WITH FOOTBALL AND POLITICS now overflowing with empty and expedient men of no moral backbone, of no clear-eyed sense of right and wrong and of no beliefs, principles or philosophies beyond their own self-advancement, Ruben Amorim at least stood stolidly and alone as a man with an unwavering belief in something.
Now, sure, that something for which Amorim stood so resolutely was not an opposition to doping or financial inequality or cheating or sportswashing or corruption or the Fifa Peace Prize. And, okay, he didn’t stand for cheaper ticket prices, and he didn’t stand for fan ownership or 50+1 or GlazersOUT.
But Ruben Amorim did at least stand for something.
And that something was the sovereign, inalienable and self-evident right for the football coach to play Three Four Three.
Amorim would not change for the benefit of the players at his disposal, nor for any sceptical supporters, nor for Gary Neville. He said not even the Pope would convince him to change. But Ruben Amorim found he was not held answerable to the Pope, but to Jason Wilcox.
And so he finds himself out of the job by discovering that the principles of United’s hierarchy were as flexible as everyone else’s in football. England’s most seasoned Old Trafford watchers reporting today that Amorim’s end came in a blow-up meeting with Wilcox after the draw against Wolves, in which the coach apparently made clear that he wasn’t going to adapt the Three Four Three.
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At which point you feel like telling Wilcox and his colleagues: no shit, lads!
But this is not the first and likely not the last United coaching reign that asks more questions of the club than it does the coach.
The only slight oddity about the Amorim sacking was its timing: why did United stick with him through a storm only to boot him when the weather had finally started to relent?
While recent results against Wolves and Leeds were poor, United’s towering number of absentees provide a hefty amount of mitigation. The data meanwhile spoke to an improving team – they are third on a league table plotted according to team’s differential in terms of Expected Goals – and sixth in the actual, real table, and outside the top five – and likely Champions League football – on goal difference only.
Amorim didn’t look like propelling United into a title race anytime soon, but nonetheless, he was getting enough of a tune out of them to suggest they had a shot of finishing fifth.
But when all of your good work is set in the future tense, and when your pitch to stay in the gig is, ‘Hey I’ve presided over much worse’, then no coach can be surprised to find themselves out on their ear.
The club have perhaps come to the realisation of just how costly and time-consuming it would be to buy a title-contending squad to fit neatly into Amorim’s designated roles, and figured the juice was no longer worth the squeeze.
Now that United have decided not to persist with Amorim, the entirety of his reign has been thrown into stark relief: it has been a disaster. United were still in the mix for the Champions League places when he took charge last year, but the whole season was written off in the name of Amorim’s one true belief.
It looked daft at the time and is utterly absurd in retrospect.
Amorim decided to diminish the impact of his best player, in Bruno Fernandes, make obsolete his best – or at least most valuable – academy graduate in Kobbie Mainoo, all in the name of finding a seemingly inexhaustible supply of vital roles for Diogo Dalot. If Amad Diallo wasn’t available to play at wing-back, then United painfully lacked any kind of attacking thrust.
Of United’s entire squad, who can be said to have looked better because of Amorim’s system? Harry Maguire? And maybe Mason Mount?
His approach was also utterly at odds with the traditions of the club – this was wingless without any wonders – and bizarrely cautious. Amorim made a routine of picking up to six or seven defensive players in any line up.
Opposition managers quickly figured Amorim out too, easily overwhelming United’s duo in midfield.
“We knew that we would be able to get behind their two midfielders and that their centre-backs would want to jump,” explained Alex Iwobi after Fulham’s 1-1 draw against United at the start of this season. “We exploited that today.”
His few good days in charge – the quickfire win away to Man City, this season’s late win at Anfield – came from the counter-attacking gameplan for which Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was deemed not good enough.
He could always be relied upon to make a bad situation worse in the press room, too: his comment that his was the worst United team in history is the kind of thing that a Sky Sports pundit would feel is over the top, while he made the risible defeat at Grimsby secondary to his post-match tantrum about his players speaking “very loudly”. Sometimes, he admitted afterwards, he felt like quitting United.
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Amorim’s fate goes to prove the fact that elite-level coaching is no place for obstinate ideologues. Pep Guardiola may have principles of play, but his genius has been in his capacity to innovate and to stay ahead of the competition. The Guardiola that arrived in England in 2016 could never have foreseen winning a league title with a giant specialist like Erling Haaland at the apex of his team.
This is a reality lost in United’s own history: Alex Ferguson never had any principle he wasn’t willing to bend if the situation demanded it.
Ferguson was the principal, and everyone else at United survived by sticking to him.
Amorim didn’t bend, and so he has been broken.
He is not the first coach to be broken by Manchester United, but he was perhaps the most brittle.
