Between playing "successful, great football" and losing 4-1, there are many other possibilities.
Right now, the question is not if Amorim is a world class manager, the question is if Amorim is any better than ETH.
Ruben Amorim - Manchester United Head Coach
- Thread starter sewey89
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Between playing "successful, great football" and losing 4-1, there are many other possibilities.
Right now, the question is not if Amorim is a world class manager, the question is if Amorim is any better than ETH.
I fail to see how Amorim holds much of the blame for that when you have yet another keeper gifting a goal (and another keeper that he inherited), a normally reliable player slipping, and a young academy player (who many have been urging him to play) get caught out of position. I do think he kind of fecked up playing Zirkzee, but other than that, I think it was just one of those days. Of course, there will be no excuses for the team not turning up on Thursday.
Again, the question is: Is Amorim any better than ETH?
Perhaps it is too early to answer this question with any confidence. However, so far the results say no. We'll see...
The answer is currently, maybe. There is no way to tell one way or the other.
Newcastle are currently so much better in terms of players. Compare their midfield to ours, no wonder we lost
He gets blame because the side he puts out every week can't keep a clean sheet, can't control and can't create/score.
Confidence is in the floor, performances have never risen.
Every game his head is in his hands because his team is pathetic. People are hanging on to his sporting tenure, because every aspect of his united tenure is awful. He is our Villas-Boas.
Classic case of two managers who don't have the capacity to get United back on top.
I think Amorim would be very very lucky in his entire three year tenure to match the season that Erik did in his first year at United.
There was a massive drop off after the EFL cup final but subjectively for me the team played well for three consecutive months in that season, at the moment Amorim can't even play well for three consecutive games.
Ruben is arguably the worst manager at United given his infancy but that changes if the team performs drastically well next season or at the very least he wins the Europa league. The fact that no matter top 10, mid table or relegation fodder every game feels like the team is the underdog is not just indicative of the teams quality but the instructions they are recieving in the system the manager is deploying.
This is a worry as well, out of every position on the field the defence for quality is one of the most well covered areas yet the team always concedes significant chances.
Having Onana doesn't help but on the balance of play, United are so vulnerable in the areas either side of the wider defensive centre backs and wingbacks. Additionally, when you consider that there's an average 6-7 defensive orientated players in most fixtures it further exposes Amorim's inability to adequately coach this formation out of possession.
Remember posting beforehand with my expectations for the team (before Rubens appointment) to struggle scoring goals but to be robust defensively. Therefore the club have a manager with a pragmatic ideology yet still the teams performances aren't benefitting from these approaches.
One of their midfielders is a guy who was a laughing stock as a striker who their manager has developed into a good midfielder. That’s what good coaching can do. Make players better. Make a team more than the sum of its parts. Amorim is failing to do that and that is a managers main responsibility.
Compare there owners to ours aswell. They’ll start challenging for trophies now because just like city when they get bought by billionaires they become relevant
I've been critical of Amorim over the last few pages, mainly based on that second half performance against Newcastle. However, I will say that the chaotic nature of the ETH era (specifically last season) where we were facing 20+ shots in a game and getting overrun in midfield and defensively is very different to now. There is a lot more control to our play and we do look tougher to beat, barring the individual errors which keep happening (which I do maintain that Amorim has a significant part to play with eliminating within the squad - it's a focus thing). The way we're losing games is different to the way we were losing last season. The chance creation and finishing is a bigger issue.
this is a joke. How many times do we see this same sentence mentioned. ETH came under this category aswell. We’ve seen progress the last few weeks and people was praising Amorim and then we come up against Newcastle who are a very good team at home and they beat us down to individual mistakes. I actually thought we could have won it the way we played first half and so did a lot of other people but mistakes cost us.
Why were only 3 of the team that started on Sunday there before he joined then? Why didn't he coach the rest to be good?
All nuance has gone from this thread
It looks like it's going the same way as all our manager threads over the past decade - a couple of bad results and the haters come in and have a go and a few good results and all the supporters will come in and praise him as the next coming of Fergie.
As you say, it's much more productive to look beyond the results and evaluate how we press, how many chances we create, how effectively we build up and so on. Stats can help quite a bit here.
All nuance has gone from this thread
It looks like it's going the same way as all our manager threads over the past decade - a couple of bad results and the haters come in and have a go and a few good results and all the supporters will come in and praise him as the next coming of Fergie.
As you say, it's much more productive to look beyond the results and evaluate how we press, how many chances we create, how effectively we build up and so on. Stats can help quite a bit here.
