FA Cup should not protect Van Gaal from the sack

With Roberto Martinez now, as far as Everton are concerned, a dead man, it would be tempting to think that Saturday’s victory means anything for the future of Louis van Gaal. In his eyes, too, he seemed to finally have lost the belligerent outlook in the face of questions about his future. He had just taken United as close to silverware as they had been since Alex Ferguson’s departure, and all Van Gaal could do was rail against meaningless refereeing decisions.

Perhaps he had finally realised that however many games he won, he would not win around supporters who were sickened by his approach to football. His philosophy, as he describes it, is safety first and fun last. People who have eyes at Old Trafford have started to stay away, quite reasonably.

Perhaps he had realised that he was never going to win around the players. In the Premier League his side have become slow, happy to wait for the end of the season, following his instructions and suffering the consequences. After the failure of these methods in the Champions League, and then the Europa League, it seems that frustration has led to the players going their own way in the FA Cup. When it comes to knockout games, such as the first half against West Ham in the replay, and then against Everton, they have shown they are capable of actually trying to attack. The best football of the season - and this is saying very little by way of meaningful praise - has been when United’s players have played at odds with Van Gaal’s instructions.

Or, perhaps most likely, he realised that he could no longer win around the board. Alex Ferguson had been fighting his corner, even if it was only to keep him as a placeholder before his pet, Ryan Giggs, might be allowed to take over. But Ferguson’s influence has rightly diminished after the debacle of David Moyes. Another protector of Van Gaal, Ed Woodward, desperately wanted to keep him on board to keep scrutiny away from his own performance, but things have changed.

There are stories that Mourinho has been preparing for the job since he left Chelsea in December, that he has contacted United players, and even that he has signed for United. There are discussions, it seems, for Renato Sanches of Benfica, who shares an agent with Mourinho. If you wanted to build a case for a deal being done for Mourinho already, you would have plenty to go on, at least. Perhaps, to Van Gaal, he has read too many stories and heard from too many of his own contacts that a deal is on its way to being completed, if it hasn’t been already.

And yet, a few people still happily make the case for Van Gaal in the aftermath of the victory. The reasons used to do this are easily dismissed, but they carry with them a kind of dishonest persuasiveness.

The first is that a victory might buy him time to perfect what he wants, and that the FA Cup would be proof that his methods are achieving something. Yet one should remember that the squad Van Gaal has now is no better than the one he had at the end of last season. The football played is now the worst it has been compared to the occasionally fun stuff played in the early stages of last season. He has spent a quarter of a billion pounds to make things worse, a barely credible feat. He has shorn a squad of Shinji Kagawa, Radamel Falcao, Robin van Persie, Angel Di Maria, Luis Nani, Javier Hernandez, Danny Welbeck and others. Selling those players is, individually, justifiable. To have barely stocked up on attacking players - and then have the gall to complain about their absence in the squad - shows he is out of his depth.

And the other point used in his defence, as commentators waxed lyrical about in the victory over Everton, is that he is championed as a man to give a chance to youth sides. He picked Marcus Rashford because James Wilson is in Brighton, Wayne Rooney is awful, and Marouane Fellaini - his designated second striker - could not perform. He played his best striker, Anthony Martial, on the wing. Will Keane was injured in the FA Cup. That is not giving youth a chance deliberately, that is fluke borne of negligence. The same for Timothy Fosu-Mensah, given Van Gaal suffered the injury to Luke Shaw, Antonio Valencia and others, all as a result of an injury crisis that has dragged on unacceptably since the start of his tenure.

It’s the same situation for others: Paddy McNair, James Weir, Cameron Borthwick-Jackson and Jesse Lingard (not as young, but from the same pool of players, essentially). All this is Van Gaal’s failure to buy enough senior players has resulted in him throwing chunks of manure at a wall to see what sticks. It is luck, by no means judgement.

In the post-match interview. Van Gaal should have been beaming. For a few minutes, he would have been able to enjoy the bonhomie of the squad, and the optimism of being able to end his career, probably, by lifting one of the most famous cups in the world, at Wembley. He wouldn’t have had to be aggressive or antagonistic, or dismissive. He could have left on a high point. Instead, because of his mistakes in management and with the press, with the fans and the players, he has backed himself into a corner, at the same time as realising he is almost certain to lose his job. There are not many men who could make an FA Cup victory seem a low point of a a retirement - it seems Van Gaal could be about to pull it off anyway.