Alex Ferguson made his ritual assault on the referee, and there was a restive sense on the terraces that something less than full value was being provided by United's first home defeat in a Champions League group game since 2001, but the overlord of Old Trafford was relatively benign.

And why wouldn't he be? True, Arsenal and Chelsea won their groups on the bridle, with the latter looking particularly menacing along with the emergence of Didier Drogba and Nicolas Anelka as an authentic one-two knockout combination of the highest class. But then United still look certain to finish top of their qualifying corner and can claim that defeat by Besiktas provided a real slice of authentic experience at the highest level of club football for a clutch of young contenders.

Certainly such prospects as Danny Welbeck, Federico Macheda, Gabriel Obertan, Rafael da Silva and Ireland's Darron Gibson know a little better now that the great Continental highway has a lot more unsuspected road blocks than they may have imagined.

ability

For United supporters, the encouraging suspicion must be that Ferguson retains an unparalleled ability to translate mere talent into long-term winning performance. Arsene Wenger may the master of mining diamonds, but surely the Scot has an edge in the matter of putting them into industrial use when the biggest prizes are at stake.

Certainly one comparison was cruel and avoidable. It was between United's record of nourishing strength and the potential to replenish it with the parlous position of the team they are still trying to surpass as the most successful in the history of English football.

While Liverpool slipped out of the Champions League after eking out a 1-0 victory over arguably the weakest team in the competition, Hungary's Debrecen, they seemed besieged by vulnerability.

Manager Rafa Benitez and chief executive Christian Purslow talked airily of the value of resuming business in the second-rate Europa Cup. The rest of big-time football could only be astonished by such detachment from reality -- and equally shocked by the paucity of resources displayed in a performance that made Purslow's cry for recognition of 'heroes' sound as if it was coming from another planet.

Meanwhile, United's embarrassment at Old Trafford, for all its imperfections, still added up to another rebuke for the tottering regime at Anfield.

It was, after all, studded with young players accumulating new experience and in the process providing at least some evidence that Ferguson has not lost his knack of picking out players who have more than mere ability; something that might be described as competitive substance.

He made that assessment when he launched his 'fledglings' in the early 1990s and one of the survivors of that experiment which inspired the leading UK television pundit Alan Hansen to scornfully declare, notoriously, "you'll never win anything with kids" was reminding us of the remarkable durability of Ferguson's investment in youth.

Gary Neville returned to work and his presence was a reminder of an astonishing set of statistics -- had he been joined by the still crucially active Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes -- United would have had three players who between them had amassed more than 2,000 appearances.

Neville may not be football's most popular veteran beyond the boundaries of Old Trafford but with near 600 appearances for the club, and 85 for his country, he is still a striking testament to Ferguson's ability to pick out the purest battling instincts.

Bobby Charlton endorsed that assessment of Neville when he came to pick the best United 11 of the post-war years. Neville, surprisingly, came in ahead of the superbly elegant Johnny Carey and the powerful, raw-boned Bill Foulkes, of whom Charlton said, "If he brushed against you in training you would show the bruise for days."

Charlton, on announcing Neville as his choice for the position, commented: "I never saw the great Carey play for the '48 team and Bill Foulkes' greatest strength was as a central defender so the right-back has to be Gary Neville.

"He has been a marvellously consistent and highly-competitive player, confident and tough -- the strongest of the pack led by Scholes and (David) Beckham.

"He's quick and wins his tackles and when there is a need you can trust him in one of the central defensive positions. Shay Brennan, a European Cup winner, is another rival to Neville but he didn't have his versatility."

Neville is less quick now -- his abrasiveness, however, can still shoot out of the starting blocks -- but he remains an authentic example of those qualities which have helped Ferguson compile an unprecedented collection of trophies.

After the hiccup against the Turkish champions, Neville remained entirely sanguine.

Satisfaction

"We had our chances to win, and it was unfortunate that we didn't, but overall there was quite a lot of satisfaction to be had," he said.

"A lot of young lads were out there acquiring vital experience and they will know a lot better what is out in front of them now. They all showed enough to say they can make big contributions over the next few years."

Guessing quite how much Liverpool's senior statesman, Jamie Carragher, would have relished making such a statement this week unfortunately enters the category of savage speculation.

Carragher stood watching a television screen with his captain Steven Gerrard in the tunnel of the Ferenc Puskas Stadium in Budapest as Fiorentina held out for the victory that ensured Liverpool's exclusion from the only European tournament that matters.

He shook his head as he contemplated a future that at the moment resembles nothing quite so much as a skull's head.

Twenty-four hours later the Old Trafford zealot Neville spoke of more inviting horizons. They may not be without serious challenge, most pressingly from Chelsea with their five-point Premier League advantage and an expression of contentment on the face of their coach Carlo Ancelotti that must be beginning to haunt all of his rivals.

However, when Ferguson looks at players like Welbeck and Fabio da Silva and the 21-year-old Serbian thoroughbred Zoran Tosic he insists that he is building on the same fertile ground that launched the second of his championship teams -- the fledgling one that nearly two decades later refuses to die.

If he is right, if his form holds good, a brief blush in Europe is surely a small price indeed.

- James Lawton

Irish Independent