The best way I can summarise what I'm feeling is that Amorim has presented us with a different set of problems compared to the ones we had under ETH, or at least at a different end of the scale. There are a few issues which have plagued both, which is work rate, determination to win back the ball, mentality, poor individual errors, etc. We had the "doughnut in midfield" during ETH's time and there was no control whatsoever, so this is an improvement on that. We've taken it the other way where it's almost become too defensive or feels that way at times. I welcome more control of the ball and that's what top teams should be doing.
But, the first question I ask myself with this current team is "where are the goals going to come from?" There's a range of factors to look at there with our recruitment, form of the players, the players who have been shipped out on loan, etc. That isn't strictly down to Amorim and I can't lay all of the blame at his door, but it is a problem that he has to have an answer to if we're going to win games.
Most likely we will play 3 CBs and Dalot, Dorgu and Ugarte also next season. We need to have one hell of a transfer window if we are to radically improve our goalscoring and chance creating.
Amad being back is also going to be a huge plus. It's really unfortunate that he's been out as he has already become a significant goal threat for us. Question marks about where he plays, however.
We've only got enough money to build a house out of sticks though. The wolves in the Premier League will be blowing that shit down every week
Yh Mou’s I think were the worst of em everyone. LVG’s maybe the best but it’s a low bar.
The sad thing is.... When Garnacho scored on Sunday I was really quite surprised and happy. When we score a goal it's very unexpected and I see it as a bonus, crazy times but we are so so low right now I think we are clinging on to anything.
Amorims seems a smart guy and you can see how stressful he finds the job. He constantly talks about how many problems we have and I feel for him. The system and squad don't work together because the squad is dreadful.
Amorims seems a smart guy and you can see how stressful he finds the job. He constantly talks about how many problems we have and I feel for him. The system and squad don't work together because the squad is dreadful.
Framing the argument with "if he was a fat English bloke..." really does negate the context of his career to date. If there was a fat English manager with a boring English name who had taken over Braga with the success he did, and then moved on to Sporting to resurrect them the way he did, he'd probably be considered the best manager in the world by English commentators.
It's not exactly a strong league? The quality is poor outside of 3 teams.
Does it change what I said? Why pay managers millions if the only way to improve a team is to sign better players? Are Newcastle more or less than the sum of their parts? Did Newcastle get worse after Howe took over?
Agree with this 100%
When Amorim took over, this was our squad
Altay Bayindir
Tom Heaton
Andre Onana
Victor Lindelof
Noussair Mazraoui
Matthijs de Ligt
Maguire
Lisandro Martinez
Leny Yoro
Luke Shaw
Diogo Dalot
Evans
Mason Mount
Christian Eriksen
Casemiro
Manuel Ugarte
Kobbie Mainoo
Harry Amass
Bruno Fernandes
Antony
Rashford
Sancho
Rasmus Hojlund
Joshua Zirkzee
Amad Diallo
Garnacho
Chido Obi
+1 player in the transfer window
That is not a squad that should be 14th with the lowest points tally in our Premier League history.
He hasn't motivated or made any players better. Many have become worse, though. I would expect a manager that we want to keep for many years to come, to be able to get a tune out of that squad before heavily investing in him. He couldn't.
It’s way too early but I actually think we’ve looked encouraging at moments this season; last year it was diabolical and I think we were lucky to finish where we did. And of course ETH underachieved with a large number of players that he brought in; Amorim has brought in two players, one of whom was a youth project and the other a raw youngster thrown in at the deep end.
I think we thought his first season was good because the team performed okay. But he fecked up the Sancho situation (Sancho at fault too imho), the Antony buy looked suspect from day one I thought. Casemiro looked good first season, Eriksen okay. But what he tried to install in the second season, plus the decline of Rashford, Casemiro, the Mount fail, the Antony fail, Malacia fail, Onana fail, Hojlund fail, Amrabaat fail… the list goes on. Deligt and Maz are okay, Yoro has potential, Ugarte pretty good, but that’s basically squad fillers.
No difference makers.
They had not won the league in 19 years. I could use the same logic and say winning the league with Aberdeen is a piece of piss because the league is shite.
I suspect most of you nay sayers will be disappointed when we start looking like a footballing side next season, and probably livid when we start playing like a big club the season after. Imagine what we could have done instead by milking what we could from the mishmash of average players here by adopting a pragmatic short-termist approach.
We all know what the squad is, and it’s a shit one. Listing out every player doesn’t make them any better somehow
We have the worst United attack in living memory, we’re relying on geriatrics for our midfield depth, and we have terrible keepers. The one good attacker we do have got injured, and we’re having to play Bruno in midfield because we don’t have any other creativity there.
You don’t have to over value the squad just to rip into the manager pal
That’s fair. He’s more likable than Ten Hag in my opinion, but his record isn’t better so far.
