CLICHES ARE devices employed by the talentless to make genius manageable. We clods only make sense of the sublime with glib and meaningless phrases. Football, for whatever else it might be worth, proves the point.

Here's a recent favourite. Every hack on the sofa offers it weekly. "Form is temporary," they say, "but class is permanent." They forget to add: "and then there's Henrik Larsson".

The little man was breaking hearts at Old Trafford last week. Sir Alex Ferguson was talking wistfully of how the Swede, if he chose, could be playing in the Premiership at 40. What he truly meant was a two-fold assertion.

First, that a player who could "only score in the SPL" has been more productive for Manchester United over 10 short weeks than certain starlets named Wayne. Secondly, that Ferguson's club only earned the right to face Roma, next time, thanks to a little guy who prefers the wife and kids to another bucket of money. Champions League? Done that, won that.

In a world of non-genuises preening in their baby Bentleys, Larsson's example is important. Ferguson taught him nothing. He exercised no patronage worth a damn and did not once dare to shout, bawl, or bully.

Larsson does not need his money, his glamour, or his psychosis. Here's Henrik executing that inch-perfect strike when it matters most, almost for fun. Where's David Beckham, at 32? Rodeo Drive? It's not even funny.

Larsson is the best header of a ball since Denis Law: discuss. This isn't a trivia quiz. Football's pantheon contains any number of glorious failures. What counts most, finally, is the ability to take a craftsman's care over the essential transaction: people pay money, I perform. That's the deal.

The Premiership, bloated beyond all reason, has begun to lose sight of the fact. My guess is that Sir Alex is allowing himself another couple of years at Old Trafford in order to create yet another team: that's his privilege, I think. That is, equally, the Manchester tradition.

But Giggs, Neville and Scholes, glorious as they have been, are enjoying their last hurrah. The team, like the coach, are no longer young, and the youngsters among them have yet to perform. What mattersnow is to transmit the virtues that Ferguson, raving like Lear, has embodied. Where's the next Keane? Who might be the new Cantona? To put it no higher, the next generation had better not pin their hopes on Rio Ferdinand.

Instead, we have Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo. Bobby Charlton, who may know a thing or two, has been lavish in his praise of the latter while appearing to ignore the former. I doubt that it counts as an accident. What was the Great Comb-over in his finest days, after all?

He was the teenager who survived Munich. Rooney needs a bit of pressure? Try living through that slaughter. Charlton was also the finest striker of a ball ever. That's ever, italics, by the way. Even Pele deferred. When old Baldy says that Ronaldo can do things no-one else has ever done before, the praise is lavish beyond words, but the criticism is implicit: where's Rooney?

Why is Sir Alex still failing to extract genius from the great, white, pasty-faced hope of English football?

Larsson's goal against Lille should be shown in every coaching class there is. The marking was dire; Ronaldo's cross impeccable: that much is beyond argument. But how do you teach anyone to lose every marker, to merely "pop up" just like that? And how do you instil an imperative: we need to win, always?

Ferguson will miss Larsson, I suspect, less for the fact that talismans who have scored in every competition offered are hard to come by, than for the example he personifies, unassumingly, at every time of asking. What could make a Ronaldo complete? What might make a Rooney understand that talent and application always go together? Here's Henrik, 35 and rising, saying that there is nothing you can show him. Nothing at all.

The hubris of English football needs this kind of corrective. Even Ferguson, in his cussed way, probably needs it. The player who says, and means, that he keeps his word to his hometown team. The player who does not stoop to foolish jousts with his coach. The player whose "media image" was never the point, nor purpose, of his trade. And the player whose reticence is an implicit comment on all those silly boys with too much money.

Possibly the most impressive thing about Larsson is that he is not much impressed by "Sir Alex". Old Trafford assumed, I think, that when the cheque book appeared the little Swede would succumb, just like all the rest. In that context, Ferguson's press conference last week was almost funny. Apparently, "the boy" - but let's call him a man - couldn't be bought.

The chances of Rooney or Ronaldo learning the lesson are remote. Those kids have agents and advisers the way dogs have fleas: they are stuffed, daily, baffled and bewildered, with "advice". But here was Larsson's last tutorial. Football need not be dishonourable. You don't need an accredited pimp. You don't need to engineer "interest" from Madrid or Milan every Monday morning.You turn up. You train hard. You keep your word. If dreams come true, you score goals.

That ethic is missing at Old Trafford. I suspect, listening to Frank Lampard's £100,000 a week contract woes, it's missing at Stamford Bridge. I see no signs of a craftsman's virtue in Liverpool, or at the Emirates Stadium. Great football clubs are owned by trading companies called players.

But who kept Manchester United in the Champions League? Who allowed the dreary nostalgics to say "that's how you score a goal"? And who allowed us to remember that a genius is worth every penny he might ever earn from a shoddy craft?

Little Swede. Black. Rising like a bird at dawn. I can almost bear to watch football again.

Thank you, Henrik, and good luck.