Keith Duggan/Sideline Cut: It is a bad week when you find yourself rooting for Alex Ferguson. Over the years the Manchester United icon has presented himself as a singularly graceless man. Despite all the successes he has presided over at United, Ferguson never really took the time to learn to win with dignity.

Those absurd pitch-side celebrations in the early years and the unconfined jumping in the stands always, I thought, betrayed him. When you are manager of the most successful club in English football and when you possess, for well over a decade, its most potent players, you should behave like you expect them to score and win.

Ferguson sniped and bullied and baited - most famously Kevin Keegan - in his various battles against contenders and pretenders who have provided the obstacles over 15 years of stunning growth.

The evolution of Manchester United under Ferguson has been a phenomenon. He inherited a fabled name of a once grand club at a time when it was rattling aimlessly around in a hollow can of ambition and turned it into a shimmering global brand name. If he ever had one crucial piece of good luck it was that his initial taste of success coincided with the first coming of Sky television.

The transformation occurred relatively quickly and it was clear by the mid-1990s that while United would not win everything all the time, they had in essence moved on to a different stratosphere. Only the biggest London clubs have been able to attempt to follow suit; the speed at which United changed the goalposts of the English game has left its traditional rivals floundering. Liverpool, Newcastle and Leeds - if they even survive - are all playing at chasing shadows.

For that reason, and others, I have always found the metamorphosis of Manchester United and the culture that it wrought to be somewhat soulless and depressing. It was like cheering for the schoolyard bully who invaded a soccer game in the junior class. Sport needs a level of intrigue and United made winning monotonous.

I could never understand the appeal to its legion of fans.

But at least it was easy to recognise that Ferguson fielded teams moulded by his personality. Even now that he has become a grand old man with letters after his name and greying temples and a gin-blossomed nose, there is the unmistakable cut of the hard-chaw about Ferguson. He is as tough as nails, mentally and physically, and those qualities have shone through the several incarnations of United teams he has fielded over his 18 years in charge.

And although it has become increasingly difficult to relate to the English league or to understand what most of its key figures' personalities believe in, you could always understand Ferguson. He is a man reared in mean and unsentimental times. You can hear it in the resonant Scottish tones and see it in the slightly pinched expression he has retained, eyes glittering with hunger. He has filleted players who have let him down or crossed a line that varies as he sees fit and he demonstrated an uncommon loyalty and empathy with Roy Keane when the Irishman was at his most vulnerable. Insiders testify he is capable of great charm and can be tremendous company.

But he is a product of a penurious early life in Clyde, the Puritan environment of post-war Scottish football and the grim economic lessons those times inflicted on him means he has always seemed slightly at odds in the happy valley of silly money he has helped create.

That is why those photographs of Ferguson in morning suit and top hat at Royal Ascot look so wrong. It is like dressing up an urchin as an Eton boy. He does not belong in that company; he has too much substance. Horses are his indulgence, one of his true escapes from a love of soccer that borders on the neurotic. Horses can give the same thrill, the same sense of power and control and promise of cash but ultimately they are just a hobby.

Equally, you get the impression that owning quarter of Manchester United is a hobby for John Magnier and JP McManus. When it was revealed the celebrated Irish men were behind the Cubic Expression group that was fast acquiring shares at United, the news was broadcast as if it were something we Irish should be proud of.

There has always been a shroud of mystique placed over both men that I have always found baffling. They are self-made men who have become uncommonly rich - and good luck to them. But so what if they happen to be Irish? The pair seem to walk this ambiguous plank of guarded privacy and extravagant public profile and that seems to turn some people on.

Not me. Here is the thing. As 25 per cent shareholders in Manchester United, Mr Magnier and Mr McManus have every right to insist all club transactions are transparent and above board. It could be said their fussiness in this regard is commendable.

But for a long time it has been glaringly obvious the Premiership is a murky world in a constant state of flux. It got too slick and too rich much too fast.

Whether Alex Ferguson got his hands muddy at some time or another remains to be seen. But English football is operating in an amoral climate. If you want a pristine investment, go buy a Van Gogh.

The rights and wrongs of the Rock of Gibraltar row is a matter for John Magnier and Alex Ferguson and, if it comes to it, the courts. That Manchester United seems have become the rope in the tug o' war is the shame of the thing.

United is not just a boardroom or a company. It is a tradition. It is an inheritance. It is the faintly recognisable but nonetheless real emblem of the lives of men like Duncan Edwards and Bobby Charlton and Matt Busby. At its truest level - on the field - Manchester United is something quite sacred, even for those of us left cold by its contemporary representation. And to see it teeter on the whim of legal and financial mind games makes a mockery of the previous generation of men for whom Manchester United meant a credo, a value system.

Ferguson values the basic tenet of those beliefs even if he has come to see himself as untouchable in latter years.

These past two weeks must quickly be disabusing him of that fancy.

Mr Magnier and Mr McManus have their reasons for desiring an urgent review of United's internal affairs and that is their prerogative. Commentators are predicting the fall-out could be cataclysmic for both Ferguson and the club. That remains to be seen.

All that can be said with certainty is that the current unrest certainly won't help Roy Keane win a Champions League medal before he retires, which is about the only thing most Irish people care about when it comes to Manchester United.

If Ferguson is forced out and if his team falter as a result of these weeks, then Manchester United has nothing to do with sport any more. To me, it seems deeply wrong that money and influence could do that.

Even as the demands for an internal audit of United's transfer and monetary dealings were hitting the headlines during the week, the trumpets sounded to herald the plans for our own humble little stadium.

How depressing it was that evening to hear Minister John O'Donoghue, speaking on The Last Word, effectively voice an invitation to JP McManus to renew his offer of a £50 million donation to the national stadium.

Are we really that stuck for 50 big ones?

As a nobody taxpayer and citizen, I think I'd rather not be beholden.