Manchester United Thread 25/26 - Teamtalk/Transfers/Gossip Mod Note in OP 26.09.24

Exactly. I'm as delighted as anyone in beating Liverpool yesterday. And if Amorim gets grief for the repeated defeats, he gets credit for the good results too. And he deserves credit yesterday, the subs, the staring line-up, the spot-on attitude, he got it right yesterday.

Personally, I think Amorim's a busted flush, that the coaching and tactics has been so poor that it's likely he's not going to improve, and that soon enough his time will be up. The results agree with that, he's been a desperately poor manager of United thus far, with little hope and even less evidence that that is going to change. I think he should have been let go at the end of last season as it was that poor and the Europa League run covered a lot of cracks, but I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, let him have his pre-season and a few signings, and see from there.

It's overall been a poor season so far, so the doubts have only become louder, and even yesterday, despite earning the win through sheer hard work, the reality is while we deserved what we got due to our performance, we got away with one because Liverpool are so off form, and even at that they were hammering at us. There's nothing really cohesive about us, we rely heavily on individual brilliance (and we got plenty of that yesterday in fairness), and still have no grasp on retaining possession. We're still in the main poorly coached and prepared, and tactically all over the place.

But that doesn't mean I don't want him to succeed, of course I want to see a manager of United that's successful and has us competing for the top honours. Now, he's finally after 11 months got two wins on the bounce. If United go on a run of form and pick up 23/24 points in the next ten games, and we end up top 5 by the end of the year, then I'll be more than happy to say Amorim has turned it around, and fair play and well done to him for it after a chronically crap start at the helm, and that he'll deserve to continue on and be given more of a chance if he has us playing to that level.

But all we've had under him is moments like beating Liverpool. It's whether these moments become regular enough is the question. I have no faith in Amorim that they will, not on his tenure so far anyway, he has no credit left in my bank, and I'd doubt I'm the only supporter that feels that way.

But that doesn't mean we can't celebrate a great result, and they really don't come much better than beating Liverpool at Anfield. It's well worthy enough to enjoy the moment, and enjoy the moment we will. And I'm happy to say, work has been great this morning, for once it's lovely to be dishing it out.

But has it changed anything? Time will tell I suppose, but I'd have no hope in Amorim that it has, so I'll enjoy this moment and hope it translates into something more, while being realistic that this might be a once off, or might even be the last hurrah of a poor managerial term.

It's a good day for United fans and for Amorim and we haven't had a lot of those.

Pretty much the first word out of Amorim's mouth in the post match interview was Brighton. He knows how important that match is now and this result will mean very little if we don't turn up in the same way next week at Old Trafford.

How many games in a row would he need to win however before those with the long knives would not come out at the next loss/draw?

There is 9 PL games left before Christmas. 6 of them are against teams which are currently below us in the table, and all of them should be winnable in their own right. If we get to Christmas and the team has picked up 18+ points from those fixtures, and we're still in the conversation for top 4/5 then we can talk about there being a turning point reached.

Amorim isn't getting questioned because of a few bad one-off results. Its because of a 35 PL game record which is overall horrendous (40 points won). If he builds up a better record over the next 9-10 games, then people will start writing off the 27 PL games last season and put more weight on record this season, which is better even when front loaded with all of last seasons top 4.

I’m well aware that one swallow doesn’t make a summer… I was talking about posters still having a go at the manager about yesterday’s line up even after a victory at Anfield. Some of these posters got it completely wrong about the line up before the game which is fine… we all do it, but at least be big enough to say they were wrong and the manager got it right ( as you say yourself in this post quoted) instead of still trying to say the manager got it wrong and United were lucky to win.

Of course they did ride their luck at times but my point was to give the manager the benefit of the doubt on his team selection after such a great win

The Grimsby game might have been a huge turning point for the club for the fairly major reason it was at long last the final nail in the coffin of one of the worst keepers (maybe just ahead of Roy Carroll) at the club in the PL era.

I think they just fell for whatever useless stats were being bandied about that showed Onana was actually a world class keeper it was everything else that was wrong.

