TERRACE TALK: The Man United Way or the highway warning for Louis van Gaal

In an idle moment during a recent United match — and let’s face it, there’ve been plenty to fill — my cronies were pondering upon the precise nature of Louis Van Gaal’s oft-cited yet ill-defined ‘philosophy’.

“It’s existentialism.” “How so?” “I wish he didn’t exist.” “Ha. To me, it’s just nihilism.” “Shouldn’t that be nil-nilism?” Ouch.

“I can laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible” as Morrissey once sang. Except, of course, that it’s still terrible.

We’re out of the European Cup before it’s even got properly started, we’re an international laughing stock (again), and — most importantly — we have been largely bored out of our skulls.

Actually, to be fair, there was a huge irony in Tuesday night’s cataclysmic defeat: it was a stupidly exciting evening. In a perverse way, many of us even enjoyed it, so long has it been since we have felt football pump the blood through our veins until we’re dizzy.

That is by the by now, not least because the ‘excitement’ on offer was akin to that felt by a man frantically trying not to drown by frenziedly flailing about at the apex of his resistance capabilities.

We were gaspingly desperate, and ended up attacking with reckless abandon because we had nothing else left to offer before tournament-death’s clammy hand descended.

Here are three leading fan website poll results, obtained before Tuesday’s catastrophe: ‘R.I.M.’, ‘United We Stand’ and ‘Red Issue’ recorded “sack him now!” scores of between 40% and 60%. The Manchester Evening News pollsters found two-thirds wanted LVG binned next summer if it meant we could hire Guardiola. That last poll was cannily targeted because, just two days earlier, it had emerged that club chiefs would happily turn Pep down in 2016 in order to retain the services of the “genius” Van Gaal for one more season! I know, I know: again, one day we will laugh, but at this time, that’s truly terrible.

The craziness continued with his dismal postmatch quotes, which included a line about his ‘success’ in this year’s Carling Cup so jawdroppingly moronic that I briefly wondered whether we were all on Candid Camera.

Unsurprisingly, virtually everything he said on Tuesday night was slaughtered, dissected, and stuck onto pikes for general stoning as Reds surged online to vent their justifiable fury.

So it has been with most of his public utterances this season, which have played no small part in undermining our confidence in him. And when he started banging on about the “facts“, the ghost of Rafa Benitez and his infamous Fat Waiter’s ‘list’ hoved into view.

Yes, Scousers, giddy with your groovy Klopp, we admit it: the joke’s finally on us now.

Nevertheless, let’s not be sidetracked by the easy targets of infelicitous vocabulary deployment by a foreigner.

He has made some serious points too which, when taken in conjunction with the horrific tedium seen on the pitch, stack up into a dossier of indictment.

Let’s state the obvious first: almost all United’s matches this season, and for much of last season, have been chance-sparse snooze-fests, some offensively so. Every man and his dog can see this and knows it to be true. Equally, even the dimmest Fido knows how to bark “this is not The United Way“, the way to which every Red boss must cleave.

Yet Van Gaal does not see this — or if he does, he will not admit it.

Now, when Fergie started out at United, most of those first three years were as awful stylistically as they were in terms of results. But — and it’s a huge ‘but’ — at least you knew that he knew it was rubbish too, and not what we wanted to see.

He did grasp what his duty was: to win entertainingly, and eventually he did so, having carried the majority of fans with him even in the darkest moments of December 1989’s rebellion.

Contrast this with the arrogant Van Gaal’s recent pronouncements, which ineluctably lead us to believe that he simply doesn’t get any of that — or if he does, he has decided to challenge it.

Witness the ‘70% possession vs. long ball’ false dichotomy that he provocatively hoisted a week ago; his faux-naif “but possession is attacking” plea; his “happy with the way we are playing” spiel at the weekend: all can only be taken as indications that he simply doesn’t accept our ongoing and increasingly vocal rejection of his joyless automatism.

He does at least concede that the team is not yet playing to his ideal philosophy; he could hardly do otherwise after Tuesday entombed his miserable continental failure this autumn.

But what is his ‘ideal’, when everything works as he wants it to do? It is something we will still likely hate, because it appears it will mean 80% careful, probing, stretching possession, eventually creating only a few chances, but ensuring they are ‘high potential’ ones that are almost all taken.

It means maximum ‘efficiency’ and coaching control, minimal ‘resource depleting’ pace and dribbling, all to the calibrated playbook manual, with any imaginative deviations to be detailed on his clipboard of disciplinary doom.

Well, that’s not our ideal canvas, oh Dutch master: that’s something we want to see rolled up and shoved into the nearest dyke hole.

You can bore us only for so long; but if you’re going to be both a bore and a loser, then perhaps it’s time for you to go?

Because it’s The United Way or the highway.”