PUT LVG OUT OF HIS MISERY
This is a job too far for a manager who is looking his age...
THE sight of David Moyes, lean and tanned, on a plane back from Paris this week served as a reminder of just how quickly the strains of football management can slip away once the treadmill stops.
Anyone who witnessed the Scot during his 10 months at Manchester United, pale, drawn and seeing enemies everywhere, will understand the point.
Similarly, the sight of Louis van Gaal right now indicates to us again just what this most unforgiving of professions will do to you once things go wrong, no matter how experienced you are or how thick you believe your skin to be.
Van Gaal, of course, wears his selfconfidence like an iron cloak, at least he used to. During the great years, it was part of the package.
Watching the eminent Dutchman now, however, is to observe a man dying a slow sporting death. It is a demise brought on by the fact he no longer recognises the faults in his own methods or understands that, at the age of 64, the instincts and the powers that servederved him so well for three decades have simply andnd cruelly left him.
This is the thing about most football managers. They have a limited shelf life.
The job asks so much of them that it is unreasonable to expect t extreme longevity. The e other thing, though, is that many of them don’t understand this.
They look at the examples set by men like Sir Alex Ferguson and Sir Bobby Robson and think that this, one day, will be them, too. Still forging powerfully ahead beyond the age of 60, still winning, still pushing boundaries, reinventing themselves and surprising people.
The truth, however, is that these men were the exception rather than the norm. Examples of the flip side of the coin are much easier to find. Dalglish, Capello, Toshack, O’Neill, Houllier, for example.
For all the work, preparation and science that is poured into modern management, it remains an intuitive art. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and as you try to bring it back you may as well spend your time trying to push water up a hill.
In his later years, Ferguson’s judgement in the transfer market left him. Crucially, though, his ability to lead remained sharp.
By the time the end arrived he had reached the water-into-wine stage.
Van Gaal, who has now reached that dreadful point where he is attracting our sympathy, had been existing on the wrong side of the parabola for a while before a 2009 title success with AZ Alkmaar in Holland breathed some life into a career subsequently embellished by a Bundesliga triumph with Bayern in 2010.
He surprised us with Holland in the last World Cup, too, but undoubtedly his best work took place with Ajax and Barcelona first time around, back in the 1990s. It was a decade that, as a coach, he pretty much made his own.
The United manager is not an old man in modern terms but he is in coaching years, having taken his first post at AZ 30 years ago. Currently you can see the challenges of every one of those years written deep in his face.
Part of the art of management, and not just in sport, is recognising what is wrong. If you can’t do that, you can’t fix it.
That seems beyond Van Gaal now and there are indications that he knows it, at least in part.
Van Gaal did not offer to resign in the wake of defeat by Southampton recently but he did have a conversation about his future with Old Trafford executive chairman Ed Woodward after a dismal showing at Stoke City on Boxing Day. He is a man struggling under the weight oof his own failure and has beenb doing so for some time.tim Interestingly, there arear those in Holland familiarfa with his methods who are not particularly surprised.
When he persuaded the club to spend vast amounts of money on youngy forwards Memphisph Depay and Anthony MartialMa last summer, for example,exam there were knowinging mumurmurings in his home country where many believe Van Gaal lost the ability to persuade senior, experienced players to listen to him quite some time ago.
HIS insistence, meanwhile, on playing his own brand of slow, steady, possession- based football — backed up by endless, repetitive training-ground drills — points to stubbornness, something that can be a quality in a coach but not when all the indicators suggest your methods are wrong.
Van Gaal, we should remember, was a pioneer back in the day. When he arrived at a dinner in honour of his friend Jose Mourinho in London a few years ago, one observer nudged his wife and said: ‘That is the man who invented modern football’.
A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but Van Gaal does belong in the pantheon of coaches who can justifiably claim to have left something significant behind. It is this, as much as anything, that makes his current travails in what will be his final job rather sad to observe.
You only have to watch Van Gaal walk to see the esteem in which he holds himself. Upright, shoulders pinned back, chin up and out. His work no longer reflects the look, though.
Manchester United has proved to be a job too far for one of the modern greats and it is time the Old Trafford board did him and indeed themselves the service of freeing him from further suffering.