FA Cup Hangover: Bittersweet Swansong for LVG as Mourinho Waits in the Wings

Pictionary players could traditionally depict “bittersweet” by drawing a lemon and a slice of cake. After Saturday, a sketch of Louis van Gaal holding the FA Cup would be as apt.

Just for clarity, for those not confident in portraiture, in this instance the lemon should barely fit on the page, and the slice of cake should be minuscule. 

By Sunday morning any sweetness had long-since danced into the night, with a Jose Mourinho-shaped cumulonimbus casting a bitter shadow. It wouldn’t be long before it rained all over his parade.

Amid widespread speculation his one-time protege will replace him as Manchester United manager as early as the middle of the week, Van Gaal when asked to stop and speak by a Sky Sports reporter refused and simply said: “It’s over.” We’re now seemingly in a situation where he is sacked, and everybody knows it, but the club has yet to inform him.

Louis van Gaal tells #SSNHQ reporter “it’s over” when leaving @ManUtd team hotel. https://t.co/8ngPsWiCPR

— Sky Sports News HQ (@SkySportsNewsHQ) May 22, 2016

Ed Woodward and the omnishambles that is Manchester United part 769. When faced with delicate situations theses days, the once-great institution is classless and clueless. Ask Woodward to retouch the Sistine Chapel and he’d do it with crayons, wearing boxing gloves. In his defence, he’d increase revenue in the official Chapel shop tenfold in a week. 

Just imagine the coach ride back to Manchester on Sunday. Van Gaal sat silently up top, wrestling with his thoughts, waiting for a call, a statement from the club, the cool feel of steel on his neck as Woodward ushers him off the coach and into the boardroom without once looking him in the eye. All the while the coach driver is trying to make small talk without mentioning an elephant in the room so big he’s had to open a skylight. 

The players, who should have been revelling in what for many of them is a first senior trophy, subdued, awkward, embarrassed for their manager. A fair few should stretch that embarrassment to themselves. 

The Guardian’s Daniel Taylor wrote a revealing piece on Sunday, confirming suspicions many in United’s squad will feel relief once he’s gone, just as they did when David Moyes was shown the door. Van Gaal’s idiosyncrasies and gnomic tendencies grated all but a few it seems.

Van Gaal has been described among those players as “hard work.”

His tactics have been so unpopular that various members of his squad have talked between themselves about openly defying him. It hasn’t reached the point of mutiny, but it has been a close-run thing sometimes.

The consensus has been that “it can’t get much worse than it is.” 

Throughout Van Gaal comes across as arcane and antiquated, with his straitjacket, safety-first tactical predilections debilitating in the extreme. While it seems unlikely a candle will be lit in his absence, it should also be said the players hardly cover themselves in glory either. Going off Taylor’s report, there’s definitely more prima donnas than Maradonas at Old Trafford these days. 

Louis van Gaal, a messy ending, and some background about why the players at Manchester United won’t miss him. https://t.co/G16pG3fBgG

— Daniel Taylor (@DTguardian) May 22, 2016

With a second Manchester United manager on the cusp of departing in as many years, it’s safe to say Gary Neville’s now infamous “as a club they stand against the immediacy of modern life” quote (via the Daily Mail) is starting to ring hollow.

This from the writer Graham Greene seems more appropriate in the circumstances: “Not so bad this ending because one is getting used to endings: life like Morse, a series of dots and dashes, never forming a paragraph.” Mourinho could be in situ before the ink at the end of this sentence is dry.

In many respects, it was an FA Cup final all about timings. Mark Clattenburg’s were off, Alan Pardew’s all over the place, Jesse Lingard’s impeccable, and Mourinho’s (or at least his entourage’s) inappropriate to the point of being squalid. As for the anointed national anthem singer Karen Harding, she’s still stood on the centre circle waiting for her cue.

A bashfully named warm-up act had earlier proved himself capable of eliciting far more than a mere Tinie Tempah from anyone in possession of ears, as his medley was at least partially responsible for a delayed kick-off. Timings, out of sync all over the place.

To watch an exalted Van Gaal triumphantly bound into his press conference clutching the FA Cup trophy, to be greeted by journalists exchanging awkward glances as though burdened by possession of a guilty secret, felt completely unnecessary.

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