On the only occasion in the past ten years that Sir Alex Ferguson allowed a journalist into his home, he talked of his love of reading. He showed off his extensive library. There, on tightly packed shelves, were Truman’s memoirs, books about the Alamo and Rorke’s Drift, biographies of Ali, Kennedy, Mandela, Sinatra and his favourite, When Pride Still Mattered, about Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers American football team in the 1960s.

Ferguson never met Lombardi, who died in 1970, but he sees a lot of himself in the pages of that biography. Many of Lombardi’s most famous quotes could easily be imagined coming from the lips of the Manchester United manager. As Rafael Benítez responded furiously yesterday to the first shots in the psychological warfare of the Barclays Premier League title race, another Lombardi-ism came to mind: “You never win a game unless you beat the guy in front of you. The score on the board doesn’t mean a thing. That’s for the fans. You’ve got to win the war with the man in front of you. You’ve got to get your man.”

For Ferguson, it has never been enough simply to have the best team, as United have had for ten of the past 16 seasons in the Premier League. It is about beating, crushing his managerial adversaries while his team do likewise on the pitch.

In the early years, that meant Kenny Dalglish at Blackburn Rovers and Kevin Keegan at Newcastle United. Subsequently he has faced the greater sophistication — or at least the perceived sophistication — of foreign managers, such as Arsène Wenger at Arsenal and José Mourinho at Chelsea and, despite the odd hiccup, which invariably led him to be written off, has always come off best in the long run. Wenger, you suspect, will come again, but for now it seems that the most immediate threats to Ferguson and United are posed by Benítez’s Liverpool and Luiz Felipe Scolari’s Chelsea.

For Benítez and Scolari, this is the first taste of a Premier League title race and of the associated psychological battle that is almost always fought on Ferguson’s terms. Benítez, in his fifth season at Anfield, must have known this week that his team were finally getting under Ferguson’s skin when he heard the United manager question — in the club’s official magazine, no less — whether Liverpool, without a league title since 1990, would have the mental strength to last the course.

“There’s no doubt in the second half of the season they will get nervous,” Ferguson said. “They’re going into the unknown and, if you make mistakes, you get punished.”

This should have been music to Benítez’s ears. Instead it triggered an unexpected reaction yesterday lunchtime as the Liverpool manager produced an A4 sheet from which he read a series of longstanding gripes about Ferguson and, in particular, his attitude to referees and complaints about the fixture list. It was delivered calmly and methodically — no Keeganesque “I’d love it, love it” rants here — but the overall impression it left was mixed.

This is a man who prefers not to pay heed to or talk about other clubs, let alone to embark on premeditated tirades against them. Rarely does he deviate from his usual mantra on such matters (“you know my idea, I prefer not to talk about these things”), but, when he does, he arms himself with the necessary statistics, assures himself that he is on safe ground and then lets fire. Mourinho has been on the receiving end before, at the height of the Liverpool-Chelsea rivalry a couple of seasons ago, as were Real Madrid when Benítez, then in charge of Valencia, again hinted at a rival club receiving preferential treatment from referees and from the authorities.

Shortly after his rant in front of the television cameras yesterday, newspaper journalists asked whether his reaction may have played into Ferguson’s hands. “Everyone can see that I’m talking about facts,” he replied. “I’m just saying things that everybody can see.”

So why bother responding? “Why not?” Benítez said. “He has been talking about Liverpool ever since we beat Chelsea.”

So you don’t think Ferguson will be rubbing his hands with glee upon seeing this footage? “I don’t think so,” he said.

Perhaps Benítez will be proved right. Perhaps, by suggesting that United and their manager enjoy preferential treatment from referees and from the game’s authorities, he is acting as the perfect counterweight to Ferguson’s persistent and very deliberate claims to the contrary. It is just that, coming from Benítez (rather than, say, Mourinho at his most Machiavellian in his Chelsea days), it sounded strange. Not completely out of character, but still strange.

It was not the response envisaged this week by Dalglish, the former Liverpool player and manager, in a column on the club’s website. Talking of “certain people in the game speculating that we won’t last the distance”, Dalglish urged Benítez and his players to “forget about these mind games and concentrate solely on what’s going on around their own club. The more others speak about Liverpool, the more worried they are.”

And it is true, but Liverpool have got this far by making quiet progress and leaving the mud-slinging to United, Chelsea and even Arsenal. Surely the ideal response to Ferguson’s comments about nerves would have been to go to Stoke City this evening and to win convincingly in front of the television cameras, establishing a ten-point lead over United, albeit having played three games more, before the champions take on Chelsea at Old Trafford tomorrow afternoon.

If Liverpool beat Stoke, Benítez will be happier than ever. If they slip up, it will be portrayed — accurately or otherwise — as the moment that their manager lost the plot.

Ferguson, though, knows that he is in a title race now. It is not long since he made light of Liverpool’s title credentials by pointedly wishing that they would win away to Chelsea in September, which they did. Even in advance of that result, Ferguson had talked of the psychological effect that a first Premier League defeat in 4½ years at Stamford Bridge would have on Chelsea. He was right. Chelsea lost that game and have dropped points at home with alarming frequency.

Ferguson thinks that he has Chelsea’s number, something that he hinted at during his press conference yesterday, but suddenly Liverpool are looming large over this title race. Ferguson, like Lombardi, can see only success — starting with victory in the war against the man in front of him. In Benítez, he has a new adversary, one not averse to the odd psychological barb himself.

Whatever happens at Old Trafford tomorrow, it is game on in the title race.