It is enough surely for any reasonable man

It is enough, surely, for any reasonable man.But then it is also true that if Ferguson had always been an entirely reasonable man his legacy would not now have been turned into such a desperate and ferocious battlefield. Even so it is hard, if not impossible, not to say that his wisest course now is to say that he has done all that he can.Controversial, bullying, ungraceful, he has been all of that. But then try to imagine English football without him these last 20 years. Where would have been the standard, the passion to win? That is the true legacy of Sir Alex Ferguson – one which in the end does not depend on whether he sips the wine and smells the roses, or goes down fighting.It is, after all, his choice – and his right.. At 57, he could have taken his knighthood on the mountain top of the historic treble of Champions’ League, the championship of England and the FA Cup, and he could have wrapped up his reputation in cotton wool and had it for all time.The point he should remember is that, despite the convulsions of recent years, he remains ahead.

He is the creator of the United wealth which Malcolm Glazer and, before him, Rupert Murdoch coveted so hard. At 63 does he need any of this? Of course it is true, as the great champion Sugar Ray Leonard once declared before going into a fight at Madison Square Garden that most everyone but him knew he couldn’t win, that “fighters fight for as long as they can because it is their life, it is the thing they do best”. If Ferguson had been a master of this art, he would have walked away six years ago – at the age of 57, one considered to be highly advanced in the world of business wizardry, where men can earn so much money by their thirties or forties they are already staking out the first of their retirement homes.That would not have done for Ferguson; it would have denied him the supreme years of his working life, the distillation of all that he had strived for since boyhood in the shadow of the Govan shipyards. And of course we know how much Ferguson still cares.For confirmation you only have to see him when his latest prot? Wayne Rooney scores an astonishing goal, or when the perceived conspiracies of the game and fate work against him and his team and he rages, as he did on the touchline at Everton recently, against a rival manager, in that case the young comer David Moyes, whom he respects so highly.But then, perhaps he should ask himself, what is the greatest trick in life? It is to quit when you are still ahead, before you have been sucked down into circumstances not altogether under your control. Did that battle, and the ill-advised provocations of some United fans, not make it inevitable that the “Coolmore Mafia” would sell to Glazer when they deemed the price to be right?Did Ferguson make a grievous error when he returned to the coaching of Carlos Queiroz, a decision that seems to have drained away the natural aggression and confidence of a team which, at their peak, always operated in Ferguson’s own image of relentless combativeness and self-belief? Did he become too entrenched in the best of a past that included a Roy Keane, undoubtedly his best signing, operating at the peak of his physical powers rather than from a brilliant memory?Because of his nature, some of Ferguson’s reflections will no doubt be bitter.

Did he not realise that in the end the game screwed every football man, and whatever his success?The result was a tap on the shoulder in the aisle of a plane. There was Ferguson, and he said: “Yes, I did.” Now Ferguson would not be human if he did not look back with some regrets and wonder how much stronger his position might be today if he had made several different turnings in the last few years.He must speculate on whether his former friends John Magnier and J P McManus would have sent Glazer back to the trailer parks and the gridiron but for the war over the stud fees and disputed ownership of the champion thoroughbred Rock Of Gibraltar. He might say that life is tough for most of the people, and then they die.For Ferguson, the greatest danger now is to be cut by a sense of ingratitude, a bleak view of the fickleness of the game which has so shaped his life. When Cullis was fired, Sir Matt Busby, whose rewards at Old Trafford were only a fraction of those that Ferguson has – rightly – received, wrote to him to say that there were times when he felt ashamed for the human race.How might the father of Old Trafford feel right now? He might revert to the realism of his native Lanarkshire coalfields.