Remember when it was considered band-wagoning to become a converted Manchester United fan? The team, after all, has won 13 titles in the Premier League, four more than all other teams combined. It has a history of signing the best players and had a famously ferocious tactician for a manager. And it was never afraid to open its big, fat checkbook when called upon.
Everything held true until last year’s catastrophe happened.
Without Sir Alex Ferguson stalking the sidelines, United had arguably its worst season in its history playing in the EPL under the helm of the overmatched David Moyes.
Something’s wrong when you don’t even qualify for the next year’s Champions League tournament and something is very wrong when you don’t even get invited to play in the Europa League. The freakin’ Europa League!
That’s how bad it got for the red side of Manchester last season. Actually, ‘bad’ doesn’t even begin to describe the team’s fortunes last season.
You could’ve thrown words like ‘disaster’, ‘cataclysmic, or ‘losers’ to any United fan and they would’ve just nodded their heads, pulled their hats down low so nobody seems them, and then weep in between chugs of Singha beer.
It finished seventh in the league table, for crying out loud! That’s eight points short of the same Everton team Moyes left for his ill-fated trip to greener pastures.
So the question remains—was last year a blip, or are we seeing the initial signs of Manchester United’s decline?
Oddsmakers seem to believe that United will bounce back. Most books have them at 5/1 odds to win the EPL title next year, only behind Chelsea and the defending champs, Manchester City.
The team enters the season with a new face of the franchise, so to speak. Moyes is gone, presumably to the outskirts of some Eastern European league to lick his wounded ego.
In his place is Louis Van Gaal, fresh off leading the Netherlands to a surprising third-place finish in the World Cup.
If there’s something we know about Van Gaal, he doesn’t take to losing kindly or at least run around from it in the same kind of blame deflection Moyes often did last season.
He’s also likely to shake things up with the way the team plays. Proof of that can be found in the team’s waxing of the LA Galaxy in a recent friendly at the Pasadena Rose Bowl in Los Angeles.
Scoff at it for being an exhibition match, but look closer at United’s 7-1 pasting of the Galaxy and you might have noticed that Van Gaal employed a different and more attack-heavy 3-5-2 formation compared to the 4-3-3 it has employed for the longest time.
The new formation gave Van Gaal some serious attacking options to play with. The new United skipper even admitted as much, telling ESPN that he prefers playing two strikers at any given time to give the team some scoring bite.
“We have four No. 10s, so the selection is not balanced in my eyes,” he said. “When we play 4-3-3, I have three strikers on the bench and that is not good.”
Whether that translates to the Premier League is another question entirely. For that to work, Van Gaal knows that he needs to have his team in full-strength, and that begins with his very own Dutch attacker, Robin Van Persie.
Form and fitness go hand-in-hand in football and when he’s healthy, RVP is still a difference maker who is capable of beating world-class teams on his own. The same can be said for Wayne Rooney, Danny Welbeck, Javier Hernandez, the four No.10s Van Gaal will rely heavily on this coming season. Having them available and in peak form will go along way in helping the team march back up to the top of the EPL mountain.
The opposite end of the field was also a major problem for United last year, possibly more so than its convoluted attacking system. Breakdowns in the back four often led to a lot of gift-wrapped goals and while the departures of Patrice Evra, Rio Ferdinand, and Nemanja Vidic will be felt in the locker rooms, the team needed an infusion of talent in the back line to steer it back in the right direction. The acquisition of leftback Luke Shaw fills a need, but how much can you really rely on a 19-year old playing in just his second full season in the big leagues?
United’s fortune, it seems, is all tied on how Van Gaal handles his new managerial role. If you’re a United fan, you’re at least praying for that same managerial genius that won multiple titles at Ajax, Barcelona, and Bayern Munich. And don’t forget the incredible job he did steering a Netherlands team further than most prognosticators expected them to finish at the World Cup.
Now, he’s tasked to pick up the pieces at Manchester United, fix it, and return it back to its pristine glory. It’s a job that’s far easier said than done, but if there’s one man who can do it, it’s Louis Van Gaal.
Or as some of my buddies who are ManU fans would say, “In LVG We Trust”.
