Ruben Amorim - Manchester United Head Coach

Nick7 said:
genuinely thought it would just be us weirdos caring about it. Is the news that big in Portugal that it’s worth being shown on tv?
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It's the CNN sports show tbf. It's not like they interrupted normal programming
 
More than ten years ago it was like this.

manchester-england-a-plane-flies-overhead-with-a-banner-criticising-manchester-united-manager.jpg
 
Bastian said:
That's an excellent post, thank you! Mods, please promote this poster.

It's tricky to say why he was given that ultimatum as you say. One benefit is that he'll know fully what he's working with come summer, but generally I am against midseason appointments because it can take some wind out of the new manager's sails. I would have been fine with Ruud being in situ until June with Amorim liaising with Ashworth about market opportunities over the course of the season.

There will indeed be no time to work a lot on his ideas as we will have a very clogged up schedule until January. As someone said earlier in this thread, it would have been a bit of a masterstroke to push all the players to pull a sickie for International duty and work for these two weeks with him on the training ground in a mini pre-season. That kind of thing takes a lot of planning and cunning though. I hope the hierarchy is sensible and gives him time. I'd be surprised if we're good enough to challenge until the season after next. He'll need a bit of a revamp over summer and most importantly we'll need to cease the commercial pre-seasons - at the very least for next summer - and only focus on football. Maybe a base in Portugal for 3-4 weeks with no travel for matches. If that happens it will be proof that they are actually putting football first.

I'm not sure how much you watch United, but how do you think he'll use Garnacho and Amad?

Again, thanks for your feedback mate.
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But that in itself represents a huge risk. What happens if Ruud's 4 game unbeaten run as interim becomes a 26 game unbeaten run? comfortably in the top 4 and we win the europa league?

Do we stick with Ruud and break the deal with Amorim?
Do we stick to our guns and wish ruud well? This adds unnecessary pressure on amorim who after any dip in form the knives would be out saying we should have kept Ruud.

It makes the most sense to get him in now. If he's as talented as suggested he should be able to see short-term improvement, van Nistelrooy has managed it with a smaller amount of experience and reputation. He can also and most importantly assess the players we have now and determine who fits into his plans and who doesn't and work with the likes of wilcox and ashworth to roadmap our strategy in the upcoming transfer windows.
 
ErikElevenHag said:
But that in itself represents a huge risk. What happens if Ruud's 4 game unbeaten run as interim becomes a 26 game unbeaten run? comfortably in the top 4 and we win the europa league?

Do we stick with Ruud and break the deal with Amorim?
Do we stick to our guns and wish ruud well? This adds unnecessary pressure on amorim who after any dip in form the knives would be out saying we should have kept Ruud.

It makes the most sense to get him in now. If he's as talented as suggested he should be able to see short-term improvement, van Nistelrooy has managed it with a smaller amount of experience and reputation. He can also and most importantly assess the players we have now and determine who fits into his plans and who doesn't and work with the likes of wilcox and ashworth to roadmap our strategy in the upcoming transfer windows.
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Agree with this, this is a good squad and, with good management, it can still achieve good things for the season whilst plans are made to turn it into a great squad. Ruud was able to get on a bit of a good run with them, just goes to show how ETH had lost it.

It's a free hit of sorts for Amorim because if he doesn'tget top 4 and a cup he can still point to a flawed squad. This allows him enough time to see which players he moves forward with and which ones he discards. Ashworth will surely involve him in the planning for next summer and his assessment of the current players, having worked 5 months with them, will be key.
 
Rodgerzzz said:
He's not officially allowed to work yet so I'd assume that means stuff like interviews, etc will be delayed until his VISA has been accepted. Would be a nice surprise if it was though!
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Argh fair enough. Thanks
 
Rodgerzzz said:
He's not officially allowed to work yet so I'd assume that means stuff like interviews, etc will be delayed until his VISA has been accepted. Would be a nice surprise if it was though!
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Just interview him as a tourist when he is being shown around the Megastore.
 
Maciej said:
The beauty of football.

We hate when we lose, we get frustrated when we play badly, we want managers to get sacked and when there's a new one, there's hope and 10k people are following his flight on flightradar24.
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Football is feelings! Have been super frustrated the last 18 months, and then from one day to another all giddy again about the future.
 
Don’t get why we’re waiting on his visa. Could that not have been done earlier to prevent this from happening? We’ve known for a couple of weeks he was coming on this day.
 
DJ_21 said:
Don’t get why we’re waiting on his visa. Could that not have been done earlier to prevent this from happening? We’ve known for a couple of weeks he was coming on this day.
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Brexit means brexit and all that.
 
Paul778 said:
Which players are on first team training but not on international duty?
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Was interested myself, by my from what I've seen, it's these players:
  • Maguire (injured)
  • Malacia (coming back from injury)
  • Yoro (coming back from injury)
  • Shaw (injured)
  • Evans
  • Mount
  • Casemiro
  • Mainoo (injured)
  • Rashford
  • Antony
  • Amad
 
saivet said:
Was interested myself, by my from what I've seen, it's these players:
  • Maguire (injured)
  • Malacia (coming back from injury)
  • Yoro (coming back from injury)
  • Shaw (injured)
  • Evans
  • Mount
  • Casemiro
  • Mainoo (injured)
  • Rashford
  • Antony
  • Amad
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Decent team there.
 
Bastian said:
That's an excellent post, thank you! Mods, please promote this poster.

It's tricky to say why he was given that ultimatum as you say. One benefit is that he'll know fully what he's working with come summer, but generally I am against midseason appointments because it can take some wind out of the new manager's sails. I would have been fine with Ruud being in situ until June with Amorim liaising with Ashworth about market opportunities over the course of the season.

