Boxing not very clever
The captain gets sent off, and the manager minds more about identity than success
SIX ASIDES Premier League: Wolves 2, United 0
United used to be so good on Boxing Day. As the BBC noted yesterday, no English club had amassed more wins on 26 December. Or more goals. United used to be box-office. They still are, but they’ve changed genres, going from reliable family entertainment to a horror movie. They simply had to win this game, just as they had to beat Forest and Bournemouth. Yes, it was an away game, but Wolves had been awful at home, collecting only four points out of a possible 24. By losing to all three of these modest opponents, Ruben Amorim has blown United’s chances of a decent season.
The top four is now a pipe dream. United are closer to Southampton at the bottom than to Liverpool at the top, on points, and according to the Opta projections, they are on course to finish 12th. Amorim has notched up his fourth league defeat after only seven games, a new club record – easily beating Erik ten Hag, whose fourth defeat came in his 13th game, even though he’d lost his first two. To reach the Champions League, United will now have to win the Europa League (in which they have a 100pc record under Amorim). To reach the Europa League, they will have to retain the FA Cup. That is a vanishingly faint hope as it entails winning at Arsenal – where the rot set in, 23 days ago.
Amorim has made three critical mistakes. The first was to change the formation to 3-4-2-1, at the busiest time of the season, when the formation wasn’t the problem. (Rule one for any boss, and especially a new one: choose your battles.) The second mistake was to conduct manic auditions, making 42 changes to the starting XI in his first nine games. Even at Molineux, where he made just two changes – Yoro for Malacia, Højlund for Zirkzee – Amorim was fielding his tenth different front three and his ninth different midfield four in a ten-game reign. So as well as trying to get used to a new shape and new positions, the players have had to get used to different dance partners. At Molineux, playing 10 against 11 after Bruno Fernandes’ brainless second yellow, they actually did well to get on top for the last 20 minutes.
The third mistake was going public with his distaste for two of his match-winners, Marcus Rashford and Alejandro Garnacho. If this was meant as a wake-up call, it hasn’t worked. Garnacho is half the player he was a month ago. Rashford has been sentenced to an unofficial four-match suspension, with Amorim accusing him of not eating and dressing the right way, then adjusting the charge sheet to read ‘not taking responsibility’. How is he supposed to take responsibility when he’s not even on the bench? And which United would opposing managers rather face – one with a fast-running, goal-scoring left-winger on board, or without? Last night Diogo Dalot was often all alone on the left wing: Vitor Pereira had clearly decided not to bother marking him because he wasn’t a threat. The hunch proved right. Dalot was the only United player to take two shots and the combined xG from them was 0.1.
Amorim has been too flexible with his selection and too inflexible with his formation, making the players doubly unsettled. When he talks about the formation, he turns into a zealot. ‘Our focus,’ he said before the fiasco at Wolves, ‘is to maintain our clear identity.’ Afterwards, he added: ‘I will continue with my idea until the end.’ He has bet the house on 3-4-2-1 and the bet has only paid off against Man City, who are not hard to beat these days. Last night, when Bruno Fernandes got himself stupidly sent off, Amorim had a chance to switch to a back four without losing face (by removing Yoro and Højlund and sending on Eriksen and Garnacho, making a 4-2-1-2). He didn’t take it, having apparently decided that a back three is the hill he will die on. He is turning United’s story, always a soap opera, into something more like a tragedy.
The best thing to do with the back three would be to bin it. The next-best thing would be to tweak it. It worked better when he didn’t play two defenders at wing-back (which has been a blatant flop, making Mazraoui uncomfortable, whereas having Amad at wing-back went well). It might work better if he flipped the front three, so as to have one passer (Fernandes or Eriksen) behind two runners (any two of Højlund, Garnacho and Rashford). But even that is probably more compromise than Amorim can countenance. At 39 he has been behaving like a 19-year-old, obsessing about identity, believing that being true to himself matters more than getting things done. The upshot is that United are now at their lowest ebb in 35 years. And their next three games are harder than the three they have just lost.
Tim de Lisle is the editor of United Writing and a sportswriter for The Guardian. If you’re on Bluesky, do follow him.