I think his system, in theory, is better than the fecking shite crap Ten Hag system, but this hasn’t manifested itself in actual results. When you look at the transfer record of ETH and see losses of Antony 90m, Sancho 80m (by alienating him, though also Sancho’s fault) Mount 60m, Onana 50m, Malacia 15m, Hojlund 65m, Zirkzee 40m, I don’t see how the club can recover from 400m in pretty much wasted transfer fees.
Amorim hasn’t been great, but many of these players were crap anyway.
I think he's better than ETH
not exactly a high bar is it who gives a shit if he's better than shite
not exactly a high bar is it who gives a shit if he's better than shite
I"m baffled at people judging him on half a season in which he purposely decimated our attack, changed the way the team will play, and has whole load of players that he is not counting on. Evans, Heaton, Lindelof, Eriksen and it goes on.
People look for short term improvement as a testament to his qualities. It's literally what he said he won't do, playing a formation that is more familiar to the players. It would've been a short term fix, but a longterm problem. I've started to see some kind of structure in the way we play in the last few matches, bar the Newcastle game that was comedy of errors all around.
No matter the tactics or formation, you will never win a match with a goalkeeper that has a shocker every other game, and a goalscorer that has scored 1 goal in the last 26 games, while your main attacking player is injured.
I belive he will improve us, with the right tools for the job. It's no wonder he was on City's radar for the manager job. But people need to calm down a bit and a take it with a bit of context.
People look for short term improvement as a testament to his qualities. It's literally what he said he won't do, playing a formation that is more familiar to the players. It would've been a short term fix, but a longterm problem. I've started to see some kind of structure in the way we play in the last few matches, bar the Newcastle game that was comedy of errors all around.
No matter the tactics or formation, you will never win a match with a goalkeeper that has a shocker every other game, and a goalscorer that has scored 1 goal in the last 26 games, while your main attacking player is injured.
I belive he will improve us, with the right tools for the job. It's no wonder he was on City's radar for the manager job. But people need to calm down a bit and a take it with a bit of context.
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people comparing him to Eth based on half a season, no summer window, and in the middle of changing the entire system, is frankly laughable. Eth managed the team for multiple seasons, spent over £600m, and still had no discernible way of playing. it’s just such a childish comparison based on duhhh 4 points off 17 duhhh he’s shit. anyone who can’t see progress in the way we’re playing - ignore the fecking results - is either blind, or just too needy to have a moan. we literally just need 4 or 5 players to the squad, particularly in attack, and it will do wonders. will look forward to quoting a whole shitload of posts in here next year.
I dont agree. That squad playing a nice 4231 is capable of a hell of a lot more than the shite we have been seeing. Also most players have become worse under Amorim instead of better.We all know what the squad is, and it’s a shit one. Listing out every player doesn’t make them any better somehow
We have the worst United attack in living memory, we’re relying on geriatrics for our midfield depth, and we have terrible keepers. The one good attacker we do have got injured, and we’re having to play Bruno in midfield because we don’t have any other creativity there.
You don’t have to over value the squad just to rip into the manager pal
you sound like a 5 year old
It’s laughable to post that squad as though that’s what he had to work with. Do you actually follow United or are you just purposefully talking absolute bollocks? The following players have been injured or loaned out for the majority of his time here:
Lindelof
Maguire
Martinez
Shaw
Evans
Mount
Mainoo
Antony
Rashford
Sancho
Diallo
If you told any of us when Ten Hag let that we’d have those injuries and loans, when we were already garbage, I bet many would have predicted a crap season and many were already talking about the prospect of relegation. I think if you want to have a balanced argument and criticise the guy, at least stick to reality.
Worse than they were under ETH?
Maguire
Ugarte
Casemiro
Amad
Zirkzee
Bruno
Yoro
All above have improved. Then there’s a few who I would say have at least kept their level such as De Ligt, Mazraoui, Eriksen (bar physical decline), Onana (still shit), Antony whilst he was here was about the same level.
Then there’s a raft of players who have barely played due to loans and injury.
Ten Hag left us in 14th in the league and on our way out in the EL. I don’t know what you envisage when you look back on the team ETH was leaving.
Are you having your own worst post competition with yourself? This is even worse than the one about Wolfsburg. Well done I guess.
I said that's the squad he had when he took over. Injured or loaned out happened later. I don't think he should have loaned out players without a replacement either.
A proper 4231 (not the madness ETH had us playing) with good coaching, wingers and Bruno getting balls into Rasmus I think we would have done a lot better.
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What's so terrible about it? Amorim lost 5-1 at home to ETH the one time they came up against each other. Havent we used such versus between managers before?
Im not saying who's done a better job at United.
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