KICK HIM
As Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson came to terms, or didn't, with another swift dismissal from Europe - and life under the shadow of Jose Mourinho - there was a rare winner in the vital matter of engaging with reality. It was Wenger.
So often in this situation the Arsenal manager has been the dutiful sheepdog
minding a vulnerable flock. But plainly the team's failure truly to compete with Bayern Munich has shaken him deeply.
In Germany his dismay was not concealed. This week, when the repair job failed so profoundly at Highbury, he said, with quite significant emphasis, that indeed he did not wish to escape from reality. Arsenal, as currently constituted, were simply not equipped to win the Champions' League.
Plainly, the same was true of Manchester United, but instead of facing up to this, Ferguson retreated, so to say, into the future.
He talked of the need for experience, pointing out that Milan had a huge edge in this area with the likes of Paolo Maldini and Cafu and Alessandro Nesta. Yet Ferguson had sent Roy Keane, Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville out into San Siro. Rio Ferdinand is a veteran of a World Cup, a European
Championship and a Champions' League semi-final. Ruud van Nistelrooy's
problem was not a lack of experience - Ferguson lauds him as Europe's most
reliable swordsman - but a palpable lack of reasonable sharpness.
United lost for the reason that Wenger acknowledged in the case of his own
team. They were not good enough, not at least as they were set up for these ties, and if few men are more secure in their reputation than Ferguson, it is also true that he cannot lightly evade some serious criticism of his handling of the challenge presented by Milan.
At Old Trafford he sent Wayne Rooney alone against the brains trust of Milan's defence, an aberration that abandoned United's best chance - a sustained assault on a defence which, for all its accumulation of wisdom, has to be most at risk against intelligently applied pace and power.
It was a yielding of home advantage in the first leg that always threatened to be destructive.
This will surely fuel the argument that the Ferguson genius for motivation - and resurrection - has run its course. Perhaps when the smoke has cleared from what threatens to be possibly his most disappointing season, he too may decide that with the signings of Rooney and Ronaldo he has made his last big plays, and that he has done his best work and gone beyond his best time.
If this proves to be so, we will see not the limits of one man's empire but the end of a whole era of football, when it was still possible for an individual, if he was strong enough, and sufficiently ruthless, to shape the entire game to his will.