Van Gaal’s horny bit of double Dutch should not be used as a stick to beat him

More horny? Good grief, that’s the very last thing we need. Purely in terms of productivity, most men would be far better for a gelding operation. As castrati, we would probably deliver a cure for cancer in the morning, world peace by dusk, and conceivably even have time in the evening to save Villa from relegation. As it is, vaulting ambition takes most of our daydreams no higher than a window-cleaner’s ladder.

So we can only imagine the effect of Louis van Gaal’s exhortations on young men in their physical prime, idolised by thousands, their wealth matched only by their leisure. If the devil can make such work for those of us who actually have to work for a living, what distractions might he devise for hands so idle that only one bloke in 11 is allowed to use them even when he’s working?

At the same time, the Manchester United manager is definitely on to something in imploring his men to greater concupiscence. According to behavioural psychologists, high achievers in even the least frivolous spheres of human activity are sustained – at some latent, animal level – by a primal urge for sexual status. Politician or poet, oncologist or oligarch, actor or athlete: they all strive, however subliminally, to lead the herd; and so, ultimately, to preserve a bloodline. True, western civilisation has matured to discourage too literal an approach. It is not unknown, nowadays, even for Cabinet Ministers or indeed footballers to be uxorious family men. In some cases, however, the celebrity’s sense of droit de seigneur remains bestially unreconstructed. Wherever his men stand in this spectrum, the fact is that Van Gaal would have little use for a team of eunuchs.

Be that as it may, the man deserves our sympathy. Without expressly saying so, many people seem determined somehow to conflate Van Gaal’s eccentric English with his alleged emasculation of Old Trafford’s attacking heritage. He will only ever be credited with inadvertent entertainment: the law of Murphy, horny football, we can still win the title. But it’s hard to think of anything more anomalous than for so many Britons to be sniggering at a Dutchman for his inadequacies in a foreign language. (Anybody here know the Dutch for “passionate”?) Unless, perhaps, we remember how many of those now mocking Van Gaal also lampooned Andre Villas-Boas whenever, vaunting his unpardonable linguistic felicity, he snared himself in too baroque a formula.

To some, such verbal tangles implicitly exposed AVB’s cardinal offence: namely, the importing of all these cosmopolitan, fancy-dan theories that football coaches sometimes require something a little more elaborate than the instructions of his predecessor at Spurs – that florid John Bull, Harry Redknapp – to Roman Pavlyuchenko’s translator: “Just tell him to effing run around a bit.”

Yet this distaste for cerebration is hardly consistent with universal veneration for Pep Guardiola, not just as a strategist but also as a walking Tower of Babel; or indeed for Jose Mourinho, at least back in the days when everyone thought of him as Che Guevara rather than Stalin, rocking up and using Milanese dialect in his first Internazionale press conference. Villas-Boas, it seems, was simply too preppy; the incarnation of football’s sell-out to the middle classes, to the soccerati who had disenfranchised the terraces. (People, presumably, like that philosopher who threw a coin at Chris Brunt last week.)

Anyone who has made respectable progress in another language will recognise and indulge those transliterations that suggest themselves to bridge a sudden void in what you’re trying to say. John Toshack apparently used to do this in Spain, where the local press were respectively mystified and affronted when he said things like “not my cup of tea” or “pigs might fly”. Gianluca Vialli once spoke of the need for teams to be strong in March, “when the fish” are down. (Fiche, in Italian, are gambling chips.) Sometimes, conversely, an imported expression can seem so apt that it enters the local lexicon, as for instance when Mourinho introduced a Portuguese idiom about “parking the bus”. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before a collective osmosis by Hispanic coaches induces Sam Allardyce to talk of one of his players as being “in a good moment”.

Van Gaal is evidently already known in Spain as not quite measuring up to the humbling linguistic standards of his compatriots; while his weirdly glottal delivery completes an irresistible invitation to parodists. But just because something is lost in translation, that doesn’t qualify all these insular, condescending inferences that Van Gaal must be a loser in any language. Certainly his English is a lot better than my Dutch and, I daresay, than “Schteve” McClaren’s. Of course, we’d all be glad enough to take evening classes. But how many of us are going to find the time, when we’re so busy thinking about sex? That’s one field, after all, where we can learn still more about “the law of Murphy” than we do from football.