Those foreign noobs!
It turns out that Louis Van Gaal knew what he was doing all along. This wasn't a surprising thing to most of us who have at least temporary ownership of a brain, but it often seems that the English media doesn't have this luxury. For much of the season it has wanted to portray the Dutchman as anything from over-rated to over the hill, mad, simply no good or, must humiliating of all, worse than David Moyes. Poor Louis.
But this is symptomatic of how non-British managers are treated. Their lack of relationships within the English media mean they're fair game from day one for a kicking. They're only ever a handful of results away from 'couldn't a Brit have done better?'.
But my God, it's so old-fashioned, this idea that the foreign man is somehow suspected to be in his position falsely, that somehow it's PC gone mad and that a perfectly decent Englishman has been deprived of a job by pinko liberals.
No British manager with Van Gaal's record would have been treated like this. Moyes was excused being awful right up to the day he was sacked. Had Van Gaal been British, some degree of benefit of the doubt would have been offered when results and performances were not immediately stellar.
Indeed, British managers who have won nothing, or very little, are routinely vaunted as geniuses by a media always keen to over-laud the Brit and over-critique the foreign.
The way Van Gaal was treated for the last six months was as though he was from another planet, coming up with bonkers ideas about how to play football that were beyond reason. Had it been an Englishman, those same media critics would have painted this as progressive experimentation, but because the dude doing it is Dutch, it's whacky and shows he 'doesn't understand our game'.
Time and again we hear that foreign managers don't understand our game and that it somehow takes them by surprise. This is usually uttered by pundits who, because they know little of European football, think all Europeans know little of English football (except when they want to laud the Premier League as mega-popular - then they're keen to say how everyone watches it all over the world. Everyone except foreign managers, presumably).
We see this time and again. The overseas interloper is given a hard time immediately things don't go right, yet the Brit is given a free ride to the point where facts are presented to make them look better than they are. A couple of losses followed by a couple of wins will be portrayed as 'six points from the last two games' rather than six out of twelve. Tim Sherwood benefited hugely from this in his early days at Aston Villa, so much so that in some media quarters, it was being said that Spurs should never have got rid of him, that he was better than their current incumbent. No scrutiny of what each man has achieved as a manager would justify this. It's only because of nationality. Saturday's result at White Hart Lane will only fuel this sort of nonsense and will soon be offered up as conclusive proof of Sherwood's genius.
It genuinely seems to me that all but the most reactionary or xenophobic fan has no problem having a non-British manager. We live in exciting and fertile cross-cultural times, yet so many voices in football are stuck in a different era where foreigners are still looked upon as an exotic indulgence and as all pretty much the same. When Glenn Hoddle bemoans a club 'going foreign' (a classic Hoddlism) foreign is all one thing. Foreign is not British. That's it. There is no further distinction. Sam Allardyce and Harry Redknapp both do the same thing, referring to foreign managers as a group rather than as individuals as though they all think and behave the same.
Look at poor Manuel Pellegrini. He hasn't done that bad. He won the league last season. This year hasn't been so good and now he's routinely portrayed as a bit useless. But if Tim Sherwood had won the league with City last year, the punditocracy wouldn't have shut up about it yet. There is no way on earth that they'd be criticising him the way Pellegrini is criticised, a few months after that win. It'd be all exasperated exhortations that 'he needs more time' and 'he's won the league, Jeff'.
I do wonder if Alan Pardew's pitchside critique of the Chilean basically represents how some in the English media view him They really seem to want him to fail. They'd deny this, of course, but there is a joy in the failing overseas manager that there isn't when the plucky Brit is awful. When he played four in midfield against Barcelona, the strutting English media and ex-pros, who, for so long were wedded to 4-4-2 almost by patriotism, the same people who saw any other system as a fancy foreign idea, came out in shock and awe at this unprogressive, retrograde managerial decision, oblivious of the sides in Europe that recently or currently play such a formation with success. It was embarrassing in the same way your dad thinking Pearl Jam are a new band is embarrassing.
There is also a flip side to this quick contempt. An overseas manager who is successful is sometimes treated as though they are magicians. You'd think Jose Mourinho had access to some dark magic the way he is described almost mystically. At times you'd have thought Arsene Wenger was the intellectual equal of Einstein. This is all part of an attitude which can be crudely boiled down to this: British = Proper Football Man, Foreign = Weirdo.
While there are swathes of the football public who are as conservative and narrow as the press that feeds them, they are a diminishing element and consequently, the gap between a lot of the football media and many football consumers has never been culturally greater. Van Gaal's transformation from not-like-us oddball, to that most perennial and idiotic of titles, Dutch Master, is under way.
Soon, his talent will be sold to us as some kind of foreign voodoo, while the rest of us look on in slack-jawed astonishment.
