Ruben Amorim will be given time and patience by the Manchester United board and fans as he tries to put right a broken Manchester United side.
There had been signs of early green shoots of recovery under the new manager after a 4-0 victory over Everton at weekend, even though they went on to lose 2-0 at Arsenal on Wednesday.
What Amorim will be seeing and what is frustrating fans so much is the side’s inability to learn from mistakes and to avoid making costly individual errors. Forest’s first goal was down to the former with the second and third very much about the latter.
One thing that has marked Amorim as different from his predecessor Erik ten Hag is his fearlessness at “going for it” and flooding his teams with attacking players when a goal is needed.
In that sense his first real tactical blunder as United manager could be seen in the deployment of substitutes Mason Mount, Noussair Mazraoui and Marcus Rashford.
With Alejandro Garnacho removed, Rashford was asked to play down the right hand side of the attack, where Amad Diallo was already operating effectively as an attacking wing back and Mazraoui pushing forward out of defence to support him.
Meanwhile, the left flank was manned single-handedly by a very tired Diogo Dalot.
Dalot got the ball time and again but unsurprisingly was unable to deliver many real killer balls and crosses into the box from his weaker side.
Rashford should have been deployed in the left inside forward position.
In Amorim’s defence, it is possible Joshua Zirkzee may have been under instruction to play that role, but seemed to be floating in the central channels rather than out wide.
If Amorim intended to overload the right side, he would at least have been better switching the fresher Mazraoui to left wing back and pushing the clearly exhausted Dalot back into the back three.
Dalot had a decent enough game in many respects but desperately needed to be partnered up with a forward on that left hand flank as two goals were being chased.
The imbalance meant United’s comeback fizzled out rather limply despite huge encouragement from the Stretford End.
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Red Billy
Red Billy is the managing editor of The Peoples Person, author of three books and totally obsessed with football’s transfer market. Billy still insists Matteo Darmian and Alex Telles could have made it at United given half a chance.
