Arsenal reawaken United beast

On the last ceremonial day of a tumultuous Premiership, three famous clubs are cast in roles which are supposed to define the new order of English football. Once aristocratic Everton go to the altar of Highbury as sacrificial lambs. Manchester United shuffle dispiritedly off the stage of the Theatre of Broken Dreams. Such is the script of the last day of a convulsion of a season. But how close is it to reality? Is Arsenal's Double really any more of a foundation for a new era of dominance – as Arsenal's Arsène Wenger suggested it might be in his moment of triumph at Old Trafford in midweek – than it was four years ago, or is it just another incitement to a new call to arms by Sir Alex Ferguson. Have the Gunners, when you get right down to it, done any more than reawaken the beast of Ferguson's ambition?

The idea may provoke rage within the marble halls, but these are not the days of football certainty – power, however impressively won, cannot be set in stone like the bust of Arsenal's first emperor, Herbert Chapman. What if Patrick Vieira does defect to Real Madrid? What if Thierry Henry, carried on to still another dimension by a triumphant World Cup, has seductive, distracting messages drumming into his ears? What if Robert Pires is slow to heal? When Liverpool were the last club to rule the English game before the rise of Ferguson's United, when the Bosman revolution was still in the incubation stage, such questions could be more easily pushed aside. Now, as no one should know better than Wenger, they stalk every dream of long-term ascendancy.

Of course there are compelling reasons for Highbury to be en fête today. The Double remains the indisputable yardstick of domestic achievement, but never can it have been less of a guarantee for the future.

When Arsenal last did it in 1998, United's response was to win their historic treble of Premiership, FA Cup and European Cup, a reality which perhaps should supply some check on hubris at Highbury today after a season in which, for all the glory of Bergkamp and Pires, Ljungberg and Henry, Arsenal's impact on Europe was again feeble.

The splendour of Arsenal's title win, which was the product of both superb consistency of intent and often exquisite performance, will stand as a lasting tribute to Wenger's capacity to draw from his team some of the best qualities that football can offer. But it says much less for his belief that tomorrow necessarily belongs to Arsenal.

Like it or not, Arsenal have to accept that that this season they have overcome a Manchester United so far from their best, so riven by fundamental but plainly repairable weaknesses, that the wonder is that they still finished one goal away from the final of the European Cup and a couple of wins from still another Premiership title.

That was the margin by which United failed to withstand the pressure of expectation which last autumn surely dwarfed that which Arsenal will face when a new season starts. When you measure the fineness of that failure ­ and when you consider the new factors which will favour Ferguson next time round ­ Wenger's talk of a shifting balance of power becomes fanciful. But in football, of course, there is always an if, and in United's case there are a whole series of them.

The most significant of them concerns Ferguson himself. At 60 can he re-charge the appetite which for so long has consumed his life? We cannot quite know because for any certainty we had to be inside his head at Newmarket last weekend when his Rock of Gibraltar held on so well to win the 2,000 Guineas. 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 Arsène 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.