The “one step forward, two steps back” nature of Manchester United seems to have continued at the club despite the change of manager.
It’s now back-to-back losses for Man Utd after the energising victory away at Manchester City and Ruben Amorim will have learned a lot about his team.
The collapse in defence and wastefulness in the attack was straight from the Erik ten Hag era and when the man in the dugout has changed, there’s one clear culprit for the malaise- the XI on the pitch.
Amad was a rare positive but the rest of the team looked cowered under the pressure from the visitors and Amorim’s comments after the game on what he felt in the stadium speak volumes about the current situation.
Ruben Amorim’s comments on full-time vs Bournemouth
Amorim has so far cut a hopeful and realistic figure in his interviews. He’s confident in his methods and believes he’ll sort out the mess while at the same time understanding how big the mess is.
With results like these, the scale of the job becomes clearer, and going by his comments, the mess to solve is not just on the pitch.
It is normal for the whole club to be engulfed in it when a season goes so badly wrong but what happened in the 82nd minute vs Bournemouth spoke volumes.
Man Utd fans in the stadium started walking out en masse and for a manager in Amorim who had built his success in Portugal on the bedrock of fan support, that must have been brutal.
The stadium was effectively empty by full-time and Amorim spoke of the need to fight that energy in his post-match comments.
He said: “We suffered again on set-pieces and we were a bit nervous, I felt it in the stadium. We have to focus on the job and not what you feel in the stadium.
“You can feel it in the first goal kick with Andre Onana, he’s thinking what to do and everybody is so anxious. At this moment, everybody in the club is tired of these moments.
“It’s the only way I know how to focus my players. We have to suffer again but we will try to win. We will do it until the end.”
Man Utd players’ mentality under question again
Amorim doesn’t say it directly but it is again a case of the Man Utd manager diagnosing the issue correctly at the first instance of it happening.
This Man Utd squad has made it a habit of collapsing and feeding off of fans’ negative sentiment when they are paid to do the exact opposite which is to turn the sentiment around with their performances.
Fans feeling demoralised when the scoreline is 0-3 is normal but for the players to use that as a reason to give up as well is a damning indictment of their mentality.
The fact that it has now happened under multiple managers leaves them with no hiding place and that’s a situation working in Amorim’s favour.
He would have looked at each player’s body language and their conduct during, and in the immediate aftermath of the game to come to conclusions.
No manager wants to lose games but for Amorim, he’s in a unique situation where he will learn more about this squad from losses than wins.
He will have learned a lot against Bournemouth and his comments spell trouble for many players.
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