Earlier in this football season it became something of a repeat chore, most Mondays, to have a whinge at yet another calamitous performance during the weekend by Chelsea in their supposed defence of the Premier League title. It was a run which took them to just a point above the dropzone in December, leading to José Mourinho getting sacked and Guus Hiddink coming in to steady the ship with his grandfatherly light touch.
But on this particular Monday I'm not in the least bit bothered by Chelsea's form, or the fact they will end the season in mid-table mediocrity, or even that on Saturday they lost - for the first time in Hiddink's second spell at the club - to the team they played on the opening day of the season, resulting in a lot of harumphing, a doctor getting demoted, and the team diving into the steep decline that then followed.
No, this week's reappearance of the Monday Moan is about Manchester United, a club I have traditionally had little time for simply because we football fans are by nature tribal, that it's either your team or their team - it's that black and white - and Manchester United have always been the wrong tribe. Actually, the moan is specifically about the current Manchester United manager.
Yesterday, when asked by a reporter clearly more interested in sensation than news reporting whether Louis van Gaal regretted turning down an offer to manage Tottenham in 2014, the archly pompous Dutchman said: "I'm sorry for Tottenham but Manchester United is a bigger club," adding with customary arrogance and more than a drop of acid (though with some justification), "It is a little bit pathetic you asked that. It's easy to ask that but, ok, you enjoy yourself."
There is a reason why I have a dislike for Manchester United. And it is a dislike forged in nothing more than profound, unabated and prolonged envy. They have won 20 league titles, more than any other club in English history, 11 FA Cups, four League Cups, three European Cups, one European Cup Winners' Cup, a UEFA Super Cup, an Intercontinental Cup and a FIFA Club World Cup. Two years ago they were the world's second highest-earning club, with an annual revenue of Eur 518 million, and last year were rated the world's third most valuable club, worth slightly shy of $2 billion. They are still the world's most lucrative football brand, and "Bobby Moore" is still (along with "Benny Hill and "Mr. Bean") a universal cypher to striking up conversation around the world.
So van Gaal was absolutely right in saying that: "The challenge was bigger for me at Manchester United and shall always be bigger" because all that reputation is currently straining on his shoulders. The thing is, though, to come out with that on a day when United were so roundly beaten 3-0 by Spurs, and managed to upset everyone's equilibrium at White Hart Lane by the club bus arriving late because it had taken two hours to drive just eight miles from their central London hotel, is a demonstration of a brand of arrogance that van Gaal alone appears to have adopted without any justification for doing so.
The Man United of yore wasn't immune to embarassments, but somehow, even their journey to Tottenham yesterday seemed indicative of their season and, perhaps cruelly, of van Gaal's tenure, too. This is a club still shivvering in the cold shadow of Sir Alex Ferguson's seemingly unassailable 26-year reign. The hapless David Moyes was always going to be in receipt of a poisoned chalice when he took over. But when van Gaal replaced him in 2014, it would be reasonable to assume, given his history, that some semblance of normality would return to Old Trafford. But it hasn't, and after two years in charge - these days, a generous amount of time, even for a club in transition - van Gaal still hasn't restored Manchester United to the team that, as an opposing fan, you dreaded playing.
Yes, I admit, that I would wake up on the morning of league or cup fixtures between Chelsea and Manchester United with very real fear in my stomach. 22 years on I'm still scarred by the 4-0 mauling they gave us at Wembley in the FA Cup Final of 1994. For most of the 1990s we watched Manchester United behind our fingers. They had The Squad - strikers, the midfield, defenders, the goalkeeper, even the stadium, by which everyone else had to aspire. And they had the manager. Today?
I don't buy that van Gaal is still rebuilding. True, Ferguson left them in a lesser state than people will readily admit, but he hardly retired with the club he'd built in any serious disrepair, and certainly not that it could capitulate so poorly as they did in the space of a six minutes against Spurs yesterday. True, they were dogged opposition in the first half, but then what gave way in the second? And why?
Sure, van Gaal is playing a very young team, but so was his counterpart, Pochettino. And yet while Spurs' youngsters have been playing with a verve and vigour matched only by their title rivals Leicester, United's kids still look wet behind the ears. As was once famously said, you probably can't win anything with kids. Ferguson won his titles with the right mix of youth and experience - the youngsters providing the spice, the veterans providing the guile.
Van Gaal is, then, far closer in character to Arsène Wenger. Both can display staggering daddy-knows-best arrogance. And both can suffer from acute myopia. The difference is that van Gaal, who parades about with that leather folio case looking more like a chartered quantity surveyor than the manager of one of the greatest football clubs in the sport's history, is sometimes so puffed up with pomposity that he forgets the legacy of which he is the current custodian.
It hasn't all been that bad this season for United. But when you look at the overall picture of their wins, draws and losses in all competitions, it is still nowhere near the United we used to fear and loathe in equal measure, with all the jibes about buying titles and the politics of envy that football fans used to throw at the club.
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