Jonathan Wilson
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However much you admire Michael Carrick commanding the area in front of the back four or how Ander Herrera knits everything together, the eye cannot help but be drawn to the frizzy halo clanking about in midfield
• So, Louis van Gaal, what exactly is your Manchester United ‘philosophy’? Throughout his career as a coach, Louis van Gaal has been dogmatic, but perhaps the only thing he is dogmatic about is the fact that he is right. He came to the Premier League and, because he’s smarter than anybody else, he took the one surviving facet of the traditional English game, and showed how we could have been using it far more effectively all these years. Look, he said, I like this target man of yours, but why on earth haven’t you been using him in midfield?
The great fascination of Van Gaal in the decade since he took over AZ Alkmaar has been his willingness to evolve, to adopt new formations and to find new ways of doing things. He had revised the typical Dutch way of playing at Ajax and Barcelona. He’d fiddled with a 4-2-3-1 with the Dutch national side but it was when he was presented a squad of lesser players that he was forced to improvise, and found glory in a counterattacking system. Now he has a new conceit: Van Gaal may speak of Juan Mata as a “false right-winger”, but redeploying a central creator to drift in from the flank has been done before; his great innovation – his great joke, almost – has been the use of Marouane Fellaini as a deep-lying target man.
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• So, Louis van Gaal, what exactly is your Manchester United ‘philosophy’? Throughout his career as a coach, Louis van Gaal has been dogmatic, but perhaps the only thing he is dogmatic about is the fact that he is right. He came to the Premier League and, because he’s smarter than anybody else, he took the one surviving facet of the traditional English game, and showed how we could have been using it far more effectively all these years. Look, he said, I like this target man of yours, but why on earth haven’t you been using him in midfield?
The great fascination of Van Gaal in the decade since he took over AZ Alkmaar has been his willingness to evolve, to adopt new formations and to find new ways of doing things. He had revised the typical Dutch way of playing at Ajax and Barcelona. He’d fiddled with a 4-2-3-1 with the Dutch national side but it was when he was presented a squad of lesser players that he was forced to improvise, and found glory in a counterattacking system. Now he has a new conceit: Van Gaal may speak of Juan Mata as a “false right-winger”, but redeploying a central creator to drift in from the flank has been done before; his great innovation – his great joke, almost – has been the use of Marouane Fellaini as a deep-lying target man.
Continue reading...
More...