Nothing we’ve seen or heard of Ruben Amorim over the years suggests a figure daft enough to have been in any doubt about the scale of the task that awaits him at Manchester United. But it was still nice of the players to show him so clearly in what ended up being a pretty scruffy and even lucky 1-1 draw at Ipswich.
We’re not quite sure we’d call scoring an early goal at Ipswich truly qualifies as ‘utopian’ or ‘staggering’ or ‘beyond his wildest dreams’ as the never knowingly undramatic Peter Drury claimed. But it was still good, wasn’t it?
It was also, very obviously, a very Ruben Amorim goal. Amad Diallo’s run with the ball from right wing-back was ideal, as was the run from Marcus Rashford without the ball to get across the keeper and apply the finishing touch.
Given the way United have struggled for goals up to this point, we did start to wonder if perhaps Amorim really is a magician. And yet… that was it. United offered next to nothing further after that one shining moment.
For a team who scored an actual goal after 81 seconds to end the 90 minutes with an xG of less than one seems distinctly sub-optimal.
It has to be a concern that United’s most important player for the remaining 88 minutes of the game after that start was Andre Onana. United’s keeper was excellent and had to be, twice making unlikely saves to deny Liam Delap.
We know Amorim is going to play with his three centre-backs with wing-backs, but we also know that it probably isn’t going to end up being the players we saw in those positions . There are obvious flaws all over this team in this shape, and it’s going to take time to fix it all. This is all obvious stuff, but it was still jarring to see just how uncertain and unconvincing United appeared.
We’re not sure Casemiro and Christian Eriksen has much long-term potential as Amorim’s midfield double-pivot given the mobile types he liked to use there for Sporting, and the wing-backs are a work in progress.
Noussair Mazraoui strikes us a player with both the necessary technical ability and footballing intelligence to make a passable success of himself at wing-back on either flank, but Amad certainly represents more of a punt.
We saw the good with the goal, and then the bad for the first of Delap’s two clear chances after Leif Davis was allowed to make almost unhindered progress down the Ipswich left.
There’s no inherent reason why Amorim can’t, in time, get it all working. But it is clearly going to take a long time and plenty of new players. That £200m spent in the summer on Erik Ten Hag players really does look an absolute folly now. Especially the chunk of it spent on Joshua Zirkzee, bless him.
One way or another, United are going to be unrecognisable in six months’ time. And probably for the better. But while some players are learning on a job they may be able to make a go of, there are clearly others now just marking time. And United themselves are likely to feel that way until at least January.
The futility of analysing the team in the interim is so obvious that it left Jamie Redknapp philosophically questioning the entire concept of punditry. It was lucky Ed Sheeran turned up just in time to prevent the former Liverpool and England midfielder experiencing a genuine epiphany.
Ruben Amorim was right in the middle of Speaking Well, I Thought about the job ahead of him at United and deserves a deal of credit for not just telling Sky to shove their interview when it was so rudely and weirdly interrupted by a pop star who simply had no choice but to say hello to Redknapp in the middle of a live interview with the Manchester United manager.
It was not the first thing to test Amorim’s patience today, and it won’t be the last over the days and weeks ahead.
Sheeran was also quite comfortably the least interesting thing about Ipswich today. It was inevitable that, whatever happened, the focus would land on the visitors today and their latest reboot, but it must be noted Ipswich were excellent.
The win at Spurs before the international break was no fluke and had been coming for some time, and they should probably have taken all three points here. The biggest compliment one can pay Kieran McKenna and his side is the fact they don’t really play like a newly promoted side. There’s a canniness and nous about their play that feels more like a team that’s already survived a relegation scrap or two.
Perhaps their rock-solid and often enormously enterprising performance here looked better for coming immediately after the maddening naivety of Southampton’s generosity against Liverpool. But there is clearly something about this Ipswich team.
It would have been easy to have been overwhelmed and consumed by the sheer quantity of narrative around the place here, especially after that goal. But not a bit of it. Ipswich simply dusted themselves down and set about being the better team for the remaining 88 minutes.
They remain in the bottom three for now, but the idea that there are three teams with less about them than Ipswich is an increasingly convincing one.
It will be quite some time before we can even begin drawing any kind of similar conclusion about Amorim’s United.
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