WHY SAY ANYTHING?

Louis van Gaal is still sitting on the throne at Manchester United.

Nobody really understands why, apart from maybe Ed Woodward. Van Gaal should have been van Gone weeks ago.

As I have already chronicled it makes no sense to keep him until United can mathematically win nothing or qualify for the Champion’s League. Let him go, put him out of his misery. More to the point, put the long suffering supporters out of their misery. Give Mourinho or Giggs a shot at the remainder of the season, it can’t really get worse!

The problem has been evident to everybody except van Gaal and Woodward for quite a while. In fact, the penny does now seem to have finally dropped with van Gaal. He’s suddenly turned into David Moyes in the way he is doubting that United will achieve fourth position or better.

He is certainly achieving very little more than Moyes did and is currently worse off, having spent around £187 million more, than his predecessor.

The main difference between the two is that Ed Woodward doesn’t seem to realise that United are failing under van Gaal. Maybe Louis just tells him that he’s top of the league and still in the Champion’s League and not to believe everything he reads in those papers, because they are all out to get him and only print lies because they don’t like him and think he’s an arrogant Dutch money-grabber.

The problem now is that the hole Louis started to dig for himself earlier this season has started to get steadily bigger. He has continued to dig rather than taking the honourable way out and handing in his spade to Woodward. He should have walked BEFORE Christmas, when he didn’t he should have been fired BEFORE Christmas, instead he was just left to continue his one man crusade to dig a very deep hole into which, if the club is not very careful, he will drag Manchester United and it’s reputation, as well as himself.

Since he came to the Premier League and managed to scrape a fourth place in his first season, his old fashioned values, tactics and confrontations have dragged United further and further away from any realistic targets they would have hoped to achieve under such a “big name” manager.

The problems really started when he decided to spend some money and rebuild the team. Ed Woodward, like the naive idiot he so obviously is, backed him all the way so, instead of building round a new centre back, as Bill Shankly did, as Tommy Docherty did, he bought a glut of midfielders, completely ignoring important positions which were crying out for a player or at least cover.

This of course was the main reason for my own personal gripe with him. He had to play so many players out of position it was incredible. Whether through injury or just rank bad planning many of his teams weren’t teams, they were a collection of individuals thrown into games, sometimes it looked like the first time they had played together.

Now sitting in fifth place, six points off fourth and ten points off third, Champion’s League qualification seems more likely through the Europa League than the Premier League.

Louis van Gaal has taken Manchester United backwards after a very brief flirtation with relative success, although fourth place and group stage elimination from the Champion’s League is hardly success for a club like United. He needs to go and he needs to go now. His reputation as an arrogant Dutch money-grabber will remain intact but at least it won’t get worse.

Once he has gone, Ed Woodward needs to be returned to the department from whence he came. His appointment as the CEO is fine but responsibility for anything to do with the football side of things needs to be taken from him immediately.

If you can possibly forget for a moment the appointments of Moyes and van Gaal, by far the biggest mistake made by United, was to put Woodward in charge of football matters.

With these two out of the way and Mourinho in charge, hopefully with a Director of Football, things may begin to look rosy once more.