Amorim was bailed out by Amad

And he needs to think a bit harder before bad-mouthing his players in public

SIX ASIDES Premier League: City 1, United 2

For years, the shortest journey United ever make to an away game was also the toughest. Erik ten Hag went to the Etihad Stadium twice and lost 6-3 and 3-1. Ralf Rangnick went once and lost 4-1. Ruben Amorim, on his first visit with United, was 1-0 down from the 37th minute to the 87th. And then he was saved by Amad – with a little help from Matheus Nunes. Pep Guardiola had made a fatal mistake: he had left his weakest link on the field throughout, up against the only United player who was offering any threat. Nunes committed one blunder, underhitting a back pass, and compounded it with another, barging into Amad in the box. Bruno Fernandes, who had missed a sitter and spent half the game remonstrating with the ref, redeemed himself by converting the penalty. Two minutes later Amad scored a fabulous goal, racing onto a fine through ball from Lisandro Martinez, lobbing Ederson with an inspired flick, and hitting a scuffed volley that had just enough on it to beat Josko Gvardiol’s addled attempt at a backheel off the line. He wheeled away to celebrate with United’s subs and this time, unlike with his last-minute winner against Liverpool, he even managed to keep his shirt on.

The fans deserved those three minutes of magic after sitting through 87 minutes of grinding monotony. But did Amorim deserve them? Yes and no. Yes, to an extent, because he had been bold in naming his squad, dropping Marcus Rashford and Alejandro Garnacho. And no, because he’d been timid with his XI. City were there for the taking, as several managers (including Amorim himself, with Sporting) had found during Pep’s sudden plunge from the top of the heap. Left with only three senior defenders who were fully fit, Pep was too cautious to trust a junior one, Jahmai Simpson-Pusey. And still Amorim opted to be as defensive as he had been at Arsenal, even though it had yielded a bad result and an even worse performance. United’s xG that night was 0.2 and it did not lie.

At the Etihad, as at the Emirates, Amorim picked two full-backs at wing-back. This time one of them was Noussair Mazraoui, who hadn’t played there before for United and duly floundered for the first hour. City’s right-back, Kyle Walker, is famous for his pace but he’s now fading fast, an obvious target to be exploited by Rashford’s directness or Garnacho’s trickery. Both had had some joy against Walker even when he was playing well: Rashford has six goals in derbies, including one in each of the past two seasons; Garnacho scored twice against City at Wembley this year. But Amorim preferred a midfielder, Mason Mount, whose main role for United, between his unfortunate injuries, is as an exponent of the press. That meant fielding only two forwards and one of them was Rasmus Højlund, who was in form but had never even had a shot against City, and still hasn’t. ‘Amad,’ I wrote in my notes, ‘may have to do it on his own.’ When he spent the first half being caught offside, it wasn’t looking very likely.

Somehow it worked, and the pundits who often moan about United being ‘a team of moments’ found themselves having to applaud them for being a team of moments. In truth, Amad bailed Amorim out. As well as making the line-up more defensive, the boss’s urge to get tough with Rashford and Garnacho had left them with only one home-grown player in the match-day squad (Kobbie Mainoo, who soon came on for the unfortunate Mount) and no real firepower on the bench, just Antony and Joshua Zirkzee. Amorim tacitly admitted this by not making his usual flurry of changes around the hour mark. He persisted with plan A until the 78th minute, when he finally attacked a little more by replacing Mazraoui with Antony. He has now started three games with a pair of defensive wing-backs (at Arsenal, Viktoria Plzen and City) and seen that set-up bring not a single goal. Both of the goals at Plzen, and both here, came after Antony was sent on to replace the right wing-back. Antony to the rescue! That’s a plot twist we didn’t see coming.

Asked about his decision to axe Rashford and Garnacho, Amorim said: ‘Just selection.’ He then came out with a list of factors that were not just selection. ‘The performance in training, the performance in games, the way you dress, the way you eat, the way you push your team-mates up.’ Everything is important, he added: ‘I see everything.’ And ‘it’s important to say … it was not a disciplinary thing.’ But if you mention eating and dressing, it’s obviously disciplinary. ‘I see everything’ had a whiff of delusions of grandeur. Nobody’s perfect: none of us see everything. If Amorim is going to be swayed by Rashford’s flashy wardrobe (something plenty of footballers go in for), he also has to acknowledge that Rashford led a successful campaign to shame the government into helping hard-up families – something hardly any footballers have ever done.

Did Amorim see Rashford making a charity visit to a local school the other day, as he often has over the years? Did he see that Garnacho has eight goals this season and Rashford seven, while Phil Foden, Jeremy Doku and Jack Grealish, who all appeared on Sunday, have only six between them? It’s clear that Rashford and Garnacho have rubbed Amorim up the wrong way, but he’s unwise to have called them out in public. Even Alex Ferguson kept these things behind the closed doors of the dressing-room. And from what I’ve seen, Amorim has handled at least one of them poorly. Rashford’s three starts under him have come in three different positions: right, left and centre. A man who has scored 138 goals for United, who has become the fourth most prolific winger in their history behind three legends (Best, Giggs and Ronaldo), is also a guy who’s just emerging from a mid-career crisis and needs some love. Tough love, yes, at times, but also – and more often – the other kind. We are about to find out if Amorim, who sees everything, can see that.

Tim de Lisle is the editor of United Writing and a sportswriter for The Guardian. If you’re on Bluesky, do follow him.