A rivalry reborn: Mourinho reignites Ferguson flame as Wenger awaits

You can pinpoint the precise moment the best rivalry of our lifetime died. It was 2008 and Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson, resplendent in matching suits and bowties, sat no more than 30 centimetres apart as they shared the stage at a League Managers’ Association function.

The body language exchanged between the two men was a study in awkwardness, and a heavily pregnant silence followed the question from a pre-scandal Richard Keys: “Can we say that you two have grown to not just understand each other, but also like each other?” As Wenger grinned sheepishly to the crowd, Ferguson told his opposite number: “You can have the first go.” “So there’s a respect?” Keys pushed. “Of course,” Ferguson cackled, “… until the next game.”

If it was a distinctly fragile entente, the mere fact that the two men were sharing a stage was remarkable. Previously, Wenger and Ferguson could barely stand to share the same touchline.

But the budding bromance on display was firmed up 12 months later when United knocked Arsenal out of Europe. Five years on from the acrimonious ‘Battle of the Buffet’, when Ferguson had been coated in pizza in the tunnel at Old Trafford, the two professional rivals put their enmity to bed. “That day [in 2004] created a division between us,” Ferguson wrote in his autobiography. “The wound was not fully healed until the Champions League semi-final in 2009, when Arsene invited us into his room after the game and congratulated us.”

The phony war continued for another four years until Ferguson’s retirement but the appearance of both men on stage at the LMA event signalled a de-escalation in aggression. Hindered by the financial demands of the move to the Emirates it was no longer Wenger’s Arsenal who were the threat to Ferguson’s Premier League empire but Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea, who had sprinted their way to the title and a record points haul in 2005 and doubled up the next year.

By August 2011, Arsenal were being dismantled 8-2 at Old Trafford and rather than revelling in his team’s extraordinary performance, Ferguson looked almost heartbroken as he tenderly picked through the wreckage, praising Wenger’s playing style and transfer strategy even after inflicting his opponent’s worst ever performance.

"He has been a big adversary and will continue to be when he gets his big players back," Ferguson almost implored. But he wouldn’t, and especially not when Ferguson swept into North London the very next year and signed Arsenal’s captain and best player, Robin van Persie.

For the best part of two decades, rather than trade players of Van Persie's quality the two men were more likely to trade verbal blows, all the way back to Wenger’s arrival in 1996 - "He's a novice and should keep his opinions to Japanese football”; “everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home”. They seemingly made it their ambition to extract every vestige of intensity from their players in a series of engrossing battles which defined the Premier League.

Tensions ran so high that the police even appealed for calm ahead of a match in January 2005. "Any activity in the build-up to the game which increases the intensity and hostility of the supporters should be stopped," said Barry Norman, Islington Met Police commander. These were matches to engage the soul. Tribal affairs which extracted the very purest football passions: pride for your own side and hatred for the other, both fortifying the same sense of identity.

The petering out of the rivalry which accompanied Arsenal’s post-2005 decline as a Premier League force went uninterrupted during the bizarre United interregnum period encompassing David Moyes and Louis van Gaal’s reigns and while meetings between the two sides had some memorable moments and no little amount of goals, they lacked meaning and, importantly, menace.

Mourinho’s appointment hasn’t yet lifted United out of their identity crisis, but it has restored the edge to a fixture which was descending back into the grey morass of normality – thanks to his own personal feud with Wenger, carefully nurtured over the past decade.

To Mourinho, Wenger is the “voyeur” and the “specialist in failure”. They are barbs with a personal dimension that Ferguson would never have countenanced. It seems impossible that Wenger and Mourinho will ever share a stage in the distant future - they could not even sit next to each other at a recent coaching conference - and the United manager was at it again on Friday, making his biannual observation that Wenger has been waiting a long, long time to win another league title.

His relationship with Wenger is laced with the same poison as Ferguson's was in the peak Arsenal-United years.

Saturday’s match marks a significant moment: Wenger’s greatest rivals are now managed by the man he surely detests the most. The Premier League’s most intense rivalry has received a long overdue reboot. Who knows how two sets of players without an education in the enmity in this fixture will react, but on the touchline at least, the menace is back.