Any visitor to The Cliff, the club's training ground, is left in no doubt from the moment they arrive who really runs Manchester United.

`Strictly Private,' reads the notice on the door of the unprepossessing changing-room building. `Absolutely no admission without the manager's permission.' Step through the door and you are entering Alex Ferguson's domain, where for the past 12 years he has been plotting, scheming and controlling.

This is Ferguson at his most relaxed. Despite a schedule which would exhaust a man half his age, this is where he has fun. So much fun, he has no intention of stopping now. "It pisses me off when everyone says: `He'll be retiring if he wins this, he'll retire if he doesn't win that'," he says. "I don't think achievement decides when you go. Or age. The important thing is when your energy levels go down and mine are the same as they were five, six, eight years ago."

In his domain, Ferguson is a very different proposition from the edgy, taut figure seen in the dug-out on match day. Here he is expansive, hospitable, engaging. Because here he is in control.

"Control is everything in management," he says. "Unless you have control, you can't have a vision, targets, dreams. In football life, the only thing that gives you control is time and the only thing that buys you time is success."

As his pitch-side demeanour suggests, there are limits to how much control even Ferguson can exercise. Take last season when his United seemed poised for everything, the planning appeared on target. Yet, to the profound relief of half of Britain, they ended up with nothing.

Does he believe he has destiny more firmly in his grasp this time? "We were doing fine till we got the injuries last year," he says. "When you're going into the big games you need your best players. But this year, the squad is stronger, much stronger. So I'm much more optimistic."

His optimism stems, he says, not just from the way the new players (and the returning Roy Keane) have added new possibilities, but also by the manner in which they have solved old problems. Jaap Stam, he says, has shored up the defence.

"That spell earlier this year when we kept drawing, the reason was simple, the defending wasn't good enough. So we've done more on the training ground on defending this year than I can remember in my time here."

Then there is Dwight Yorke, the £12 million steal. "There was something about Yorke that always worried me when we played him, and there's not many I can say that about in English football to be honest with you," he says.

There is another thing about Yorke, too: he has made a weapon out of Andy Cole. Did Ferguson think that he would get two of the top three strikers in the league when he handed over that £12 million to Aston Villa? "No, absolutely not, it's a piece of luck, I admit I had no idea," he says.

Tonight there's the Premiership meeting with Arsenal. And it must be remembered that last year something as well as injuries helped wreck Ferguson's best-laid plans: Arsenal. Moreover, under another manager who likes to leave little to chance, the Highbury club seem to be moving into gear again.

"That was some run last year, so perfectly timed," Ferguson says of his rivals. "It'll be hard, impossible I'd say, for them to replicate it. But it's a massive game for us. I think what they'll try and do is play on the fact they've done us the last four times, that's motivation for them."

So what will motivate United? "At Manchester United we have to be better than everyone else. That's why we have worked so hard on discipline. Somebody wrote the other day that every great team needs bad behaviour at times - but I disagree.

"I had one terrible patch back in '94 lasting about three months when everyone was being sent off. I had to step in and do something about that. Now the discipline on the pitch at this club is bloody good. We play the right way."

Ferguson is always circumspect when choosing his words. So when he announces that the most significant thing about his current team is not its passing or movement or greed for goals, but its discipline, there is a purpose. And you don't have to be Arsene Wenger to spot who his observation is aimed at.