SOCCER/English Premiership: There could have been no better occasion for Alex Ferguson to get a very significant monkey off his back.

On the day of his 19th anniversary as manager of Manchester United, after a week in which many voices questioned his right to celebrate a 20th, he confronted Jose Mourinho and came out a winner for the first time in seven meetings.

While it would be an exaggeration to say that United were reborn in yesterday's victory, few witnesses would doubt they created a platform from which to mount a resurgence.

Ferguson himself had a short answer to a question about the rumours of his enforced departure before the end of the season. "It's a load of bollocks," he told Sky TV as he reflected on a match in which United's competitive spirit appeared to erase doubts about his continuing ability to motivate his players.

When Mourinho said last week he considered United to be Chelsea's closest rivals, it seemed likely he was both killing Ferguson with flattery and dealing Arsene Wenger yet another insult into the bargain. The Chelsea manager appears to believe the best way to deal with Ferguson is to pal up with him, call him "boss" and share a bottle of red wine. In that way, perhaps, he hopes to avoid the sort of fangs-bared commitment with which United traditionally respond to Ferguson's highly personal dislike of Wenger.

Yesterday's performance, lacking the ferocity conferred by the presence of Roy Keane, was not quite of the 18-certificate variety with which United knocked Wenger's team out of the FA Cup in April last year and then, eight months later, put an end to Arsenal's 49-match unbeaten record.

Their results over the last few weeks have exposed the comparative meagreness of Ferguson's resources, particularly in the enforced absence of his two dynamic full-backs, Gary Neville and Gabriel Heinze, and the team has stuttered badly. If they were to prevail yesterday they needed to overcome their recent failings and find a constructive response to the captain's stinging midweek criticisms.

Luckily for them, Chelsea are experiencing a dip of their own. Their rocket-propelled start to the season is receding into history, and yesterday's outcome demonstrated that if they are to maintain their dominance, they will need to knuckle down and fight.

Yesterday United set them the perfect example, overcoming their initial hesitancy through the kind of collective effort of will their critics claim has become an endangered commodity at Old Trafford.

"We wanted to make sure that we played quick, passing football, getting it into their box as soon as we could," Ferguson said afterwards.

"We tried to instill that into them in the last few days. The loss to Lille on Wednesday night was not a good one. No matter what we said about the terrible pitch, we didn't play well enough to win it. How you handle yourselves after something like that is important. Everyone here has got on with the job."

Chelsea's own lack of fluency made United's job easier. Enjoying the vast majority of possession in the early stages, the home side looked stilted in their movements. But when the west London team proved to have few attacking ideas of their own, beyond hitting long balls for Didier Drogba to chase, United were given the scope to play themselves back into some sort of recognisable shape. What was not lacking, the watching Keane would have noticed, was effort.

Alan Smith lacks too many of the necessary attributes to make him the captain's ideal understudy, but very little could be said against his performance in yesterday's demanding environment. Two tackles midway through the first half, on Drogba and Joe Cole were of the crunchingly uncompromising sort that can lift the whole team.

United were drifting at the time, and the chant of "there's only one Keano" had been heard from both ends of the ground. Five minutes after Smith had made his point, United were ahead when Darren Fletcher, another to have felt the lash of Keane's tongue, chased a lost cause at the far post and jumped to head what proved to be the winning goal.

Smith accepted the man of the match award, but Fletcher probably deserved an extra swig of champagne for the fight he showed throughout the match and for the header with which, after 54 minutes, he created a chance that Ruud van Nistelrooy should not have squandered.

And so Roman Abramovich sat in the stands watching the end of Chelsea's unbeaten run the league, while Malcolm Glazer and his sons, somewhere in the US, could breathe a sigh of relief in the knowledge that United's recent poor results might not, after all, have imperilled their highly-geared debt repayments.

"It was a fantastic spectacle," Ferguson said. "The keenness and desperation to play of our young players was marvellous, but in the last five minutes we were under the cosh because Chelsea went for everything. That's what champions do. We've done it many times in the past. And today was a turning point because the supporters showed how much they care for the club. When they're like that, it raises the ante and puts the players under pressure to do well. Today they were unbelievable."

Guardian Service