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We have spoken all season about how Manchester United have been out of sorts going forward and, in his weekly column, Paul Scholes has underlined the problems that currently exist at Manchester United.

It does not give me any pleasure to say that at the moment I am struggling to watch Louis van Gaal’s team with any great enjoyment. They beat Burnley on Wednesday night but it was Burnley who had by far the best of the first half. At times, United’s football is miserable. To beat opposing teams you have to attack, and to attack you have to take risks. Too few of the players in the current team are prepared to take those risks.

We couldn’t put it better ourselves. It’s exactly how we see the problem. Manchester United’s current ethos seems to be ‘why create a chance with 2 passes when you can do it with 15?’.

It’s slow, zig-zaggy build up play which takes an eternity to get to the opposition goal mouth. And the double whammy with this sort of style is that it allows the opponent to get back into perfect shape. This makes it doubly hard to score.

The root of the problem lies in a midfield which is regularly bypassed and doesn’t have a Cesc Fabregas to open things up and speed up play. We think that it’s time to give Ander Herrera a chance in there to see if he’s up to the job.

Scholes continues:

Part of being a Manchester United player under Sir Alex Ferguson, perhaps the most important part of being one of United’s attacking players, was that when you were in possession you had to take risks in order to create goalscoring chances. It was not an option; it was an obligation.

Instructive words indeed. And we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Paul Scholes back in the dugout alongside Giggs and/or Gary Neville after Louis leaves Manchester United.