When asked if they can still win the championship this season, the default answer from Van Gaal and his players is consistently a defiant 'yes'. The latest in a long line of such forecasts comes from Michael Carrick, here.
It's a very telling response. No doubt its intention is to convey an impression of self-belief to the outside world: no matter how unconvincing we've looked this season, it wants to say, within the camp we're still convinced we can do it.
Only it really betrays something else: a sense that no one really believes it, least of all the manager and the players themselves.
Any club that truly aspires to be champions at this stage of the season inevitably gives a far more cautious response to such a question: witness the guarded, taking-one-game-at-a-time answers given by Ranieri or Pochettino. It's not so much that they're concerned at how foolish they'll look if their proclamation turns out to be ill-founded (otherwise known as 'Doing a Brendan Rodgers'); it's more that, cliched as it may be, keeping a focus on that next game is really all that matters in football.
Any manager worth his salt knows this. If you make the target something too far off in the distance, something too difficult to grasp, you risk taking your eyes off the more immediate aim: three points in the next game.
Van Gaal, whatever faults may have been detected in his make-up of late, is too experienced a manager not to know this too. That's why a response like 'yes, we can still win the league' not only really means its opposite, it's also indicative of far too much concern about what other people think. Most of all it betrays a lack of focus that's been United's real problem all season.
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