There’s a good bit in Bobby Robson’s autobiography where he describes with brilliantly magnanimous good sense the end of his time as Barcelona head coach. Robson still had a year left on his contract when he found out the club had other plans, with the best young (ish) coach in the world already lined up to take over.
Talks were held. A compromise was reached. Robson would stay on as general manager, offering his handover notes and bequeathing his assistant, the magnificently piqued José Mourinho, to his successor. Who was of course the 40-something Louis van Gaal.
Robson describes the arrangement: “Look Louis,” I said. “You’re going to be the future, so you have the job and I’ll walk way. Let’s shake hands and do it nicely. I’ll scout for you. I won’t undermine you …” I ought to say that Louis was totally respectful towards me.” It worked too. Robson saw out his contract. Barcelona won the league that year. A very amicable, grown-up kind of succession was brokered.
Fast forward 20 years and the suggestion continues to bubble away that this same triangulation of elite coaching talents is circling Manchester in slightly altered form. In this version Van Gaal is now Robson, the ageing eminence with a year left to run.
Mourinho is Van Gaal, the hot (ish) young (ish) thing. And Ed Woodward and the disparate Old Trafford hierarchy are charged, as the Barcelona board were, with producing the best possible result from the coaching riches bumping shoulders – so we are led to believe - in the Old Trafford vestibule.
So. Why not do a Bobby? The latest whispered talk is that Mourinho will take over if United fail to make the Champions League for next season. But perhaps this doesn’t have to be an either-or. Why not resist that familiar old scorched earth urge and create a kind of high-end brains trust, reuniting Mourinho with the coach who first gave him the chance to actually take a proper training session?
Van Gaal has been here before after all. He remains a huge asset with a vast reservoir of expertise on development and good practice.
Who knows, in some sweeping academy-revamping, player-scouting role he might even help Mourinho remember his own best qualities, that concentrated energy and focus on fine details rather than the gruelling adversity of his toxic middle age.
It is certainly an idea. Albeit not one that has any serious chance of becoming reality, given that so many impossible variables must first slot into place. Forget the personalities, we simply do things differently here. The acrimonious sacking, or worse the Busby-style destructive lingering-on seem to be the only available tropes for managerial departure.
Which is a shame in itself, given the fragile hints that Van Gaal might have found his way, finally, into the guts of this muddled, listing juggernaut of a club. Yes: it’s the kids!
There have been a few mini-dawns in the past 18 months. Indeed the current minor surge may or may not make it through the week. This time, though, the waft of minor positivity does at least look and feel like something that is both authentically Van Gaal and in tune with the club’s own hackneyed, but undeniably seductive, view of itself.
Whatever the real driving force – injuries, the boldness of nothing much left to lose – the past eight days have seen a rejigged
United beat Midtjylland, Shrewsbury and a flaccid Arsenal, while scoring 11 goals and fielding 13 players aged 23 or younger. Louis, old boy. We’ve been expecting you.
This was always likely to be Van Gaal’s ace and general legacy project whatever his results on the pitch. “It is the culture of Manchester United, that is why they take me as a manager,” Van Gaal shrugged this week and he does of course have a genuine history here, a combined XI of players given their club debuts under his hand that is a match for any modern manager.
At Barcelona he promoted Xavi and Carles Puyol, and even managed to whistle in Andrés Iniesta and Thiago Motta during that failed second stint. At Ajax he gave debuts to Edgar Davids, Clarence Seedorf, Patrick Kluivert, Marc Overmars and Edwin van der Saar.
Bayern brought Thomas Müller and Holger Badstuber. Even his AZ Alkmaar had a reputation for blooding talent, with Graziano Pellè and Moussa Dembélé among those touched by the Van Gaal nose for a tyro. At United a more youthful team has emerged only out of necessity. As late as the final game of Van Gaal’s first season Phil Jones was the only player in the team under the age of 25. This season kicked off with Luke Shaw the only really youthful regular.
A turning point came with the 3-0 defat at Arsenal in early October. The next game against Everton saw Jesse Lingaard back for the first time this season, from where he has become something of talisman for those intermittent glimpses of the best of late-Van Gaal United. Cameron Borthwick-Jackson, an emergency fill-in, looks as if he may have a future at left- or centre-back, his preferred position. Players such as Paddy McNair and Donald Love may not become regulars, but there is a healthy excitement in simply seeing them on the pitch.Chuck in Anthony Martial, Shaw and even, perhaps, the improving Memphis Depay, who clearly likes playing in a team where he gets to swagger a little, and there is something here at last, an armature of a fine and engaging young team.
On Sunday at Old Trafford this accidental United produced the most seductively Manchester United-ish moment since the departure of Alex Ferguson, and perhaps a little longer still. Marcus Rashford’s second goal, made by a spin and cross from Lingaard, was a kind of heritage piece in itself, created and finished by two players who have been at the club since the age of seven and eight, Lancashire- (and Cheshire)-born and performing with an undeniably compelling native energy in the cause.
Whatever happens from here this is at least what football clubs are supposed to look like, a reminder that there is a kind of happiness even at the top level that exists outside simply hauling in cups and trophies. Of the many objections to the thin gruel of Van Gaal’s second season the idea that he has betrayed “the United way” always seemed a little mean spirited. This is a club presided over by distant, speculative owners, a squad assembled in the garish Galáctico-lite style. At times Van Gaal – austere, aristocratic, hunched next to his mute and frowning Giggsy – looks like the most United-ish thing left.
There are still those who would blame the struggles of an ageing coach for all the club’s ills. Plus of course the pressure to play returning stars may yet derail even this little glimmer of the shadow-United, a genuine Van Gaal legacy beyond furred arteries of the last year and half.
There is another point here, though. The non sequitur many are so keen to usher in – slow-burn Louis out; punkish José in – could well destroy any such progress at a stroke. Succession has been a key topic at United. Come the summer they may well have another chance to get it right, or wrong, all over again.