A picture can tell a thousand words, can't it?
The emoji equivalent of LVG's face in this pic? 😡 pic.twitter.com/kTVQpLDvnH
— Newstalk's Team 33 (@teamthirtythree) August 30, 2015
That's a clearly contented looking Louis van Gaal leaving the Liberty Stadium after a third defeat in a row at the hands of Swansea since taking over the club.
But while Garry Monk seems to have some mystical (and mostly tactical) hold over Van Gaal at present, the result also highlighted some of the defensive and attacking issues that United face.
But I want to focus on the support play behind Wayne Rooney. The captain may be misfiring and not in his optimum position, but Mata (who did score the Reds' only goal against Swansea), Memphis Depay and Ander Herrera need to be regular goalscoring options, which is easier said than done.
Inverting The Pyramid author Jonathan Wilson made an interesting point in The Guardian a couple of days before the Swansea defeat, saying that Van Gaal's mechanised take on Total Football means that attacking players can be "inhibited" by the need to immediately switch to a defensive mindset when possession.
United have emphasised possession under Van Gaal and had a 65 per cent share against Swansea, but as they build up the pitch, the attacking midfielders have to be outlets for passes, which means their runs are not always tailored to get into goalscoring positions.
Is that what is preventing the line of three behind Van Gaal from making runs into the box? Who knows! But certainly some of United's best chances - and the Mata goal - came when the supporting cast behind Rooney made their rare forays into the box.
Mata received the ball in the box four times, three of which resulted in a chance or goal. Here are Herrera's passes to Mata on the Four Four Two Stats Zone app with light blue arrows signifying passes which resulted in chances:
However, it did not happen often enough with, Memphis and Herrera barely receiving passes into the box between them.
As former Ireland defender Paddy Mulligan said on the Monday Rewind podcast: "They have to start playing aggressive football and when they have the ball, attack in strength," he said, adding that the strength in Alex Ferguson's time was the midfielders' willingness to push into the box.
"You'd nearly effectively six or seven players in the opponents' 18-yard box. Now you're lucky if you have one. The goal that Mata scored yesterday was a ball into Rooney that missed Rooney and Mata was at the far post. They were the only two people in the box.
"You need your midfielders coming through. That's the modern game and when you don't have that, you've got problems. Van Gaal was talking rubbish yesterday about having 'well, we had 85 per cent possession'. I don't care what possession they had. They didn't have possession where it mattered and that was the 18-yard box."
But of course, that has to be balanced with a need to be cautious defensively in order not to be caught on the counter-attack and that is the challenge for Van Gaal: finding the optimum balance between defence and attack.
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