• Ferguson: referee’s decision swung league Chelsea’s way
• Manager not planning major summer purchases

Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager, has said he believes the controversial award of a free-kick against his side in November’s Premier League match at Stamford Bridge ultimately cost United the title.

He has singled out a decision by Martin Atkinson, the referee, to give a free-kick to Chelsea for Darren Fletcher’s challenge on Ashley Cole, although television replays suggested the United midfielder won the ball cleanly, as pivotal to the destiny of the league championship. John Terry headed Chelsea’s winner from that free-kick.

Ferguson advanced his view in the latest edition of the club’s official magazine, Inside United, which is released tomorrow. “Perhaps crucially,” he said, “the decision down at Stamford Bridge was a bad one against us. That has maybe swung the whole title around, if you think about it.

“There are many things you could talk about. But you can’t agonise over these things. “I used to do it but … if you look at all these twists and turns, you can torture yourself. Sometimes you get the breaks, sometimes you don’t. It happens.”

The United manager also said that he had not given up hope of winning the title until half-time in his side’s final match of the season at home to Stoke.

“At half-time I accepted Chelsea were going to be champions,” he said. “We felt it would be difficult for Wigan to get something and when we heard they were down to 10 men, all our hopes evaporated.

“We applaud Chelsea. We know how hard it is to win the title – it’s the hardest league in the world and we’ve won it for the last three years. I congratulate Carlo Ancelotti on a wonderful achievement. He’s a good manager and a good guy.”

However, Ferguson regards being knocked out of the Champions League by Bayern Munich at the quarter-final stage as the biggest disappointment of last season.

“I look at the European Cup as our biggest disappointment. We should have been in the final,” he said. “We were the better team and were fantastic here [at Old Trafford], we just didn’t have the luck on the night and that’s what can happen in football. You need a bit of luck.”

Those United fans wishing for an active summer in the transfer market will not take comfort from Ferguson’s remarks that he expects few changes to his playing staff as they seek to regain the title.

The United chairman, David Gill, has repeatedly indicated that the £80m fee from the sale of Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid last July is still available fto spend on top players – despite the club’s financial situation. The club’s owners, the Glazer family, have said they are comfortable with United’s debt situation and have pointed out that their assets total £2bn.

However, on possible purchases, Ferguson said: “We’ll look at the structure of this club. It’s a good structure. I think we’ve worked hard over the years at bringing in young players and developing them very well. We’ll have to assess all that and maybe do one or two things.

“In the market today it’s very difficult and the structure of our squad is good in terms of ages, the balance, the numbers and there’s a lot of good young players.Sometimes you have to trust in all the development and I’m going to stick with that – or most of it.”

The Scot is confident United will regain the title in 2010-11, having missed out on four championships in succession last season. “Next season we’ll go again and bring back the title to the best place in the world,” he said. “We’ll come back next year, that’s exactly what Manchester United do.”

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The World Cup and England will be a little richer if Joe Cole makes it to South Africa

Those 32 minutes of normal time, plus the two minutes indicated by the fourth official, seem to have been enough to convince Fabio Capello, the sternest of judges. Joe Cole’s cameo in the 8-0 thrashing of Wigan on Sunday appears to have secured the Chelsea midfielder’s place on the list of 30 players called into England’s World Cup preparations. And thank goodness for that.

Had Capello omitted Cole, as seemed likely, we would have been asking whether the £6m-a-year manager, supposedly a master of the art of Italian defence, had scored a second own-goal only 24 hours after his widely criticised launch of a player assessment software toy. A computer game capable of persuading Capello that the Chelsea midfielder was not good enough to join his party would not have been worth giving to a 10-year-old. But since its initial conclusions placed Cole second to Karim Benzema, who scored off the bench for Real Madrid, as Europe’s player of the week, it might just be worth adding to the Christmas list.

The signs had been ominous. “He is no longer the Joe Cole I remember,” Capello said some weeks ago, having watched the player’s attempts to regain his form after missing most of last year following knee surgery. But Capello was at Stamford Bridge on Sunday to witness a half-hour display that was exactly the Joe Cole we all remember: effervescent, imaginative, unselfish, eager to a fault, giving the crowd just a hint of the fantasy so rarely at the command of English footballers.

Cole has not had as much time on the pitch for Chelsea as he would have wanted in recent months because, during his absence, Carlo Ancelotti found a formation he liked and a player, Florent Malouda, whom he persuaded to cast aside the cloak of anonymity. Malouda started doing the job that had previously been Cole’s, and he did it very well. Ancelotti was not inclined to take unnecessary chances at a critical time of the season.

Not surprisingly, then, Cole found it hard to recapture his true form. Whenever he did get a chance, his puppyish keenness, even at 28 and with 53 caps and World Cups and European championships behind him, often caused him to try too hard, an endearing trait that can take the edge off his effectiveness.

Capello is not so laden with creative resources that he can afford to ignore one of the few English players blessed with the gift of imagination. It is his job to bring the best out of the player by showing trust and instilling confidence. But Capello’s insistence on discipline and rigour seemed to have turned him against a player who, in Germany four years ago, was the only credible rival to Owen Hargreaves as England’s player of the tournament and who surely had much more to