Imagine being a fly on the wall when Sir Alex Ferguson meets Malcolm Glazer for the first time.

First question? How on earth did Manchester United lose the 2005 FA Cup final?

Tough one that.

United played all the football in the most one-sided final since, well, since United beat lowly Millwall last year. In Roy Keane they had a supreme organiser and a leader of whom Glazer would have been impressed.

In Rio Ferdinand they had a defender who might struggle to justify his £120,000-a-week pay demand but who was solid and stylish in United's defence.

In Cristiano Ronaldo they possessed a man whose tricks tormented Arsenal's defence all afternoon.

In Wayne Rooney they had potentially the most wonderful player ever seen on an English stage and in Roy Carroll a goalkeeper so unemployed that he really could have read the Times from cover to cover.

And yet still they might have played into the middle of next week and somehow not scored.

It is the story of Ferguson's season and as the Manchester United manager sat in the concrete bowels of the Millennium stadium, subdued by the incredulity of what had gone before, it was easy to sympathise with him.

Now that is a sentence I never thought I'd write.

But sometimes sport is so desperately unjust, so harshly lacking in logic that sympathy is the only decent thing left to offer.

And that was the story of the first cup final to go to a penalty shoot-out. A cup final in which the manager with the most ambition went unrewarded, in which Arsenal boss Arsene Wenger's strategy of utilising Dennis Bergkamp as a lone striker was flawed and in which the worst side by some distance prevailed.

To Ferguson's credit he did not hide behind excuses. He did not rant. Instead, apart from an observation that Arsenal captain Patrick Vieira was lucky to be left on the field to dispatch the winning penalty, he admitted: "We have only ourselves to blame."

Of course, that was true and if we are looking for someone to carry the heaviest can then the shoulders of Ruud van Nistelrooy are a good place to start, the Dutch striker squandering a series of chances.

In sport as in business, as Glazer has demonstrated this past week, invariably advantage has to be pressed home.

Not that United did not emerge with credit. It was largely thanks to them that, while we did not get a cup final to thrill the soul, we did witness a match to restore faith in English football's most famous clubs.

There was none of the snarling animosity of their most recent meetings. Wenger even admitted United were the better team.

And United's demonstrators were impeccably behaved. Yes, the majority wore their symbolic black and 100 or so marched to the ground chanting their distrust of Glazer, but it was peaceable and orderly and you suspect a season without a trophy has caused many to wonder whether change might be for the better after all.

Why, on the long road back from Cardiff there were more than a sprinkling of phone-in callers, cogent and coherent for a change, proclaiming their belief that Ferguson had taken the club as far as he was able.

That remains my view, although only a brave soul would mention it in the hearing of the knight himself.

As it is Ferguson admitted he was in the dark about future plans until he met Glazer, which might be some time off considering Ferguson is on holiday from June 1.

Retirement, however, is clearly not on the Ferguson agenda.

"We're heading towards a new team in the sense of the younger players," said Ferguson. "We've no problems age-wise apart from Roy Keane. The ones at 30 or 31, like Ryan Giggs, are very fit lads and can play for another two or three years easily.

"We have players like O'Shea, Fletcher, Rooney, Ronaldo, they'll be here for a long time. The defenders are all good ages. Browny is 25, Rio is 26, Silvestre is 28 in July, Fortune is 26, Heinze is 26, Gary Neville is 30 but that's fine for a defender. In the main, they've defended very well this season so that's the foundation. And the young players will improve."

It was persuasive. It sounded like a man planning a new dynasty. Only time will tell whether that is reality or delusion.