LOUIS van Gaal has claimed that football must be freed from the shackles of maths.
“It’s not about balls going between posts”The United manager is unwilling to acknowledge the goals scored over the weekend in numerical terms.
He said: Can a number describe the majesty of a volley? Or the sweet smell of newly mown grass? Or how much leveraged debt the club is currently in?
The game is a beautiful, flowing work of physical poetry that shouldn’t be sullied with the base functionality of, for instance, how many million we paid to borrow an injury-prone mercenary.
For Saturday’s game against West Ham he has proposed an interim measure of deciding the game based on which team George Best was most likely to play for if he was still alive.
The Dutchman has dismissed other number alternatives such as Arsene Wenger’s suggestion of alphabetical placings or Crystal Palace’s proposed ranking system based on how much a team sounds like a Disneyland ride.
Van Gaal’s experiment is thought to be influenced by the 1968-69 Eredivisie when a Dutch FA, led by a contingent of jazz musicians and free-form poets, awarded the title to Feyenoord for having really beautiful moustaches.
