TERRACE TALK: Man United - Bumbling Louis van Gaal takes giant leap backwards

Cue jaunty ’70s Americana theme tune. Previously, on last week’s episode of Soap: “Derby, Stoke, and Chelsea are all either poor sides or in poor form, so we shouldn’t get carried away... we just don’t want to see any trace of the ancien régime again.”

Ha! So much for that briefest interregnum. We feel like Henry VI’s Lancastrians witnessing the prompt return of the Yorkist Edward IV to power. The ancien regime’s back, and it’s even more hope-sappingly brutal than ever.

The second half at Sunderland was quite a thing to have to swallow, wrapping up everything we had come to loath about this season in one handy 45-minute fajita of farce. As I write, on so-called Super Sunday, the contrast with Shite Saturday is painful. The TV screen flickers with the exertions of genuine title contenders, while the sad memory lingers of our own sorry shower, apparently condemned in the words of both our manger and captain to hoping for the best in the Europa League.

That Van Gaal himself should have offered the line about the much-derided tournament being our likeliest route into next season’s Champions League was shockingly unexpected. You can’t blame some cynical Reds for wondering whether he has reached the point where he is actually trying to get sacked, thereby acquiring the consequent hefty pay-off.

Certainly, he seems to be realistic about his life expectancy. I expect it to be revealed today that he has insisted on a rolling monthly rental contract on his expensive new penthouse, rather than commit to the standard six-month lease; hardly the action of a man confident in the future. And pathos drenched his response on Friday, when he weakly said he had not asked Ed Woodward about the club’s plans, sounding like a man who’d rather not pose a question that might prompt a discomforting answer.

The stats look harsh for Louis too, especially when the comparisons with his predecessor, Poor David, are wheeled out. A year ago, when things were getting bumpy, we used to console ourselves that we would never get to the “worse than Moyes” stage. But on the current points-per-games tally, and with non-CL qualification looming, he can hardly claim to be better. And even Moyes managed to punch his way out of a CL group, whereas you’d fear for Louis inside a paper bag.

Van Gaal had asserted before the game that the coaches and players were all “pulling in the same direction”. Perhaps so, but which direction would that be, then? For about the dozenth time, we appear to have just witnessed over the past fortnight the well-worn LVG United manoeuvre of two tentative steps forward, followed by a huge one back. Which would make the ultimate direction, umm, standing still. A position that at least makes it easier for LVG to continue digging that grave-shaped hole for himself with his every public utterance.

Off we now go to what Reds have been calling ‘Midgetland’ aka the unpronounceable and unspellable club we face in Thursday’s Europa clash. A fitting destination for giants ripe for felling, you may feel. Potentially worse, in the giantkilling stakes, then awaits at Shrewsbury in the FA Cup, a tie with ‘career-ender’ written all over it.

But any sanely objective paper analysis would decree comfortable United wins in both these matches, with the pressure on the boss subsequently easing — just in time for the next likely slap in the face, against Arsenal, to ratchet it up again.

That’d be two staggers forwards, one leap back... it’s like deja vu all over again.

Sigh. When will this Fresian fandango farrago end? No wonder so many Reds are rewording the call of another Plantagenet Henry: “Won’t some good knight rid us of this turbulent pest?”