This is the post about an 'aggressive pressing game' - with a picture of a goal kick! I fucking love this guy's logic.
This picture summed up most of this game for me. You could throw a net over all 20 outfield players. It was a lot like this in the Spurs game too. Both teams playing an aggressive pressing game, squeezing the life out of the match and leaving no space to play any football. That is the direction modern football has been going in for a long while now and we did need to replace Sir Alex with someone like van Gaal to modernise our football because as much as people dislike van Gaal, you can't possibly deny that this is a mile away from how we played under Sir Alex.
Whether that's a good thing or not is another debate entirely but to call him a fraud as some people have is just silly IMO. We're a very well coached team, far more so than we have been in a long time. There are a lot of other areas to management than coaching and of course Sir Alex far exceeded van Gaal in many areas but this is something that Sir Alex never could do. I expect we'll overperform in Europe because of that to the same degree that we underperformed under Sir Alex.
I don't expect to win a title under van Gaal but I won't see him as a failure if we don't. He's laying the foundations just as he did at other clubs and it's impossible not to see that in the way we play. The way we play is painfully structured and devoid of creativity and flair so I already look forward to another manager coming in and releasing the shackles, but that doesn't take away from the fact that playing and being coached in this way is improving some fundamental qualities in our team that needed to be addressed.
We played stone age football under Moyes partly because he's a traditional British manager but also partly because they were conditioned to play that way under Sir Alex. We shouldn't lose sight of that.
