Murphy tears into Amorim’s 3-4-3 formation at Man Utd as he make ‘hundreds of millions’ claim

Former Liverpool midfielder Danny Murphy would be “amazed” to see Man Utd still playing a 3-4-3 formation under Ruben Amorim in a year’s time.

The Red Devils chose to replace Erik ten Hag with Amorim at the beginning of this month after Man Utd made a terrible start to the new Premier League season.

Man Utd have won four of their first 12 Premier League matches with Amorim’s side drawing 1-1 against Ipswich Town in the Portuguese coach’s first game in charge on Sunday.

Amorim deployed a 3-4-3 formation against the Tractor Boys but, after only a couple of days training with his full quota of players following the international break, his Man Utd side unsurprisingly didn’t look comfortable with the new tactics.

And former Premier League midfielder Murphy thinks Man Utd need better midfielders in order for Amorim to play an effective 3-4-3 formation in the English top flight.

Murphy said on Match of the Day 2: “I’d be amazed if they were still playing a 3-4-3 in a year’s time. This league’s very, very different from continental leagues. We’ve only had Chelsea, in recent years, win playing that system and let’s be honest, they had [N’Golo] Kante and [Nemanja] Matic.

“Two wonderful defensive midfielders in the middle of the pitch and [Diego] Costa up top with [Eden] Hazard supporting him and helping him as well.

“They don’t have those players yet and how do you find them? It costs hundreds of millions to get the best players in the world. I think when you play three at the back against the majority of good teams in our league, who play three high, you end up being a five and that’s really difficult. If United are going to get much better and competitive, I think that 3-4-3 will evolve into something else.”

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Man Utd now enter a period after the international break where recovery will be more important than time on the training pitch, as three matches a week become a regular occurrence until after the festive period.

On how he will implement his plans despite limited time on the training pitch, Amorim said: “We have to find a way.

“I think the only way to do it is we have games and the guys that don’t play, have training. Everyone is going to play and everyone is going to be on the bench so they have the feeling of the game but they need to train.

“With this schedule we need to rotate the team, so we will try to use that to train, to improve the team between matches.

“Without time we have to find the time and this is the only way. Some of the guys are going to play and some of the guys in the next days will work on our idea and then they will change the positions.”