Ruben Amorim looked like he hadn’t slept or had been crying. This is what managing Manchester United does even to the best of them. His media conference was in keeping with his team’s performance against Brighton: erratic, fraught with anxiety, control ebbing away.
He wants to confront the task head on, share with us his shock at the sheer scale of the job he has taken on. Laying it all on the line might be advisable before a counsellor, but it’s not management. In this context he is the counsellor, supposedly the guru with all the answers.
His job is not to appear vulnerable but invincible, to gather this rabble by the scruff of the neck and get results. Two wins in nine in the Premier League is not sustainable. His remarkable claim that this might just be the worst team in United history hardly helped his case since he is the man in charge of it. It all felt like an unravelling, like the man United went all out to get might be in too deep, beyond his capacity to cope.
These must be nervous times for Omar Berrada and Co, the top-tier technical department brought in at great expense to professionalise the football operation. How is that going, lads? One response to all of this is to dump it on the players, question their quality and commitment. Yet at Anfield and the Emirates that same group showed character and resolve.
It is the job of the coach to set the mood, to make the players feel good about themselves, to create an environment that optimises performance. These blokes are professional footballers. To get this far they will have had to stand out, to demonstrate the personality and character. The Premier League is not an apprenticeship, it’s an elite workplace for the highly qualified.
Amorim’s sensitivity dial is obviously turned up. His observation that the players are anxious and tense is insightful. Whilst this is fine, it begs the question after almost three months in charge why things are getting worse not better. And if he, his method and approach, is a contributory factor in failing to arrest the slide?
Amorim is clearly a reasonable man, you might even say too reasonable, too nice. The narrative of failure he rolls out might actually being facilitating it. It is his job to destress the space, to free those limbs, to bolster belief, to build confidence. All this “I can feel the tension” stuff is not helpful, however true it might be. It is for the coach to rouse them, to make them a team.
Performance is not a consequence of unseen forces but design and organisation. Amorim is wedded to a way of seeing the game, a tactical solution. His successes at United have come on the road, with the team packed into a compact shape designed to keep the opposition out. Fine, but that is not the United vision outlined by Sir Jim Ratcliffe when Ineos bowled in a year ago.
Amorim’s admission on Sunday that other teams are just better is an admission that they are better coached. Holding on to the supremacy of a grand design is fine if it’s working. To continue with a plan that is producing negative outcomes amounts to dogma. Brighton, like Southampton and Newcastle before them, were cohesive, adaptable and resolute, the players comfortable in their shape.
United are effectively playing golf swing, instead of golf, preoccupied with systems, endlessly computing where the shoulders should be relative to the hips and hands. They should instead be responding instinctively to what is around them. It seems that Amorim is overloading them with tactical ideas instead of getting them to play. “Enjoy yourself son”, was the extent of Sir Matt Busby’s instructions on match day.
It would appear the same tension that is crowding the players has claimed Amorim too. Welcome to Manchester United. The Premier League is emphatically not Portugal. There is no equivalence between the demands of managing Sporting and United. Thus is Amorim learning as much about himself as his players. There is no space to develop or time to build. Managing United is a fully immersive gig, a kill-or-be-killed habitat.
Amorim’s replacement at Sporting, Joao Pereira, was sacked before the year was out. Amorim is not there yet, but he might be unless he changes tack. That does not mean abandoning his big idea, but adapting to the lethal reality he faces. It seems Brighton at least taught him that. “We need to survive this moment because I’m not naïve. I know that we need to survive now. We need to win, games, that’s all,” he said.
Well, indeed. Rangers in the Europa League at Old Trafford has acquired even more significance now. Mischief is inherent in an Anglo/Scottish rivalry loaded with ruinous potential. Four home defeats in five is not a sequence that sells anywhere, still less United. Amorim’s fragile mood looks ill-equipped to cope with a fifth on Thursday.
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