Veron the conjuror can do the trick for swansong man

Talk of Fergie's conquest of Europe is all-consuming. Guy Hodgson reports on the season of the obsession

To discern Sir Alex Ferguson's real feelings about the Champions' League it would be advisable to ignore the current and increasingly tetchy mutterings from the Red Knight and go back five months. Then there was no preoccupation with his final season as manager of Manchester United, just the raw hurt of losing in Europe to Bayern Munich.

"The disappointment we suffered was of a totally different order," he wrote in the aftermath of the quarter-final exit last April. "It was the kind of setback which cuts right through you and leaves you stunned. One of the big problems is that you feel you have let so many people down. You wonder how those whose lives are influenced so much by the achieve-ments of their team are going to fare when they go back into work. I remember those days when I was just a fan myself."

That was the authentic Ferguson writing to his constituency via the United programme, harking back to the days when he was the 16-year-old striker taking two buses to train at Hampden Park with his first club, Queen's Park. He was not the manager trying to relieve pressures on players only too aware the Champions' League final next May is on that same ground in Glasgow, his birthplace.

"I don't want this season to be about me," he repeated last week but he might as well save his breath because until United go out of Europe the focus will narrow on Ferguson and a second Champions' League success that would push him beyond Sir Matt Busby in the list of Old Trafford achievements and into the same stratosphere as Clough and Paisley, who won Europe's highest trophy more than once. Piraeus on Wednesday, and a match against the Greek champions Olympiakos, will be the first step in the long goodbye.

The evidence, too, points towards continental conquest being a preoccupation at Old Trafford. United romped away with the Premiership last season, their third successive domestic success, but the transfer emphasis in the summer switched from sniffing around looking for bargains to exotic purchases with far more than squad depth in mind. Juan Sebastian Veron, Ruud van Nistelrooy and, to a lesser extent, Laurent Blanc have been bought to win in Madrid and Munich not Bolton and Blackburn.

"Veron and Van Nistelrooy know they were bought to add quality, particularly in Europe," Ferguson agrees, but tactics, too, have been adapted and, indeed, it probably did cost United two points at Ewood Park when they sat back polishing a formation designed to be durable on foreign fields when the more adventurous approach of previous years would possibly have put the match beyond Blackburn's reach before half-time.

The proof of the purchases and the formation will probably not be revealed by Olympiakos, who may have been within five minutes of reaching the Champions' League semi-finals – and a meeting with United – in 1999, but who have failed to negotiate the first phase in the last two years. There will be clues as to whether Ferguson's team have solved their problems, however, just as the opening exchanges 12 months ago exposed weaknesses that ultimately proved fatal against Bayern.

"Traditionally we have started slowly. We can't afford to do that this time," Ferguson said, aware that only an extraordinary miss by Dynamo Kiev's Demetradze at Old Trafford allowed progress to the second phase last autumn, a lucky escape that did not conceal a lack of imagination, innovation and defensive frailty. United had won the Champions' League down the flanks in 1999 and two years later the players and the threat remained the same, so it did not need the tactical acumen of Sven Goran Eriksson to put two markers on Ryan Giggs and force David Beckham inside.

Blanc may provide stability and Van Nistelrooy's strike rate will exercise minds in Champions' League Group G and beyond, but it is Veron who is expected to provide moments that no coach, no matter how well briefed, can counter. United's success, you suspect, will depend on whether the Argentine midfield player can turn conjuror and, in turn, find space for his wingers.

"We want to swing on that star," Ferguson wrote in the depths of his post-Bayern disappointment, "and we are in touching distance without being quite on it yet." On Wednesday, five months on, we will begin to see if he has got any nearer.