I'll start by saying that, up until the end of February, I had pretty strong doubts about Amorim. We were just utterly shite for essentially the entirety of the period from when he took over up until that point. There were precious few performances to take any encouragement from.
These past few months, though, I think the performances have honestly been quite considerably better and we've just not been getting the results to match them. I see a lot of people making blanket "we've deserved to lose all these games" and "every team in the league outplays us" statements which, frankly, I think are a load of BS. To support that, I'm going to break down every match we've had from the beginning of March until now in the league (because our Europa League performances have been fine and this isn't particularly contested I don't think). I'll include the results and the xG as per
Understat, with a brief summary of how the match went:
9th March: Manchester United 1-1 Arsenal (xg: 1.31-1.83)
Strong start here because I confess, I didn't get to see this match. With that said, just looking at the chances created it seems a draw was probably about fair. Nothing spectacular about a draw at home to Arsenal but, given that they're a much better side than us, it's hardly catastrophic either.
16th March: Leicester City 0-3 Manchester United (xg: 1.30-1.14)
Interestingly, perhaps our best result throughout this run is also one of the ones where the xG doesn't look so great. To be fair, much of Leicester's xG came near the end of the match where we were two or three goals up. Not sure there's too much to be said in favour of Amorim for this one either since Leicester are shite and beating them isn't a major achievement. Meh.
1st April: Nottingham Forest 1-0 Manchester United (xg: 0.51-1.87)
This is one of the matches where I really think we were unlucky. Forest scored very early thanks to an exceptional goal from Elanga, and then sat off for a large portion of the match, so it's only fair to point out how this would contribute to us creating more than they did. With that said, we easily created enough that we should've scored one or two in this game. This is definitely a match where, with more clinical forwards, I think we'd have drawn at the very least and probably even should've won.
6th April: Manchester United 0-0 Manchester City (xg: 1.23-0.69)
A very dull match and I don't think either side can really complain about the draw. With that said, I think we certainly had the better of the play and created the better chances to win the match. Again, with a more clinical forward line I think we could easily have converted this into a win.
13th April: Newcastle United 4-1 Manchester United (xg: 2.64-0.79)
No arguments here. We were shite and got deservedly spanked.
20th April: Manchester United 0-1 Wolverhampton Wanderers (xg: 1.14-0.19)
Again, we had the better of the play for most of this match. I think it's fair to argue we should've created more but Mount and Fernandes both missed chances that a clinical forward player might have converted. Wolves, meanwhile, created practically nothing of note and scored from a brilliantly taken free-kick. I truly don't see how anyone could argue that we deserved to lose this one.
27th April: Bournemouth 1-1 Manchester United (xg: 0.61-1.91)
OK, I'll pre-empt what people will say here: yes, I am aware that we created a good number of chances after they went down to ten men. With that said, I'd argue Bournemouth were lucky that they weren't a man down quite considerably earlier and they then proceeded to score directly after that. Another game where, on the balance of play and chances created, we should have won and didn't because our forward line isn't clinical enough.
4th May: Brentford 4-3 Manchester United (xg: 3.59-1.13)
The only other game in this list which I think we clearly deserved to lose but for this one we fielded maybe four players from our strongest side because we've got a much, much more important game coming up. With that in mind, I think it's a bit daft to jump to conclusions off the back of it. There were three teenagers who'd barely played any senior football, and four or five bench players, a number of whom were coming back from injuries. It's so far removed from our strongest side that I'd expect us to struggle against any decent Premier League side.
That’s generally the mark where survival is generaly guaranteed. 3 games left and we still need a point to achieve it!