There will indeed be no time to work a lot on his ideas as we will have a very clogged up schedule until January. As someone said earlier in this thread, it would have been a bit of a masterstroke to push all the players to pull a sickie for International duty and work for these two weeks with him on the training ground in a mini pre-season. That kind of thing takes a lot of planning and cunning though. I hope the hierarchy is sensible and gives him time. I'd be surprised if we're good enough to challenge until the season after next. He'll need a bit of a revamp over summer and most importantly we'll need to cease the commercial pre-seasons - at the very least for next summer - and only focus on football. Maybe a base in Portugal for 3-4 weeks with no travel for matches. If that happens it will be proof that they are actually putting football first.

I'm not sure how much you watch United, but how do you think he'll use Garnacho and Amad?

Again, thanks for your feedback mate.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the comments, I appreciate it.
There's a few reasons behind their choice of timing, but first and foremost is stability.
When things go sideways the people in charge need to take action, to show that they're on top of the problem and that things will get fixed.
That's even more important in a club as big as United. Uncertainty and instability can snowball out of control quickly.
And considering they've been in charge since the Summer and deliberately chose to keep ten Hag when it was clear he was no longer the man for the job, they needed to fix that mistake FAST.

Lastly, I haven't watched United games regularly for a few years now, I mostly catch the highlights.
What I can tell you is that there's a few key characteristics Amorim likes in his players for specific roles.
His center backs need to be good on the ball and, particularly the wide ones, be able to cover for the wide players.

As an example, Sporting have 3 young and strong CBs, Debast on the right, Diomande in the middle and Inácio on the left. Inácio has an amazing left foot, and he's known to make key through balls between the opponent's defenders. Diomande is a boss in the middle, strong and quick, with good positioning. Debast just came in this year but he's looked set to do on the right what Inácio does on the left.
The wingers are very important in his system. They're gonna be running up and down all the time, and while their defensive obligations aren't as high as if they were full backs, they don't have the freedom a "normal" attacking winger would have either. What I noticed is that, in games with more tougher opponents, Amorim usually splits his bet. He'll use someone more defensive in one of the wings, and a more attacking player on the other side. That way he can focus is offense on one side while still maintaining a good cover at the back.
The midfielders also have a ton of work. Since there's just two of them, they're gonna run a lot trying to cover the opponents and recover possession. When we have the ball they sometimes drop back to open passing lines for the CBs and create space for the wingers and forwards to explore. But he's made good use of players with different abilities here. Palhinha was a monster, he covered pretty much the whole space by himself, granting a lot of freedom to his teammate, which was usually Matheus Nunes. Matheus was great with the ball, his box-to-box skills are great, and he'd take us up the field fast and had quite a few goals and assists because of it. Then came Ugarte, which didn't have the coverage of Palhinha, he's still a great defender. There was also Morita, who's a very solid player, good in transition and finding spaces for progression. Hjulmand is another massive midfielder, one destined to be at a to club in a year or two, and lastly Daniel Bragança, who's quick on the ball, quick on his feet, a good dribler, good on passing and shooting.
Lastly, the guys up front. Like many people have pointed out, he now plays with what's basically two 10s behind the striker, but that wasn't always like that. On his 1st title season, we didn't have a striker like Gyökeres, so the 3 attackers shifted a lot in their positions. Our top scorer, and the League's top scorer that season, was Pedro "Pote" Gonçalves. Paulinho didn't join till the winter break, and while he scored crucial goals, most of our wins came from Pote and the other attackers/midfielders.

All this is to basically say a couple of things:
- Amorim wants specific things from his players, but they're not as "limiting" as I've seen people think. He's perfectly happy to adjust certain aspects of the squad to accommodate players to their new roles.
- Because of this, it's not easy to determine what players will or won't fit into his model. Especially since I suspect that his model will evolve as time goes by, and players come and go. Amorim said it, United has an identity, and that's not to play defensively against any opponents. Sporting had a lot of merit in how it explored City's weaknesses, especially in the 2nd half when Pote dropped back to the midfield. But we still had very little possession, and that's not how we usually play, and it's not how United should ever play.
But it'll take time to get to that level, so I suspect he already has an idea on what he's going to start with.

GaryLifo said:
I think the ultimatum was more a reflection of our desperation to get him now. I wonder if he'd called their bluff whether they really would've looked elsewhere.
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I think they would. When he finally talked about whole process, on the Friday after the Amadora game, he said that he spent 3 days trying to convince United to wait till the end of the season, and they wouldn't budge.

ErikElevenHag said:
But that in itself represents a huge risk. What happens if Ruud's 4 game unbeaten run as interim becomes a 26 game unbeaten run? comfortably in the top 4 and we win the europa league?

Do we stick with Ruud and break the deal with Amorim?
Do we stick to our guns and wish ruud well? This adds unnecessary pressure on amorim who after any dip in form the knives would be out saying we should have kept Ruud.

It makes the most sense to get him in now. If he's as talented as suggested he should be able to see short-term improvement, van Nistelrooy has managed it with a smaller amount of experience and reputation. He can also and most importantly assess the players we have now and determine who fits into his plans and who doesn't and work with the likes of wilcox and ashworth to roadmap our strategy in the upcoming transfer windows.
Click to expand...

Correct.
That in and of itself wouldn't be an issue per se. If the club wins, what does it matter who's in charge?
But it would indeed make it more complicated for Amorim, and it also would speak volumes to the management's abilities, when an interim manager performs really well and you question why he's interim and not full time.
 
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