THE routine is wearing thin.

Real thin.

The numbers say that Manchester United are fourth in the table, on track for a Champions League spot next season. That's the minimum objective this season, the one that helps avoid some £35 million to £60m in lost revenue, from revised sponsorships to European income.

On the flip-side, United are headed towards their second consecutive trophyless season. They had the highest wage bill in the Premier League last season and they will likely set the record again this year.

And, of course, there's that net spend of £120m, again a high-water mark.

Louis van Gaal arrived with the tag of visionary and, had the script played out a certain way, you could live with it in hope for better times. After all, this is the manager who talks about philosophy, about playing football the "right way", about attacking and entertainment and creativity. All those buzzwords which, to be fair, he has delivered on for much of his career even when results didn't go his way.

But this Van Gaal doesn't follow the script. This one seems tentative and uncertain, both when it comes to team selection and tactics. He rotates men and he rotates systems as if he were trying to find the right formula. Or throws concepts up at the wall to see what sticks. Players appear and disappear and you don't quite get why. Juan Mata makes eight consecutive starts playing all but three minutes between November and New Years' Day. Since then, he's made one Premier League start.

And then there's Ander Herrera. A fixture in the starting XI early in the season, he disappeared until mid-February, making just one start (against Yeovil in the FA Cup) and is now again a bona fide starter.

Wayne Rooney is sometimes a striker, sometimes a midfielder. Radamel Falcao, misses a crunch FA Cup game against Arsenal but instead turns out for the Under 21s.

Yet what gets you most is just how poorly United play. You can count on two hands the number of matches where they actually looked good, Van Gaal-like. Games when they didn't just rely on individuals or opposition errors or, ahem, long balls to Marouane Fellaini. Indeed, the fact that the Belgian, but for a foot injury which nixed his transfer to Napoli in late August, shouldn't even be there tells you all you need to know. If there is a plan, it gets shredded and re-written on a near-weekly basis.

And that simply doesn't fit the Van Gaal as visionary script. There are mitigating factors to explain it. He took over the team in late July and you get the sense it's only then that he started to really think about what was needed. It's his first season in a country where he's never worked. He hasn't managed a club side in four years, since the debacle at Bayern. And Ed Woodward, United's chief executive, didn't exactly deliver a balanced, well-assorted squad.

Woodward is so invested in Van Gaal that you can't see a parting of the ways, unless the Dutchman walks away. He'll get another year. But without some sort of vision or plan coming together - and doing so convincingly, even if results don't always follow - the fallout won't just affect Van Gaal, but the guy who put him there as well. That's why the turnaround needs to begin. Ideally starting with today against Tottenham Hotspur.

HE did it again. Played them like puppets on a string.

There were two dominant storylines coming out of Chelsea's elimination from the Champions League. One was the fact that Jose Mourinho knocked on the door of the Paris Saint-Germain dressing room and personally shook the hand of every single PSG player. The other was the behaviour of the Chelsea players in surrounding the Dutch referee, Bjorn Kuipers, which brought out the usual tut-tuts from the commentariat.

Neither narrative address the basic fact that Chelsea, over two legs, were distinctly sub-par. They could easily have conceded three or four at the Parc des Princes had it not been for Thibaut Courtois' heroics. And at Stamford Bridge they were incapable of closing out the game while playing 89 minutes with a man advantage (and not just any man, but a He-man like Zlatan Ibrahimovic).

Instead of an inquest on what went wrong - lots - and perhaps noting the fact that they haven't beaten any Premier League team by more than a single goal since mid-January, the media are talking about player behaviour, a theme fueled by Mourinho himself when he had pops at Jamie Carragher and Graeme Souness on Friday.

That's part of what makes Mourinho the manager he is. Insulate the players from the real issues and give the public something else to talk about, while working to fix what ails Chelsea in private. And we'll get a better sense of how he's getting on in that department this afternoon when Southampton visit West London.

BY this time next week, there could be no English teams left in European competition. Everton's 2-1 home win over Dinamo Moscow will be by no means unassailable when they travel to the Russian capital on Thursday. By that point, Arsenal and Manchester City will be called upon to overtun heavy deficits - 1-3 and 1-2 respectively - in Monaco and Barcelona.

If they come up short - and even if they don't because, well, it's Everton and it's the Europa League - it might be time to ask just how Premier League clubs spend their money, particularly with the £5.1 billion domestic TV deal on the horizon. Each case is different of course and, yes, things are cyclical (but if this were a down cycle, why would the money keep growing the way it's growing?) yet there's clearly some kind of collective failure at work here. Ask yourself how many of the Premier League's European representatives consistently played well all season and you may find only Chelsea (until recently) and (arguably) Arsenal fit the bill. It seems pretty obvious that some poor choices were made from the top down. You wonder if someone will pay a price for this.