Visit www.awolonline.net
don’t count
on it!
Van Gaal calls for an end
to numbers in football
england
LOUIS van Gaal has claimed that football must
be freed from the shackles of maths.
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 injuryprone 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
Left: Van Gaal ponders whether
he should ask Ryan Giggs about
borrowing his calculator for the rest
of the match
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.
Van Gaal has had possibly surprising support
for his view, at least this week, from Liverpool
boss Brendan Rodgers, who said, “I think he’s
right - the quality of the goals scored should
far outweigh the actual number; for instance
Raheem Sterling’s effort was clearly enough
to win the game against West Ham on its own,
regardless of how many they scored.”
24
Sell it fast with AWOL Classifieds