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By Geoffrey Levy

PUBLISHED: 18:01 EST, 8 May 2013 | UPDATED: 01:39 EST, 9 May 2013

He could never really have retired last year at 70, as quietly planned. Not as a loser. Not when the last kick of the football season meant coming second worst of all, second to his 'noisy neighbours' Manchester City.

Right to the last Sir Alex Ferguson had to be a winner. If he had to bully, insult, rant, trick and intimidate to overwhelm all opposition, if he had to put off his long-delayed retirement for another year, then so be it. He had to have the last word, the last kick.

And so it has turned out. No wonder he was so fulsome in his gratitude yesterday to Cathy, his wife of 47 years. Eleven years ago when he first decided to retire at 60, it was she who convinced him he was too young. How could a man who regularly worked out in the club gymnasium before 7am really think of retiring?

Sir Alex Ferguson with wife Cathy and twins Jason and Darren in 1977

Last year, as the Premier League title slipped away, and even before he told her 'It can't end like this I've got to keep going', she knew that her husband could only bow out of football on a high.

So what drove Sir Alex to such obsessive heights of need? His poor family start in life in the Govan shipyard area of Glasgow, perhaps? The fact that he never scaled any serious heights as a player?

Or could it have been the damning words of an industrial tribunal in Paisley which marked him out as a managerial failure when he was 37? The lifelong Labour supporter took the unheard-of step (in football) of taking St Mirren football club to the tribunal when it fired him after four years as manager.

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Fergie retirement: Finishing first and having the last word, Sir Alex Ferguson's lifelong obsession