MANCHESTER UNITED WON THE Premiership yesterday and did so from an absolutely hopeless position of eight points adrift. It would be nice to think that this was all down to the legendary “mind games” of Sir Alex Ferguson — an extension of the myth that teams are a physical embodiment of the personality of the manager. But alas, the emperor has no clothes.

The one possible example of psychological warfare came when Arsenal were winning everything and Ferguson accused them of “triumphalism”. This was an odd choice of word, but perhaps it was a telling one. If triumphalism can be defined as thinking you are better than you really are, then this was not so much a mind game as hitting the nail squarely on the head.

All good teams have periods when it all seems just so easy. It is as if the team you play against are not so much opposition as willing accomplices in their own humiliation, a foil for your irresistible genius. And all teams go through periods when this period ends. The most dangerous period of all occurs when the magic period has ended and you haven’t actually noticed. After that, there is only one way to retrieve your position. You must go slumming into the sordid and disgusting parts of yourself.

Ferguson’s achievement this season has been to take his team into those hateful parts of themselves and to bring them out as champions. Like the men who climbed Everest by the least accessible route, they have done it the hard way. And in the end, this is much more satisfying — much more meaningful — than doing it by sheer brilliance.

Perhaps it helped that Juan Sebastián Verón was injured. Verón has been a problem for Ferguson since he was purchased at vast expense. As much if not more than mere winning, Ferguson likes to stuff it up opponents and critics. He loves to feel victimised, got at, unfairly treated. It is the shortest route he knows to those secret depths of yourself, the cornered rat department.

Ferguson has been mule-stubborn in his defence and his continued selection of the flawed Verón and that was a key problem in his failed campaign of the previous season. But at the telling part of this season, Verón has been out and Ferguson has had to fall back on his tried and trusted.

And, of course, Ruud van Nistelrooy. Van Nistelrooy is unquestionably Ferguson’s greatest big-money buy. His courage to go back to the Holland striker after his cruciate injury was a piece of high-stakes gambling and it was Ferguson at his high-rolling best.

The stuffing it up will be a deep satisfaction to Ferguson and I write as one up whom it has been comprehensively stuffed. I recall Sebastian Coe’s celebration of his second Olympic gold medal: not a smiling lap of honour, but a mad-dog snarl of fury at the press. “Who says I’m ****ing finished?” he alliterated. We in the press never get enough credit for our powers of motivation.

And so Ferguson, who retired and then unretired, and heard it was all a great mistake, and then compounded it by winning nothing in his first season as an unretired person, has earned the right to rant and patronise and preen as much as he likes, at least for a week or so.

All right, it was a title that Arsenal lost. But they lost it mostly because they cracked under pressure. And who put the pressure on? Manchester United, that’s who. Not Ferguson with his mind games, but United with their increasingly vexatious habit of winning matches by wide margins.

Manchester United are still short of Ferguson’s most vaulting ambition — that is to say, to be among the natural elite of Europe, serial winners of the European Cup in the manner of Real Madrid or Ajax or (best not mention this name in his presence) Liverpool. But domestically they are almost untouchable.

This was not a season when they ran away with it, like Michael Schumacher and the Ferraris. It was a season in which Arsenal proved themselves not quite good enough: and who else should knock them out of their pretensions? Ferguson kept his players from triumphalism, just as he kept them from a spiralling depression after their defeat in the European Cup. This was a victory of the hyena rather than the lion: a victory not so much of the top predator but of the most brutal scavenger. It was victory by klepto-parasitism: but the point is victory.

Last season, in another outbreak of so-called mind games, Ferguson said that Arsenal may have won the title, but that Manchester United played the prettier football. This season, there is no need for this or any other kind of psychology. Manchester United won. They won not by being the prettiest, but by being the best.