ROONEY’S WRONG, LOUIS VAN GAAL’S MICRO-MANAGING WAS OUT OF DATE
LOUIS VAN GAAL has a book out in Holland and asked Wayne Rooney to write the foreword. In it, the former Manchester United captain describes Van Gaal as the manager who taught him the most. He also claims United should not have sacked the Dutchman.
Those of us whose job it was to cover United specifically five or six years ago would disagree with the second bit. If ever there was a walking example of how time catches up with even the best coaches, Van Gaal was it. Rooney certainly had his own moments with the United manager.
I remember, for example, standing in the broiling Washington heat watching United train on a summer tour of America in 2014. Rooney was practising penalties at the end of the session and was, to put it mildly, somewhat aghast when his then 62-year-old manager wandered over, moved him aside and started to show him how he should be doing it.
At that stage of his career, Rooney had scored more than 150 Premier League goals for the club.
This was Van Gaal’s style but it was also his problem. He was a micro-manager and by the time he reached United — the eighth posting of his career — it was out of fashion.
On that same tour, he insisted square dining tables were replaced with round ones (to encourage conversation) while it was common for him to blow his whistle during a training session, take a player by the shoulders and move him half a yard to his right. ‘That is where I want you to be,’ he would say. He also tried to ban players shooting first time.
Another great Dutchman, Ruud Gullit, had a theory. It was that Van Gaal would always succeed in bringing on young players as they would blindly follow everything he said. Older modern players, on the other hand, required more subtle handling and this proved beyond him.
There may be something in that, too. Once, after a particularly miserable loss at Stoke on St Stephen’s Day 2015, United assistant coach Ryan Giggs was having a drink with the opposition staff only to be told the team bus was leaving early. In the middle of a taxing holiday programme, Van Gaal was taking his players back up the M6 to Carrington to train. Giggs was stunned.
At Old Trafford, non-football staff loved Van Gaal. Of the four managers to have followed Alex Ferguson, he was the best liked. Despite his clumsy, abrupt utterances to the media, he was by nature a charming and warm presence.
But, despite winning the FA Cup in his final game, he was a categorical failure. The Jose Mourinho football that followed was not easy on the eye, but Van Gaal had already started that train in motion. The abject 2-0 Europa League surrender at Liverpool in Van Gaal’s second season was one of the meekest United performances I have seen, and I will never forget Ferguson’s face as he left the Anfield directors’ box.
And Ferguson is relevant to all this because it turns out managers like him are the exception to the rule. Most of the game’s great coaches do have a limited shelf life, but just don’t know it. Most do not travel well through their seventh decade. Football management burns you in the end and the few survivors are those who adapt. I remember listening to Ferguson talk about Twitter at a time when I didn’t even have an account. Social media was in its infancy, but he knew about it because he knew he had to.
Not all are the same. Most managers think the skills that got them through back then will get them through now.
Van Gaal thought that and he was wrong. Rooney — when he becomes a manager for the first time — would do well to be more adaptable.