This opinion lark doesn't require much besides the conceit that you're right about everything. Since everyone instinctively believes that about themselves what distinguishes the pro is an ability to know everything about everything on cue. It's a definitive world where doubt is a stranger, a world that turns Louis Van Gaal into a punchline.

There are many more worthy recipients of pity than the millionaire Manchester Utd manager famous for his high opinion of himself. Yet, even though it's hard to look at Van Gaal's CV and argue against him being a substantial football figure, much of this season has become an exercise in ridiculing the Dutchman as some loony ignoramus hopelessly out of his depth.

Now there’s so much grey in the real world that football provides welcome black-and-white relief, most importantly of all in the scoreline, but also in a multitude of opinion, which has upped the ante for those of us required to pin a name to our prejudices.

And the result increasingly seems to be either adulation or damnation by rote, an exercise in slotting names into a formulaic narrative of genius’s and clowns, chancers and paragons, the plucky underdog and the wolfishly greedy; cartoon stuff, broad-stroke stereotypes with little or no requirement for nuance.

I'll spare you some of the more fawning commentary that greeted Van Gaal's appointment on the back of David Moyes getting the chop at Old Trafford – although most of it came with a 'continental sophisticate' theme – and instead remind you of no less a verdict on Van Gaal than Alex Ferguson's at the time.

Notoriety

“He’s a great coach, he will do well,” opined the man who himself avoided hero-to-zero notoriety only through a legendary

Mark Robbins

goal. “When he gets the best players back, you watch United go.”

When a microphone is put in front of you it’s a real hard-ass who doesn’t feel a need to say something so there are automatic accusations of dirty pool when what you say one day is volleyed back at you the next. Just ask a politician, or indeed any reporter faced with space and a boss as disinterested in excuses as the audience is in ‘uhm’ or ‘ahm’ indecision.

It’s why the same hacks and pundits who heralded Van Gaal’s arrival in Manchester with messianic rhapsodies of welcome are mostly the same ones putting the boot in with such gusto. Remind them of their earlier assurance about Van Gaal being the right man in the right place and the response will probably be rueful shrugs and reminders about how this is the game we’re in.

And that’s true. Getting your wonkily judged words thrown back at you really can be dirty pool, something yours truly knows all about since the evidence of dodgy judgment is scattered daily all over the racing results. It’s a judgment that has managed to get thousands of ‘good-things’ stuffed and yet never seems to dilute editorial confidence in the next one. That’s the gig.

It’s the same gig which sees intimate psychological portraits painted of subjects on the back of a few snatched minutes of conversation – subjects the interrogator mightn’t even recognise again if they sat on their lap – that are invariably definitive. And that’s because this is a job best sustained on a diet of bellowing indignation, finger-jabbing certainty and a ‘f-you’ disregard for the any shade of grey.

Most of us don’t want to read ‘but on the other hand’ balance, or listen to righteous finger-wagging about differing but equally legitimate sides of the argument, all of which winds up like being locked in a cell with the Green Party. It doesn’t matter that they might be right: they’re boring, and the one thing truly impossible to argue with is boredom.

Since that’s primarily what Van Gaal is accused of his days probably are numbered, even allowing for beating Liverpool, although it is interesting to speculate how deep Old Trafford’s disaffection will run if boredom gets combined with success. But if he does eventually go, a new name will slot in and be well remunerated for becoming the latest character in world football’s craziest narrative.

Overwhelming blitz

But eventually you have to wonder if the fire of this overwhelming blitz of faux-outrage and ridiculous certitude, the microscopic 24/7 scrutiny, that insatiable appetite for the next big thing to provoke the latest screaming headline, actually produces any heat: is Van Gaal simply the latest figure reduced to a cartoon by the Premiership circus’s skewed perspective?

Despite his success in Holland, Spain and Germany, critics will say England has found him out. But it's just as likely that his stint, from a purely football point of view, has once again illustrated how the game in these islands exists in its own frenetic little bubble, with a hardly non-coincidental symptom being that international sides from here invariably get passed into oblivion at every World Cup.

Van Gaal believes in holding onto the ball on the hardly earth-shattering basis that if you have it the other team can’t score and you can. The current consensus is that that is boring, although it is essentially the same principle underlining the revered Barcelona side, which leaves us with a conclusion that the difference might be as simple as Manchester United’s players not being good enough.

Of course, that’s a hopelessly inexpert opinion, although I still get to put it out there. And there’s no escaping how LVG’s problems are very relative indeed.

However, the gig which turns him into a buffoon surely faces a credibility problem in a panto that is fast becoming noisy for noises sake, and comes accompanied by a white-hot spotlight that increasingly provides little actual illumination.

But what do I know?