Louis Van Gaal is a serious coach. He wins titles everywhere he goes. When Manchester United took the decision to appoint him in the wake of David Moyes’s departure, it looked like a shrewd move - regain success quickly and build later.

But that success doesn’t look inevitable just at the moment. Van Gaal has brought a competitivity back to Manchester United, he’s brought them Champions League football and they’ll look to push on from their fourth place finish and challenge for the title again this season. He’s done what was expected of him thus far, but nothing more.

Since taking over at the club, Van Gaal has spent nearly a quarter of a billion pounds on talent from all over the world. His side is filled with players signed for huge sums who either start - sometimes in strange positions - or sit on the bench. He’s had bad luck with injuries too, it must be noted, but Van Gaal sometimes seems to be playing the role of a Russian oligarch’s spouse, spending stupid amounts of money just for the sake of spending it.

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In order to surpass expectations, any team of individuals must play as more than just the sum of their parts. But the Manchester United machine is built up of interchangeable cogs, there was one strange opposite-day at Old Trafford last season when Robin Van Persie and Wayne Rooney found themselves in midfield as Marouane Fellaini played up front. Truly, Van Gaal’s dream is to have a fluid system of players who slot into a new position when needed.

But whatever the system at United this season, United need some focal points. You can’t just have everything changing unless everyone can do the specialised jobs - like keeping the ball out of the net or putting the ball into it. Players with the capability of finding the net look thin on the ground for Manchester United just now. Last season’s top scorer in the United side - that is, the current United player with the most league goals in the 2014-15 season - is Memphis Depay with 22, next place is Wayne Rooney with 12.

If Depay manages 22 league goals this season then he’ll be exactly the kind of specialised player I’m talking about. But 22 goals in Holland doesn’t translate into 22 goals in England, he’s already shown us he’s got talent, but he’ll have to do a lot more than that to bang the goals in with that kind of regularity.

Some positions on the pitch are specialised, but that doesn’t mean other players can’t do it. Wayne Rooney is incredibly high on the list of all-time top scorers for both club and country, and even in Premier League history. It would be unfair to say that he isn’t a goalscorer, then, but it would also be untrue to say that he’s an all-out goal poacher or a sniffer-out of chances. Clearly if Rooney isn’t a ‘specialised’ player, he still does a good job of scoring the goals a more ‘specialised’ player - like Van Nistelrooy, for example - would score.

Manchester United are filled with these less-specialised, jack-of-all-trades players. Mata is a great creative midfielder, but neither a winger nor an attacker. Januzaj has been playing in the middle of late, he’s not the winger we thought he could be, but he doesn’t look like a number 10 just yet. Memphis is the player with the sharpest cutting edge, but he’s playing more as a winger for the moment. They’re all doing a job, but none are doing any one specific job.

And that’s the way Van Gaal wants it. He wants to have everyone pitching in and doing things for the team, he wants integration not specialisation. When he tells us that his goalkeepers need to be good on their feet and show good distribution, what he means is, ‘my goalkeeper is just as much an attacker as the rest of my team’.

Louis Van Gaal seems to want to pass around the opposition, camp out in the final third and smother the opponent into submission. Formation goes out the window when your players are standing in an arc around the 18-yard box. His team are like a blunt weapon. If you hit something with a hammer for long enough, it’ll probably crack. United’s defeat at home to West Brom in May saw the Red Devils manage 26 shots and 80% possession, yet they still lost.

It’s all well and good to hit the opposing defence with a hammer, but sometimes no cracks appear. If, instead of drawing defenders out of position and leaving cracks in the defence, the opposition simply nick the ball and set up a counter, then you have real problems.

Sometimes hammers aren’t needed. Sometimes swords work better. Having that one player with the ability to penetrate the defence will make goalscoring that much easier than United are making it at the moment. For all their nice and silky play, they just need to be more swordsman-like, more swashbuckling. Forget about making cracks in the defence, and just slice straight through its heart.

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