When you think about some football clubs, Sir Alex Ferguson said yesterday, the first thing that comes to mind is the manager. He was talking about Charlton Athletic, today'sopponents for Manchester United, and their manager, Alan Curbishley, whose achievements he greatly admires. But as Manchester United stand on the brink of their eighth championship in 11 years, he might just as well have been talking about himself.

"There's a lot of myth," he said, in answer to a question about whether he can still motivate his players through instilling fear. "If you had about 20 million in the bank, would you be scared of me? I'm a pussycat now. But you've got to get a response, or I wouldn't be here, would I? I would have retired. But I made the right decision. I'm enjoying it. I feel younger and fresher now than I did a year ago. There are times when I'd like to be out there on the pitch with them."

Even for a ground accustomed to providing a stage for history, Old Trafford could be in for something special today. A lunchtime victory would require Arsenal to beat Leeds United at Highbury tomorrow afternoon to hang on to the receding chance of retaining their Premiership title. United would thus be within sight of winning back the trophy after a comeback to exceed any in Alex Ferguson's 16-year tenure, on a day when the whiplash speed of Ryan Giggs and the finesse of David Beckham will be prompting more poignant thoughts.

Three months into the season Arsenal had raced to a nine-point lead over United, their attacking play displaying a lethal fluency perhaps unprecedented in English league football. United seemed hobbled by injuries to Roy Keane and Gary Neville, by Beckham's post-World Cup ennui and by the questions surrounding Juan Sebastian Veron's adequacy and Ferguson's seeming inability to settle on a regular partner for Ruud van Nistelrooy.

Yet Ferguson's teams have often clawed back substantial margins. In 1992-93, the year of Ferguson's first title, Norwich City were eight points ahead at the beginning of December. In 1995-96, more famously, the team overhauled Newcastle United's 12-point lead. But that was Newcastle, managed by the emotionally brittle Kevin Keegan.

This, on the other hand, is Arsenal, whose manager, Ars'ne Wenger, spoke last year of sensing "a shift in power" as his team ended United's run of three consecutive titles, and dared to suggest at the start of the present season that his players might go through the campaign without experiencing defeat. For Ferguson, this success would taste particularly sweet.

"I think it'll be the greatest achievement of the team," he said firmly, "because of the position we were in early in the season. When we had all these injuries and we had to make decisions on them, it wasn't a great moment for this club. There's always a question mark over how players will come back from operations. But we were prepared to take the poison then, hoping that they'd all be back for the second half of the season with a clean bill of health. And from the turn of the year they've been absolutely fantastic."

Most of all, however, the prospect of the eighth championship of the Ferguson era sharpens the awareness, prompted by months of rumours, that the Old Trafford crowd may be about to look for the last time upon the cadre of homegrown players, formed a decade ago in United's youth team, whose collective identity has been a foundation of the years of glory.

It was 10 years ago, on a filthy night at Gigg Lane, that Ferguson sat in the stand watching his reserve team go down 2-0 to Leicester City. He seemed unworried. "I'd be really hard pressed," he said, pulling his overcoat tighter around him, "to say where we'd go to get better than the young players we've got coming through now."

At that time United were still three months away from winning the championship for the first time under the Scot's supervision. Eric Cantona, the catalyst of that triumph, had crossed the Pennines only a few weeks earlier. But out there on the pitch, struggling to keep pace in the mud with their bigger and more experienced opponents, were three players who represented the future of Manchester United: Neville and Beckham, both aged 17, and the 18-year-old Paul Scholes.

Today two of those three - Neville had a plate inserted to support his injured metatarsal on Thursday night - will be part of the United team making a final push for yet another title. And they will be joined in the squad by two other members of the same Old Trafford generation: Ryan Giggs, who is a year older than Scholes and was the first to graduate from the reserves, and Nicky Butt.

All five were members of the team that won the FA Youth Cup in 1992, already earmarked for stardom. The crescendo of transfer rumours - Beckham to Spain, Giggs to Italy - suggests that this may be their final season as an unbroken unit.

Bryan Robson saw them growing up together during his last years at Old Trafford. "I had a few injuries in those days," he said this week, "and I played a few games with the A team. I could see what was happening. Eric Harrison, who was their coach, had a lot to do with it. He gave them discipline, and he tried to educate them to pass the ball rather than booting it forward."

Harrison, United's youth coach through out the 80s and 90s, had worked with Brian Kidd, then the club's youth development officer, to assemble the group. "Individually and collectively they came along quickly," Harrison remembered, "and they played the best football I have seen a youth team play. I should have put them on crowd bonuses because you could hardly find a place to stand at the training ground, where we played our home games. I couldn't contain my excitement at watching them, and I was always telling the boss how good they were."

But there was more to it than talent and coaching. "They'd all have flourished as players no matter where they were," Robson continued, "but I think a certain percentage of their success is due to helping each other along and making each other better players. They've always been part of a success story, and they really demand off each other. They became mates and they've kept their feet on the ground. People say Manchester United is too big to be a family club, but it can be."

By the summer of 1995, when Ferguson courted the fans' displeasure by selling Mark Hughes, Paul Ince and Andrei Kanchelskis, the younger generation was ready to take over. But nothing lasts forever and earlier this season Ferguson remarked that some of his players might have "stayed too long". Yesterday he admitted that he was looking for a reaction. "There was an intention there," he said. "I have to find these things out."

Now, echoing his remark of a decade earlier, he said: "You're blessed when you get a group coming through like that. Apart from David Beckham, they're local boys. The mixture is right. Local boys, happy in the area, happy with the club, and there's no need for them to move. When I came here, I knew from eight years at Aberdeen about the rewards you can get when players stick together and grow up together. It's a powerful weapon, believe me. Amazingly powerful. And the one thing you have to admire about these players is that they don't quit. They never give in."

For Robson, that quality comes from the manager. "They've always tended to get stronger as the season goes on. That's their mentality. The players have to be like that in the first place, but they get it from him."

"We don't stop," Ferguson said. "Me and my staff don't have rests. If the staff sat back and didn't show their feelings about things, the players would be quite likely to take the easy ride themselves. We don't allow that. We've always demanded, and that's a credit to all my staff."

He added that he expected to add a couple of players to the squad during the summer, but would say nothing about the rumoured departures, except to display a sardonic amusement when reminded of Real Madrid's official denial of an interest in Beckham. Perhaps, with two games to go and everything to play for, he has yet to decide whether this is the summer in which to begin the break-up of the golden generation.

"It would be difficult," Robson concluded. "They're all dedicated players who really love football and they've always looked after themselves very well, so I could see all of them lasting until they're 35 or more. That's the type of lads they are. I know a lot of them would like to finish their careers at United. But given the circumstances surrounding football, you never know."

Guardian Unlimited ' Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

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