married life with a scuffle in a car park.

Like every great empire, Ferguson's Manchester United have thrived on conflict and then victory. Even two months short of his 64th birthday, he retains a remarkable ability to face down a room full of journalists with just the projection of his mood.

Few of his past skirmishes, however, will compare with this latest one with Roy Keane. Somewhere in Ferguson's office at the club's training ground sits the tape of MUTV's now infamous interview with Keane in which the United captain, 34 years old and with 12 years' service, lambasts the state of the club: an invective so harsh it is understood to name Kieran Richardson, Alan Smith, Darren Fletcher, Liam Miller and John O'Shea as unworthy of playing for the club; an affront to the authority of Ferguson and United so savage that a decision was taken by Ferguson and the club's chief executive David Gill to prevent its broadcast. A one-man mutiny. In short, a very good reason for an argument.

If the manager can never lose an argument, then this is surely the title fight to end them all. Ferguson has, in the past, claimed that internal club affairs should be kept private, that a stray boot kicked in the dressing room is no one's business but his and his players'. The issue of Keane's MUTV interview is one that has to be resolved in public.

Keane has seven Premiership titles and a status that is incomparable among United fans. Those supporters who claim to represent the soul of the club have always viewed him as detached from the hyperbole and addicted to the single most important aspect of United's existence: winning. This is, after all, a player who once said he would rather receive the FA Cup in the dressing room than go through the hassle of the presentation.

It is a status reinforced by Ferguson's view of Keane, too. No one doubts that they have fallen out on countless occasions - not least when the captain expressed his dissatisfaction with the pre-season training arrangements in Portugal this summer - but they have always maintained a public unity. The manager has backed his captain's judgment time and time again. Now he finds himself in such fundamental disagreement, there can be no alternative but to take Keane on.

Ferguson versus Keane. It is a conflict that promises to inflict much damage on the institution that these two men have done so much to build. There is a well-grounded fear at Old Trafford that Keane, thwarted by the spinelessness of MUTV, will take his complaints about United elsewhere. Given the current state of United, 13 points behind Chelsea and humiliated by Middlesbrough last week, he will find a receptive audience among a disillusioned support.

He has established himself as a renegade, a teller of the truth, and his words will have so much more weight now that they have been suppressed once already.

Ferguson must either extract a promise that Keane's one-man crusade against Old Trafford's failings will cease or, most likely, he will cast him out. The January transfer window is two months away, and Keane will be six months from being a free agent. Even if he has not recovered from a broken toe by then there would be no shortage of suitors.

It would be the end of one of football's great partnerships, one that began back in the Ferguson family home in 1993 when Keane, considering a move from Nottingham Forest to Blackburn Rovers, visited to discuss a transfer to United.

The two played a frame of snooker, which, Keane revealed in his autobiography, he let his prospective boss win. Something tells you that their latest disagreement will not be settled on such amicable terms.

- INDEPENDENT