Louis van Gaal the BIOGRAPHY PDF
MARCH TO THE BEAT OF A DIFFERENT DRUM
‘I am a very consistent, honest and direct person. And sometimes that
strikes people as being hard.’
Louis van Gaal .
The story goes that the Dutch club SC Telstar asked the KNVB (the
Dutch FA) if its team could start playing on a blue pitch.
The KNVB
turned to FIFA to settle this bewildering question. Why blue, when
everyone has been so happy, for so long, with playing on a green field?
It would be unfair to lay the blame for causing such confusion in the
sacred halls of the highest football authorities at the feet of Louis van
Gaal, but one cannot help but wonder if, somehow, this persistent
troublemaker is not the engine generating such unorthodox ideas.
Van
Gaal has been proven to champion innovations that others would hesitate
to endorse.
Although he agreed that nothing beats the smell of freshly
sprayed grass pitches in the early morning sun, he has also embraced
artificial turf:
‘Then every ground in the world would be the same, which
I prefer over the extreme differences in quality of grass pitches.
’ The
current match schedule indeed leaves little time for a pitch to recover,
which can be detrimental to the quality of the football on display.
The
development of artificial turf has reached its ‘third generation’ which
constitutes a mix of synthetics and grass.
Most professional teams have at
least one training ground equipped with it.
After falling from the managerial heights of his golden 1990s, perhaps
van Gaal, like all wise men, has realised that the highs and the lows in
football are married to each other.
His rehabilitation began at AZ
Alkmaar and was completed at Bayern Munich in 2010.
He is never one
to rest on his laurels though, and football has long been on the alert for
relentless van Gaal activity – be it verbal, tactical or ideological.
Long
before the start of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, for example, van
Gaal was already offering his forthright opinions:
‘Little boys all over the
world saw that one of the biggest stars of today’s football cheated.
[Thierry] Henry used his hands to shoot France to the World Cup.
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