Grimsby just killed off all those bullshìte stats and made it glaringly clear Onana could just never play for us again.

You would think this would be the mood in here today wouldn’t you?

It's definitely not a bad start to the season results wise. The 3 wins v Chelsea, Sunderland and Liverpool have solidified that. Performance wise it has been decent. I think the perception that he's doing badly stems from a couple of things.

The baggage from last season is a big problem. We were bad last season but the league performance was unquestionably affected by a decision to prioritise the Europa League (which was the correct decision imo given the level of teams that were in it). Also, many of Utd's top earners were getting frozen out for character reasons, shipped out or were injured. Rashford and Antony were loaned out and not replaced, Sancho had already been loaned out in the beginning of the season. Mount, Shaw and Amad all missed many months through injury. You take out the players from any team in the league that make up 30-40% of the entire wage bill, and see how they get on. I don't think Amorim gets cut enough slack for this. On top of all this, he had to come in mid-season and has an approach + style that's very different to ETH.

I think when the club appointed him, they wanted him to play the same style he did at Sporting. He tried this in the beginning. I remember the first couple of months, the emphasis was on lots of controlled possession and lots of short build up. He tried to mirror what he did at Sporting, which is why we signed him. But imo, the league has sort of undergone a rapid evolution in the last 12-18 months which is becoming clearer each week. There's a much bigger emphasis on set pieces, physicality and directness. Arsenal's evolution over the last 3 seasons is the best illustration of this. When they had their breakthrough season and ran City close in 22/23, they were pretty slick and smooth. Now their defining characteristics are tough and athletic with a huge emphasis on set pieces. Amorim has had to move away from his original vision (not the formation itself, but the execution of it) to attempt to meet these challenges and mould a team that's able to compete in this version of the PL. He's not the only one, even Pep is still figuring things out and look at how inconsistent every other team has been bar Arsenal.

I think there's a lot of understandable frustration that we don't see a clear upward curve of improvement that we can have confidence in having a high enough ceiling to compete at the highest level. But I dunno, maybe we are not taking into account enough the sheer competitiveness and uniqueness of this league. It's very messy to build and compete at the same time.

I think if people came across balanced instead of just sticking the boot in all the time…only one poster I seen admitted to being wrong yesterday….before kick off it was "line up is a sackable offence","wont lay a glove" etc etc,nobody says "hey,i was wrong this time" and balances their opinions and makes their post worth reading,they just disappear until the next rant or ignore anything they wrote……you yourself just went with something along the lines of "well i was right about dalot"!!

We got the result. But I thought Cunha looked better with Sesko up top. Gettign the result doesn't mean the selection was automatically correct does it? It can still be wrong can't it? I don't understand the reasoning for not playing sesko either - so we would go with more pace than aerially according to Amorim? But Sesko is quicker than both Cunha and Mount - his stated reason for the change makes no sense.

My issues with the team were (1) Dalot - he was rubbish. (2) Bruno CM - his creativity is not in questioin, its his defending, and I think we were caught out on transitions multiple times due to that, and he left his partner stranded, as he does and (3) Mount for Sesko, and I don't think Mount did anything amazing. Shaw for Yoro I still don't like and i don't think Shaw proved me wrong either.

Spot on 👍👍👍

I think this goes both ways.

There should be balance in how we assess the performances

It's also totally Ok to say, I was delighted with the win at Anfield.

And….I still have a lot of concerns because of the dysfunction elements in the side (especially at CM and with the WBs, for me).

I wouldn't call the lineup a sackable offence, or anything like that. By the same measure I'm not jumping on any cheerleading bandwagon either. Liverpool are in their worse run in about a decade, and still wasted numerous chances to easily win that game yesterday. We did ride our luck 2nd half, for sure.

I can understand it's frustrating for some to see underperformers (Dalot being the obvious one) repeatedly start big games. So the lineup can provoke a reaction.

Let's assess in a months time and hopefully we see some momentum being built. If not, the caution some posters are showing won't be unfounded.

Here we go...

Nee'r mind