They ought to shift the tactics board from Carrington to the Old Trafford boardroom. The chairperson of Manchester United, Sir Roy Gardner, and the chief executive, David Gill, have to come up with a defensive formation and gauge their scope for counter-attacks.
If they cannot deal with the challenge of two major shareholders, the future of the club and of English football may be radically altered.
It is no longer inconceivable that Sir Alex Ferguson will be prised out of the job he has held for more than 17 years. John Magnier, who owns 25,49% of the shares in United with JP McManus, was sure to become inquisitive about the workings of the club once its manager took legal action over the stud rights to the racehorse Rock of Gibraltar.
The two Irishmen can be expected to persist in demanding an independent audit of transfer fees and payments to agents, transactions in which Ferguson must have been intimately involved. They have not been pacified by the club’s announcement of an ‘internal reviewâ€.
There is little room for compromise with Magnier and McManus, who may have the muscle to get their way at an emgergency general meeting.
By identifying an issue of corporate governance they might just secure the backing of Malcolm Glazer and others so that they wield a majority vote. The unwritten motion on any agenda is surely the removal of Ferguson. Gardner and Gill may rationally see the retention of the manager as crucial to the health of the club, but their wish for conflict resolution is futile if all other parties are bent on war.
If Magnier and McManus have the power to insist that the new deal for Ferguson is merely a one-year rolling contract, there is no significant improvement for the manager on the current arrangements that expire next year.
Visualising United without the Scot is a mental exercise that few minds are supple enough to perform but, should the club be overcome by deadlock and division, there will be no option but for him to leave.
He is not the man to totter away in a daze. Even at 62 Ferguson would still have his mind set on another of the great posts in football and the virtually unbroken success of his career means that he is a walking warranty. Clubs would compete to employ him and, if Claudio Ranieri is bored with hearing that Sven-Goran Eriksson is to replace him, he might find the rumour being updated in an even more unsettling form.
There was brief conjecture last year about overtures to Ferguson by Roman Abramovich and Chelsea’s owner cannot be indifferent to the value of such a manager. Ranieri, for all his charm, has never been in a position to try for the title in Italy or Spain and must crumple under the force of any comparison.
Ferguson has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the ruses and attributes of Premiership winners, which he allies with a yearning for a second Champions League triumph to silence the sceptics who still refuse to number him among the very elite of European coaches.
Were he to take over at a club with the means of Chelsea, this manager might apply a greater intensity to his work than ever before.
The Old Trafford office-bearers ought to be desperate to keep him because by losing Ferguson they would gain a ferocious adversary.
Last week he made the mellow remark that age was curbing his temper, but all the anger-management classes in the world will not curb his fury once a yearning for retribution takes control of him.
If Magnier and McManus still held their stake at United, ascendancy for Chelsea would be the most direct means of slashing its value. How odd yet curiously passionate an undertaking it would be for Ferguson and the new Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon to bombard everything they had built in the north-west.
Stamford Bridge supporters who were indifferent to any feuds could still relish the benefits of the Scot’s on-field expertise. There might be less vacillation in form and the team selections would not bear the opaque idiosyncrasy sometimes associated with Ranieri.
Perhaps, too, he could extract a greater contribution from someone such as Joe Cole, so that the tricks actually hurt the opposition as well as sending ripples of pleasure through the fans.
While Ferguson was trying to transform Chelsea, United would be forced into a radical change as they sought a replacement for someone who has formed the club in his likeness. The Premiership champions might well resume the interest in Eriksson to which Ferguson once alluded in an interview.
They could also look further afield and take note of the resurgence at Roma of Fabio Capello, who is fighting against the assumption that his current life is merely an epilogue to the Milan era of the early 1990s.
There is cause, too, to see Martin O’Neill as a candidate unless the Liverpool board’s robust backing of Gérard Houllier should somehow weaken so that O’Neill winds up at Anfield instead. Ferguson’s departure would call into question all the present certainties of the Premiership. How United would hate that. —