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Ruben Amorim at least stood for something - unfortunately for him, it was never going to work
WITH FOOTBALL AND POLITICS now overflowing with empty and expedient men of no moral backbone, of no clear-eyed sense of right and wrong and of no beliefs, principles or philosophies beyond their own self-advancement, Ruben Amorim at least stood stolidly and alone as a man with an unwavering belief in something.
Now, sure, that something for which Amorim stood so resolutely was not an opposition to doping or financial inequality or cheating or sportswashing or corruption or the Fifa Peace Prize. And, okay, he didn’t stand for cheaper ticket prices, and he didn’t stand for fan ownership or 50+1 or GlazersOUT.
But Ruben Amorim did at least stand for something.
And that something was the sovereign, inalienable and self-evident right for the football coach to play Three Four Three.
Amorim would not change for the benefit of the players at his disposal, nor for any sceptical supporters, nor for Gary Neville. He said not even the Pope would convince him to change. But Ruben Amorim found he was not held answerable to the Pope, but to Jason Wilcox.
And so he finds himself out of the job by discovering that the principles of United’s hierarchy were as flexible as everyone else’s in football. England’s most seasoned Old Trafford watchers reporting today that Amorim’s end came in a blow-up meeting with Wilcox after the draw against Wolves, in which the coach apparently made clear that he wasn’t going to adapt the Three Four Three.
At which point you feel like telling Wilcox and his colleagues: no shit, lads!
But this is not the first and likely not the last United coaching reign that asks more questions of the club than it does the coach.
The only slight oddity about the Amorim sacking was its timing: why did United stick with him through a storm only to boot him when the weather had finally started to relent?
While recent results against Wolves and Leeds were poor, United’s towering number of absentees provide a hefty amount of mitigation. The data meanwhile spoke to an improving team – they are third on a league table plotted according to team’s differential in terms of Expected Goals – and sixth in the actual, real table, and outside the top five – and likely Champions League football – on goal difference only.
Amorim didn’t look like propelling United into a title race anytime soon, but nonetheless, he was getting enough of a tune out of them to suggest they had a shot of finishing fifth.
But when all of your good work is set in the future tense, and when your pitch to stay in the gig is, ‘Hey I’ve presided over much worse’, then no coach can be surprised to find themselves out on their ear.
The club have perhaps come to the realisation of just how costly and time-consuming it would be to buy a title-contending squad to fit neatly into Amorim’s designated roles, and figured the juice was no longer worth the squeeze.
Now that United have decided not to persist with Amorim, the entirety of his reign has been thrown into stark relief: it has been a disaster. United were still in the mix for the Champions League places when he took charge last year, but the whole season was written off in the name of Amorim’s one true belief.
It looked daft at the time and is utterly absurd in retrospect.
Amorim decided to diminish the impact of his best player, in Bruno Fernandes, make obsolete his best – or at least most valuable – academy graduate in Kobbie Mainoo, all in the name of finding a seemingly inexhaustible supply of vital roles for Diogo Dalot. If Amad Diallo wasn’t available to play at wing-back, then United painfully lacked any kind of attacking thrust.
Of United’s entire squad, who can be said to have looked better because of Amorim’s system? Harry Maguire? And maybe Mason Mount?
His approach was also utterly at odds with the traditions of the club – this was wingless without any wonders – and bizarrely cautious. Amorim made a routine of picking up to six or seven defensive players in any line up.
Opposition managers quickly figured Amorim out too, easily overwhelming United’s duo in midfield.
“We knew that we would be able to get behind their two midfielders and that their centre-backs would want to jump,” explained Alex Iwobi after Fulham’s 1-1 draw against United at the start of this season. “We exploited that today.”
His few good days in charge – the quickfire win away to Man City, this season’s late win at Anfield – came from the counter-attacking gameplan for which Ole Gunnar Solskjaer was deemed not good enough.
He could always be relied upon to make a bad situation worse in the press room, too: his comment that his was the worst United team in history is the kind of thing that a Sky Sports pundit would feel is over the top, while he made the risible defeat at Grimsby secondary to his post-match tantrum about his players speaking “very loudly”. Sometimes, he admitted afterwards, he felt like quitting United.
Amorim’s fate goes to prove the fact that elite-level coaching is no place for obstinate ideologues. Pep Guardiola may have principles of play, but his genius has been in his capacity to innovate and to stay ahead of the competition. The Guardiola that arrived in England in 2016 could never have foreseen winning a league title with a giant specialist like Erling Haaland at the apex of his team.
This is a reality lost in United’s own history: Alex Ferguson never had any principle he wasn’t willing to bend if the situation demanded it.
Ferguson was the principal, and everyone else at United survived by sticking to him.
Amorim didn’t bend, and so he has been broken.
He is not the first coach to be broken by Manchester United, but he was perhaps the most brittle.
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brittle and broken Manchester United Premier League Ruben Amorim