After Manchester United had lost a Champions League quarter-final to Bayern Munich last season Roy Keane declared that their football had become too predictable and something more was needed. That something duly arrived in the shape of Ruud van Nistelrooy and Juan Sebastian Veron, who between them cost United £47m.

This season Keane's wish has been fulfilled although it was probably not quite what the United captain had in mind. Either way few could have predicted that, by the end of April, United's only interest in the fag-end of the football programme would lie in delaying by one match Arsenal's usurpation of their Premiership title while hoping to secure second place and automatic qualification for the next Champions League.

In theory, and highly fanciful theory at that, Sir Alex Ferguson's team can still win a record fourth successive championship. Reality, however, suggests that even if Arsène Wenger's Arsenal fail to regain the title by avoiding defeat at Old Trafford on Wednesday they will make sure when Everton visit Highbury on Saturday week.

Effectively, then, Manchester United's last tangible ambition of the present season ended in Germany on Tuesday night when they were knocked out of the Champions League by Bayer Leverkusen, who won their semi-final on away goals after drawing 2-2 at Old Trafford and 1-1 at the BayArena.

So United are about to suffer their first season without a trophy of any sort since 1989, and their first without a major title since 1998, the year Arsenal completed a league and FA Cup double which they are hoping to repeat over the next five days. United's reaction then was to go one better and achieve a unique treble of league, FA Cup and European Cup the following year, but for this to happen again Ferguson will surely have to have a further rethink about how he wants his side to play and whom he wants to play in it.

Keane was right. United had become too set in their ways and if they were to win the Champions League a second time under Ferguson their football needed an extra element of subtlety and surprise. Yet the basics of sound defending, reliable goalkeeping, consistently accurate passing and the right degree of flexibility between defence and attack still had to be maintained.

Perhaps Ferguson was right to sell Jaap Stam, seeing that the Dutch centre-back had hardly been in Italy five minutes before he failed a drug test. But buying the ageing Laurent Blanc as a stopgap replacement proved to be the equivalent of plugging a leak with a sponge. Sooner rather than later things were bound to seep through.

Add to this a series of eccentric errors by Fabien Barthez, who is strong on comedy but hardly a master of timing when it comes to farce, and injuries to Wes Brown, Ronny Johnsen, Keane and, latterly, Gary Neville and David Beckham, and United's ability to prevent goals was bound to be affected.

Scoring them has not been a problem. Van Nistelrooy proved sufficiently prolific to drag United back from mid-table mediocrity just before Christmas to the top of the Premiership by mid-January. He is not yet another Marco van Basten but the gap is narrowing.

How to give Van Nistelrooy the most effective support, however, has turned out to be one of Ferguson's most intractable riddles. Time and again the United manager has used the Dutchman as a single striker with Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs or Ole Gunnar Solskjaer playing off him. Other leading European teams operate this system, so why not United?

The fact that Van Nistelrooy has scored 35 goals suggests the attack must be doing something right, and United's 2-0 victory over Deportivo in La Coruna in the Champions League quarter-finals was rightly hailed as one of their best performances of the past three or four years.

Yet so much still depends on the form and effectiveness of Giggs and it is no coincidence that in both legs of the semi-final against Leverkusen the Welshman was unusually ill at ease on the ball and, apart from a few minutes during the first half in the BayArena, off the plot generally.

Then there is Veron - or not, as the case may be. On Wednesday night the Argentinian was pushed forward to support Van Nistelrooy. Anyway that seemed to be the theory. In practice, apart from the odd pass or shot, Veron played like a gentleman's gentleman, forever hovering but unlikely to offend etiquette by putting himself about.

After the match had ended the PA system belted out a rendering of the Anfield anthem You'll Never Walk Alone. To which Van Nistelrooy might have retorted : "You do if Juan Sebastian is your partner."

Last autumn Veron looked like the best footballer on Planet Earth. But his form went back with the clocks and has yet to catch up with British Summer Time.

Before the start of next season, then, Ferguson surely has to consider the possible consequences of trying to pick up a thread of success which had been unbroken for four years while retaining the collective services of Barthez, Blanc and Veron. And the longer the season has gone on, the more United have regretted not being able to persuade Teddy Sheringham to stay.

They have, after all, just gone out of the Champions League to a factory team, the German professional equivalent of Billingham Synthonia.

1990 FA Cup

1991 Charity Shield joint winners, Cup Winners Cup

1992 European Super Cup, League Cup

1993 Premiership

1994 Charity Shield, Premiership, FA Cup

1995 Charity Shield

1996 Premiership, FA Cup

1997 Charity Shield, Premiership

1998 Charity Shield

1999 Premiership, FA Cup, European Cup

2000 Premiership, Inter-Continental Cup

2001 Premiership

2002 None?

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