Welcome to the Real World

While many were marking the 50th anniversary of Match of the Day last Friday by trawling through gloopy memories of days when it felt like more than two clubs might win the League, two things stuck out like sore thumbs. Firstly -  and as a man very sure-footed about which way he swings I can say this without fear of innuendo - wasn't that Alan Hansen a dishy-looking fella back in the day? Two, Hansen's equally confident assertion that 'You'll never win anything with kids' rang down the decades.

Well, I've won a few things with my kids: nothing tangible but it's opened the way to a few conversations with idle young Mums in the park that I wouldn't have started otherwise. Since my two have got older I've stopped hanging around them swings - you get the wrong sort of reputation.

But it's seems poignant on the morning after Manchester United were thrashed by MK Dons (a football team and not a middle-range gentleman's outfitters) 4-0 to ask whatever happened to United's production line of junior talent.

This morning Louis Van Gaal must have walked on to the training ground like a farmer who wakes up to find he's left the door to the coop wide open. All them pretty little chickens torn to shreds.

Okay, it was the League Cup, and Van Gaal predictably put out the B team, complete with a few children from the youth squad. The way they played, though, you'd think this was the Z team. Arsene Wenger does the same thing in this competition and never gets so utterly demolished by the lower ranks. (He tends to leave such humiliations for first team away fixtures).

Van Gaal insists this wasn't a shock for him. Presumably when he puts his fingers in a light-bulb socket he feels nothing. I'm sure it was a huge shock to Angel Di Maria. And don't be fooled Man U fans - just cos he called Angel doesn't mean he'll be supplying any divine intervention. Yes Di Maria has a lot of qualities but resurrecting the near-dead isn't one of them.

And actually, even by today's standards I would have thought £60 million for a talented but inconsistent winger seems a helluva lot to me. Adam Johnson would've cost a tenth of that.

There's one person in the country who I'm sure is finding it hard to resist a chipper little whistle as he trots down to the paper shop this morning: David Moyes. Oh yes, when LVG tells the press 'we're in a rebuilding process' I'm sure the Gollum-faced Chosen One nods sagely and mutters 'Good Luck with that one'.

Van Gaal has a track record of starting badly in his management role - Bayern nearly sacked him after three months before he turned it round. But this is altogether different. The Dutchman has not just been charged with turning around a huge oil tanker - he's first got to haul the bloody thing off its side and stop it gurgling gunk all over Old Trafford.

The back three so beloved of the manager is obviously going to take years to bed in. He's forgotten that he's given this new formation to a set of predominantly British centre-backs, who have always formed part of a pair. Indeed Jonny Evans played like a man who couldn't count past two last night. (Although I expect another impressive Arsenal striker on loan might have changed that when he made it 3-0. Arsene has Afobe and Campbell and still Sanogo's first in the queue?).

Of course, Welbeck and Hernandez aren't going to be starting many games ahead of Mata, Rooney, RVP and Di Maria but it makes you wonder what Van Gaal has in mind up front. You could see the 3-5-2 operating like Holland's in the World Cup, with Van Persie in the same mode and Di Maria doing a Robben impression. That would be the longest-faced front two in football history of course.

It would leave Mata prompting a la Sneijder and Rooney, the ever-flexible Rooney, being pushed one way or the other to accommodate these game-changers. It's evident that United's squad is going to be puddle-deep this season but if an understanding can be built between the forward players then they might just bring enough firepower to offset the glaring almost Brazilian sized holes at the back.

(By the way, I should of course have given MK Dons the credit they deserve after a fine performance. But one, the name still sticks in the craw of an old traditionalist like meself - 27000 fans would disagree I'm sure - and two, whether they like it or not, the story is how shit United were.)

But the fact is Van Gaal has not started well - far worse in fact than Moyes - he hasn't so much hit the ground running as hit the ground digging. And he may have a lot more of that to do before he find where to put his foundations. At least Moyes, theoretically at least, had an established first choice back four to pick.

And you know for all the glory of his tenure, I'd still lay much of this at the door of Alex Ferguson. When you hand on a torch to the next man it's best that the torch still burns brightly, rather than it sputtering away cos someone's just pissed on it.

Fergie did of course win the Premier League in his last season. That he did that is more miraculous than Liverpool's almost championship last season, or Sunderland's great escape. The reins he handed to Moyes were slippery as hell. Van Gaal hasn't even found where Moyes left them quite yet.

But, given that Alan Hansen's tenure at Match of the Day coincided with years of relentless and to most of us bloody irritating years of United dominance, this bleak period in Old Trafford's history is very welcome.

Yes, United fans, this is what it is like to be a regular supporter of a football club. You hope to goodness that your young local players might arrive fully-formed into a senior eleven and lift your struggling regulars to heights undreamt of. You hope that you too can win something with kids, that a Beckham and a Scholes, a Giggs and hell even a Neville are lurking in that youth team.

But as Hansen said, it doesn't really happen. Not twice any road.

So (barring spending 131 million quid in two months) Welcome to the Real World, Angel.