Ruben Amorim is facing a barrage of questions about his every decision after Man Utd’s latest loss in the Premier League, and Nicky Butt can’t understand one thing in particular.
The doubts are plenty about Ruben Amorim at Man Utd, more so because of the manner of the 3-1 loss to Brentford instead of the plain scoreline.
Man Utd fans were happy after the defeat to Arsenal on the opening day, so was Amorim, but the Brentford game offered no such mitigating factors.
Nicky Butt has been left shocked at what Amorim has done with the top Man Utd player recently. It has made the team a lot worse.
Nicky Butt shocked at Ruben Amorim’s baffling call
When it comes to head-scratching tactical calls by Amorim at Old Trafford, the list is becoming uncomfortably long.
It’s not even about the system anymore, as it can easily be played well if Amorim just played players in their natural positions and made the right selections.
The personification of that mess is Amorim’s failed experiment of trying to make United’s best attacker their box-to-box midfielder.
Much has been written about Amorim’s call to convert Bruno Fernandes into a deeper midfielder, and Butt, speaking on the podcast The Good, The Bad, and The Football, said he’s shocked Amorim would do something like this.
He said: “The only way you score a goal over the last 18 months was Bruno. Now Bruno has come deeper, so you’ve lost that as well. I think you’ve got worse.
“The only bright light has been Bruno, and I was one of his critics because I think he doesn’t do what I like as a footballer. But he’s a top, top talent and scores goals. But now he’s not playing deep.
“So you’ve lost that as well. It’s shocking what’s happened.”
Amorim’s stubbornness will cost him
Man Utd fans have wholly backed Amorim so far, mainly on the basis of what this team “could be”, rather than what it “has been”.
Amorim sold a positive future at the end of the last season, but the reality couldn’t be more different, and it was only getting worse.
The team is making individual errors with regularity and missing chances, but it’s on the players up to a certain point, after which the manager takes the hit for putting them in positions to fail.
It’s not Patrick Dorgu’s fault that he’s failing to connect crosses, because he shouldn’t have that much attacking burden in the first place.
Fernandes is not capable of tracking runners in midfield, but Kylian Mbappe isn’t either. The difference is that only one is being asked to do what he cannot, while taking away from him what he excels at.
Amorim has made it clear that he’d rather die by his ideas than thrive with small tweaks. Ineos might have no choice but to give him his wish and pull the trigger.
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