It is an embarrassing incongruity for the marketing men of the Champions’ League

It is an embarrassing incongruity for the marketing men of the Champions’ League.Sir Alex Ferguson said before the second leg that he hoped Bayer would win the Bundesliga as “it is good to see teams with small resources doing well”. Perhaps, as Bayer later celebrated, his mind went back to his days at Aberdeen, whom he steered to an unexpected European Cup-Winners’ Cup victory over Real Madrid.Bayer’s Ferguson is Klaus Toppm?r, an engaging man fond of quoting Sir Winston Churchill. Toppm?r has never won a major honour but, building on the work of Christophe Daum, he has formed an attractive un-German team. Committed to attack, rarely indulging in gamesmanship, with an emphasis on nimble flair rather than brute strength, Bayer may yet cause another surprise in Glasgow.By then United’s leading players will be at rest, gathering strength for the World Cup and pondering, like Ferguson, where it went wrong. Roy Keane, fronting up off the pitch as he did on it, admitted: “We blew it.”Keane, who overcame a hamstring injury to be United’s most impressive player on the night, said: “These sort of chances don’t come along very often and we blew it. The manager, the staff and the fans deserved better than this. It was probably not the standard we expect of ourselves over the two games.”After United went out in the quarter-finals last season Keane said the team needed major surgery.

In spending £47m on Juan Sebastian Veron and Ruud van Nistelrooy, Ferguson seemed to have met that demand but he sold Jaap Stam, prompting defensive uncertainty, while the replacement, Laurent Blanc, adapted to the English game. Barring an unlikely collapse by Arsenal, this was not repaired in time to retain the Premiership.Lingering instability, and injuries, also left them defensively vulnerable in Europe but while Van Nistelrooy was in form United overcame this. Now he seems drained by his first season combining the physical intensity of the Premiership with the mental demands of Europe. With Veron unable to find a role, and the squad lacking cover for David Beckham, United were found wanting in attack. One wondered, as the limping Lucio held United at bay, if the “fantasy” of Paolo Di Canio, whose purchase was stymied by the insistence that Dwight Yorke be sold first, would have made the difference Ferguson may be wondering, too.. An old message of football was beaten out on the angst-filled brow of Sir Alex Ferguson in the Rhineland this week. It said that the game stops for no one, not even the greatest manager of his generation.

It says that the world breaks everyone, quite indiscriminately, but that some grow strong at the broken places. When Ferguson shakes off his disappointment, he will surely realise that he is superbly equipped both as a manager and a particular sort of man to act profitably on the vast accumulation of evidence supporting that last belief.For the moment Fergie may well bemoan United’s bad luck on Tuesday night and dwell a little on the four occasions the German team were obliged to clear away United efforts from their goal-line. But Fergie did not get to be where he is in the game by indefinitely pulling the wool over his own eyes and the fact is that between now and the resumption of European action next autumn he has to vigorously re-trace some of his steps.When he does that he may conclude, with a somewhat lighter heart than the one he carried from the BayArena, that finishing second in the Premiership and away-goal losers in a European Cup semi-final was only a disaster by his own extraordinary expectations. From the viewpoint of almost any other manager confronting the kind of situation, Ferguson faced in mid-season that would surely represent not so much catastrophe as a spectacular piece of professional deliverance.However, Ferguson long ago stepped beyond such easy consolation, and that was both his pain and his glory when his chain-smoking rival, Klaus Toppm?r, charged on to the field in triumph. It meant that if Ferguson is to turn his extended tour of duty into another roll of honour rather than an ordeal, he must address the fundamental reasons for United’s first trophy-less season since the one plagued by Eric Cantona’s eruption at Selhurst Park.The basic problem this time was the deep competitive dislocation caused by Ferguson’s announcement that he would quit at the end of this season. Whatever the provocation, the sense, perhaps, of a boardroom failure fully to appreciate, and reward, the amazing transformation he had brought to the playing fortunes and financial foundations of the club, Ferguson’s decision was an error, at least in the public declaration of it, and by the time it was corrected United’s ability to repair the damage, especially in the Premiership, was stretched beyond its limits.Next season will supply its own momentum, and much of it will come from the slow-release anger guaranteed by the shock of the team no longer being able to call themselves champions.Ferguson will also have to help the process with some vital decisions.