UNITED ON MEND AS LVG EASES IRON GRIP
Gloom is lifting after players’ plea
NOT so long ago, Louis van Gaal was angrily walking out of a press conference. Yesterday, he breezed into his briefing almost 10 minutes early in a decidedly better mood. The atmosphere around Manchester United’s Carrington training base has changed, and not just because the recent storm raging around Van Gaal has largely blown over following his team’s improved performances and results.
It is nearly three weeks since the Dutchman met a delegation of four players — Wayne Rooney, Michael Carrick, Chris Smalling and Juan Mata — to try to resolve the crisis engulfing the club.
They asked Van Gaal to relax his notoriously strict regime. The exasperated manager, fast running out of ideas to turn around United’s season, agreed as long as his players proved they could handle the added responsibility.
They requested changes to his monotonous training routines that left them feeling ‘like robots’, according to one source.
One of their requests was to bring back the rondo, an exercise where a player chases the ball around a small pitch while his team-mates try to keep possession.
Popular under Alex Ferguson and David Moyes, it is one of the routines the United players believe puts more sharpness into training instead of the methodical stop-start nature of Van Gaal’s sessions.
It also encourages banter within the group which has been lacking since Rooney and Carrick went to see the manager in August to warn him that the dressing room was ‘flat’.
Morale among footballers can be a fragile commodity. Under Moyes, the simple decision to take fish fingers off the menu as well as chips, which were a Friday treat, went down very badly.
With Van Gaal, the strict mealtime rituals were getting his players down. They felt as though they were being treated like schoolchildren, always having to eat together as well as attending compulsory suppers at the team hotel when the time used to be their own.
That all changed two days before Christmas following the summit. Players now come and go as they please in the canteen. The so-called supper club is voluntary.
‘It was as if a compromise had been reached,’ said the source. ‘The mood around the place picked up that week.’
There is no guarantee it will cure all United’s ills. On the first weekend, they lost away to Stoke City in one of their worst performances of the season.
A draw with Chelsea and victory over Swansea have lifted the pressure on Van Gaal but it will only be a temporary reprieve if results take another downturn. What should be a straightforward FA Cup third-round tie at home to League One Sheffield United today will be followed by trips to Newcastle and Liverpool over the next week.
Van Gaal is not getting ahead of himself. ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer,’ he remarked yesterday when asked about the confidenceboost of beating Swansea.
He confirmed that the players have been given greater responsibility, but clearly still needs some convincing.
At the age of 64, old habits die hard and, until now, Van Gaal’s philosophy has been set in stone.
He suggested that the players are perhaps too close, and his dressingroom should not represent quite such a safe haven for them.
‘I think the atmosphere in our dressing room is very good,’ said Van Gaal. ‘Maybe too good because they are always protecting the dressing-room… their colleagues. That is very good until a certain point.
‘We have changed our approach to the players to make it easier to take responsibility.
‘You can change your approach and so the players take the commitment, for example, for the gameplan and other kinds of decisions. So we are trying everything to come to a solution, but at the end it always comes down to being better than the opponent and we have to score goals.’
In the past two games, certainly Van Gaal’s United appear more willing to express themselves on the pitch. There has been a greater energy and more shots on goal, even though they have scored only twice.
‘It looked as if the shackles were off the United players,’ observed Match of the Day pundit Alan Shearer.
‘He (Van Gaal) has learned that Man United have to play on the front foot, have to play the Man United way, have to play attacking football.’
Although some have tried to attribute the apparent change in approach to assistant manager Ryan Giggs, it is understood that the man earmarked to replace Van Gaal remains a relatively detached figure, detailed to work on analysing the opposition.
It is still most definitely Van Gaal’s team. But the dynamic has changed in recent weeks and the Iron Tulip, as they call him in Holland, has proved that he can bend after all.
His future as United manager may depend on it.