James Lawton: Ferguson the ultimate competitor has to revive old certainties

Perhaps only Sir Alex Ferguson could get himself into a position where, at the age of 60 and after dominating English football more profoundly than anyone in the history of the game, he has simply to start again.

It has not happened before. Don Revie was drawn into the Bermuda Triangle of running England. Sir Matt Busby hovered in the margins of Old Trafford. Bill Shankly broke away, suddenly, and spent the short days remaining to him in the pain of detachment from the thing he loved the most. Jock Stein angrily rejected the lukewarm patronage of Celtic, the team he had carried to the heavens, and died on the touchline as the manager of Scotland.

But not old blood-and-guts of Old Trafford. He nearly went that way. He nearly walked away from the arena he had filled with his rancorous, one-eyed, all-consuming passion to have Manchester United finish first at every time of asking. But his family nudged him into the reality that if he handed over the reins of United he would be turning in what had become, for all the diversions of the race tracks and the stables and the fancy vineyards, the meaning of his life. But then if it was, given the imperatives of his nature, a wise decision it was also one that carried him right back to square one.

Now he must do it all again. He must re-create the old fever that swept United into the dominance of the 1990s. He must stop in his tracks an Arsène Wenger emboldened by his second Premiership and FA Cup double. He must put down the threat of a fully-programmed Terry Venables working on the potential of talents like Harry Kewell and Mark Viduka. He must stifle the rise of Liverpool. Most of all, he must get United playing again, really playing.

Can he do it? It should be said straight away that the inconvenience of Budapest the other night, when United managed to bury their natural superiority to the point of conceding a 1-0 defeat in the first leg of a Champions' League qualifying tie, should be put on one side. The field once illuminated by Ferenc Puskas had turned into a rough pasture and United, on a better surface, might have won by three or four. But for the moment the question is not about talent or technique, or the ability of Juan Sebastian Veron and David Beckham to respond to suggestions, however veiled, that for much of last season they were not much more than extravagantly over-valued passengers, but something much more fundamental.

Ferguson identified the huge priority one grey day at Anfield last season when, after one of a series of defeats by Gérard Houllier's team, he said that he was in the process of evaluating the residual desire of his team. He wondered who still wanted success in the old way, which players still had that basic hunger, and which of them had grown psychologically fat on all the success.

Now he says that he believes United have gathered together some of the old will. He is confident about the security and confidence that Rio Ferdinand will bring to the centre of defence and he can point out that Nicky Butt and Paul Scholes, who had two of the better World Cup runs before disappearing into the fissure that opened up under the entire England team during the quarter final with Brazil, are approaching the prime of their professional lives. Even though he may worry a little about his resources up front with the departure of Andy Cole and Dwight York, especially with the sense that the splurge on Ferdinand represented as much as the plc board wanted to spend, he knows that in terms of playing resources he still carries the most powerful hand.

But then that was also true last season, and he will scarcely need telling that the erosion of United's position last autumn was not to do with any shortfall of talent. It happened because of a dimming of old certainties at Old Trafford, and Ferguson will know that in this he was partly to blame. The greatest certainty at Old Trafford was the will and the values of Ferguson, and, if these were commodities under siege, not least by the wild celebration of Beckham's efforts on behalf of England at a time when he was seriously under-performing for United, the real undermining of them lay in the belief that Ferguson, who had shaped all of their ambitions, was about to walk away.

He is around for three years now – time enough, you would imagine, to re-impose the ethos which was irresistible for so long. But we do have to consider the effort of will, and the extent of the re-imposing of authority, this will require. Facing Ferguson is no mere tinkering with the spirit of a team which, even subliminally, lost its sharpest edge of desire. Ferguson has to re-make Manchester United at an age when most are mulling over the shape of their retirement.

One of the most pressing questions he now faces is the continued value of Roy Keane's self-appointed role of conscience of the team as it goes to work. Beckham tried hard enough at a press conference in Budapest – a little too hard, some would say – to dismiss the worst of Keane's criticisms of his team-mates in his conflagration of a memoir, but there is no question about the validity of the Irishman's central complaint. It is that some United players got away with "murder" last season, and when Beckham pointedly asked for some specifying of when these occasions happened, he might have been referring to when he was withdrawn from vital games, and crushing defeats, at home to Chelsea and away at Anfield. Beckham would say that these developments came at the beginning of his "rest period" but of course such a concept is alien to Keane.

Ferguson's dilemma is whether Keane's heavy chiding is creating more doubts and resentment among the team than real incitement to superior effort. It is one of the subtleties of judgement which must now occupy, as never before, the manager who has not only to re-instate a great team but his own aura. The instinct here is that such an achievement, while unprecedented in the game, remains within the power of English football's ultimate competitor. Some 60-year-olds might waver at the idea of starting again. You have to suspect, though, that Ferguson is not one of them. He remains, surely, the man everyone has to beat.