Feel free to think what you want. Van Gaal's ideas are all down in book form for you to read, including his rules for what players do in special situations. He is obsessed with detail, and if he subbed Krul on for penalties, it's because Krul was better at penalties, for sure. But also that he had a better chance of acting on scouting information than the starting keeper. There was less luck than preparation involved here. I would hazard that if Van Gaal wasn't going to be United's manager, people would be praising this to the heavens.
And if the dutch were to lose, nobody would be talking about how he analyzes his opponents.
While I do agree that penalties are a mix of luck and technique, I must say that, the instructions given to Krul about the opposition were spot on. But, what made that so accurate? If we are talking about how well Van Gaal prepares before the match here, then I am sure, as a coach of the Costa Rican national team, Pinto too knows what kind of a coach Van Gaal is and what he would be up against when it all came down to a penalty shoot-out. While the Dutch might have worked on which directions the Costa Rican players would go this time based upon the previous penalty kicks taken by them in the previous game ( might as well be 10 games, who knows), then here the Dutch will depend on a pattern which they have worked upon and hope that Costa Rica continue on that pattern, so that would provide the data for Krul who will now have to hope for Costa Rica to stick to that pattern and prove the data right.
So ultimately it comes down to whether or not Costa Rica would continue to stick to that pattern or not, which is again a gamble
Assuming that Costa Rica do have a pattern .
So maybe Pinto thought that the Dutch would do the opposite and instead instructed the players to stick with the same pattern, but guess what, this time Van Gaal didn't choose to do the opposite and the Dutch won.
But nobody talked about how obsessed Pinto is with his 'data' because they lost to Van Gaal's data and people were ready to praise Van Gaal here on RAWK but slowly, yes slowly, they started realizing that he is the manager of Manchester United and they instead started praising the, guess what, data... or the paper or the pad no, no it's surely the pen.
And not so surprisingly the winner ends-up being praised for the usage of Data and
skill which is 50% of the penalty-taking tactics and the loser starts thinking about what gave up on him, the luck or the data. Surely, it is the luck, because he didn't have a data in the first place, which is quite obvious as he ended up being on the losing side.
Surely you do have your 'data' about Van Gaal and you have the right to stick with it, but I was merely analyzing it.