LockerRoom/Tom Humphries AT the beginning of The Long Season, Jim Brosnan's classic account of a year (1959) in baseball, there is the achingly innocent story of his pre-season wage negotiation.

Brosnan is a decent player and 1958 has been a decent season. He expects he'll be rewarded by a salary in the region of $20,000. In the meantime, to make ends meet during the close season, he takes a job at an advertising firm in Chicago. One day, as he puts it, he calls home to make sure his wife has enough olives for the martini hour and she tells him his contract for the following season has arrived in the post - $16,000. Like it or lump it.

Brosnan is incandescent. He writes back to the club expressing his disappointment and vows to himself that he won't be going down to play for St Louis Cardinals till a letter comes offering $20,000. Meanwhile, the snow piles high in Chicago and no word comes back.

Spring training will be starting soon. Brosnan is beginning to panic. The St Louis Cardinals are indifferent.

Finally, Brosnan says give me $500 more and I'll settle. Sure, say the Cardinals, well why argue over $500. And soon, desperate to play, desperate to earn money at baseball while he still can, Brosnan is on his way south to Florida and pre-season in the sun.

I was reading The Long Season while the world was digesting the detail of the horrific injury to David Beckham's tender brow and it occurred to me that managers like Alex Ferguson will soon be as extinct and quaint as the martini hour. Throwing the teapot, kicking the table, ruling by fear - there's only so far you can go with those motivational tools. Players at the top level aren't desperate anymore.

On the hierarchy of human needs most players are basically satisfied. Very few are old enough or wise enough to motivate themselves to be the best they can possibly be so that they will have no regrets later.

Today's players are more immune to their white heat of managerial rage than ever before and there has been something poignant in the last year or two in watching Fergie, beetroot faced and livid, most of the while attempting to counter the more cerebral technique of his nemesis, Arsene Wenger.

Players aren't desperate to play anymore. Players know they have the whip-hand. You need more subtle ways of cajoling and motivating them. You can't help thinking that not only is Wenger's menagerie of stars playing better football but they are happier.

This past 10 days or so have marked, I suspect, a turning point in English football. Ferguson remained unrepentant as Beckham displayed his war wound with a surprising relish and, in fairness, he turned in a fine display against Juventus in midweek before lapsing into anonymity against Bolton on Saturday.

The impact of the flying-boot incident will be something more than two stitches however. Ferguson lost something as soon as the boot made contact with Beckham's brow. However unintentionally he'd done his worst, blown his stack, drawn blood and exposed himself as a man out of control. There must have been a ripple of thought which went through the Manchester United dressing-room. We're all grown men here. We don't have to sit and take this.

And that thought is fatal. Every player in that dressing-room went off and told their immediate family the anecdote of Fergie and Becks and there were jokes made and opinions chipped in and heads shaken. Sport at the top level is about the illusion that you do have to take it. You can't get the extra 10, 20 per cent from yourself when an amused corner of your brain is looking at Alex Ferguson and thinking that you'd never found him comical before, but yes, he is funny when he gets going, who'll he have a go at next then, etc, etc.

COACHING is like teaching. The audience senses things and when you've lost whatever it is that keeps them afraid or fascinated then they have your number and there's no getting things back to the way things were.

And for Manchester United in the past couple of weeks there has been another worry. Not only does the irascible Fergie seem intent on staying on till 2005 but Roy Keane seems muted and bemused.

The explanation for Keane's rather anemic performances has been the hip problem which has not only forced him out of international football but has also slowed him down and placed a marker in the visible distance signifying the end of his career and the prospect of life after football.

Love Roy Keane or loathe Roy Keane, bless him or blame him, it has to be conceded that after the year he has had life after football probably has more appeal to him than it ever had. For a guy who aches for his family when he is away from them the thought of a quiet life far from the madding crowd may just have lodged itself in his head by now. He's sampled the acclaim business and found it lasts about as long as the morning dew. One day you're a national hero, next day you are a goat.

Just a week previously, in the matter of his international retirement, Keane had seen Ferguson and Manchester United move with alacrity to cover their own backsides. What was going through Roy Keane's head when he watched the scud hit David Beckham?

Not one suspects the kind of thoughts that Jim Brosnan had all those years ago. Not quiet desperation. Not the sharp-edged hunger he's always felt. There's a big world outside where people have different perspectives. Maybe Keane felt he was ready for it. Maybe he felt Alex Ferguson was ready for it. Either way last Wednesday night against Juventus, of all people, in the Champions League, of all competitions, in a season which has its finale this May at Old Trafford, of all places, Roy Keane looked serenely removed from the hell and the fury.

There was a time when if Alex Ferguson told Keane and Beckham that tomorrow was Christmas they'd have their stockings up and be in bed early.

Arsenal, meanwhile, just move on. Wenger is the old man river of the Premiership - he don't say nothin', but he must know somethin'. He keeps his array of stars happy and if he can't keep them happy he moves them right along before they make other people unhappy.

Fear, it seems, is redundant as a management technique. None of the old square-bashing sergeants are thriving anymore. Howard Wilkinson won the last first division title with Leeds. His Sunderland side with two league wins out of 19 played are proof that that time has gone. Souness struggles. Genial, thoughtful old Bobby Robson thrives.

Alex Ferguson was the last of the hair-dryers. He brought the technique as far as he could. He didn't change though, the game did. Manchester United won't become a bad team overnight but the suspicion is that right now they are like the cartoon Coyote who runs over the edge of the cliff and keeps running on thin air until he looks down and realises his predicament. Wenger speeds on like a road-runner. Meep! Meep!