Jamie Carragher has blasted Manchester United co-owners Sir Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS for their baffling decisions which have left Ruben Amorim vulnerable.
Amorim was appointed on a two-and-a-half-year contract in November to replace Erik ten Hag, but any hope he would bring about immediate positive change has already been extinguished.
The Portuguese has lost five of his first 11 games and declared Manchester United, 14th in the Premier League table and seven points clear of the bottom three, to be in a relegation battle.
But the responsibility for this ‘mess’ can only really be apportioned to those who backed Erik ten Hag through a laughable summer job review before sacking him a couple of months into the season and bringing in a coach who philosophy centres around a formation the squad is miserably unsuited to.
Jamie Carragher reckons Manchester United ‘might have found the right man for the job and hired him at the worst time’.
‘The club’s hierarchy has a lot to answer for,’ he writes in his latest column for the Daily Telegraph. ‘Appointing the prime target as soon as possible is understandable.
‘What is harder to explain is this: how could you have given a £200 million budget to a lame-duck coach who plays 4-2-3-1 four months before recruiting a manager who plays three central defenders and wing-backs?’
Amorim has already rejected the suggestion that he should show more tactical flexibility instead of forcing an incompatible squad into his favoured 3-4-3 system, saying he has “to sell my idea, if I change all the time it will be even worse.
“But I understand they have a lot of difficulties because they spend two years playing one way and now playing another, with a lot of losses, is really tough on them and you can feel it during the games,” he added.
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“Even when we try to score, was more from them than the organisation. You have to feel it. I have to sell my idea, I cannot find another one.
“If I change the system completely I don’t know if I’m here to win. You know? If I do that and continue to lose, it’s worse. You don’t know, I don’t know.”
Carragher agreed with Amorim, writing: ‘If Amorim switched to four at the back in response to United’s results it would undermine his reason for being there.’
The Sky Sports pundit continued to take aim at those in charge of footballing matters: ‘The Manchester United executives in charge of football operations are the architects of this mess, not Amorim.’
He then questioned how technical director Jason Wilcox can insist on establishing a team-wide “game model” – ‘the same system replicated across every level of the club’ – when ‘you are backing a manager with such a vastly different system to the one you have just sacked?’
And really yeah, that’s pretty fair.
‘The United hierarchy knew the risks of asking Amorim to take over straight away because it is obvious the current squad are not set up to play his way,’ Carragher says.
‘They have put faith in Amorim to make it work but his formation is so unsuited to the personnel that all the positive momentum that could have been created, had he taken over with a full pre-season and a chance to recruit players of the right profile, has been lost.’
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