As exhilarating as it was to watch Sporting hammer Manchester City, knowing that certain elements of the UK media would get incredibly giddy (Maybe Ruben really IS the new Sir Alex’, says the back page of The Sun), we were at pains to note that this told us absolutely nothing about how Manchester United would look under Ruben Amorim.
This is not a scenario that will ever be repeated at United. There will be no over-emotional send-off that results in such a slow start that City are allowed 80% possession to create chance after chance for an oddly misfiring Erling Haaland. United would never play so deep at Old Trafford; there would be boos raining down from the stands if they lined up with anything akin to a back seven.
And perhaps, most tellingly, Manchester United do not have a striker who has scored 48 goals in 2024; Bruno Fernandes is Man Utd’s top scorer over the same period with 13. It’s not comparing like with like, or even fish with birds, or chalk with cheese puffs.
We know the formation and instinctively know which players are going to prove too square for round holes but we can only guess at its efficacy with this squad. We know there is something rotten in the state of Manchester United, but we don’t really know if it can be fixed.
But what we did learn on Tuesday night was that Amorim absolutely knows all this. He was at pains to point out that this was a “one-off” and that “at Manchester United you cannot play exactly like this. You cannot play so defensively and so there we will have to adapt”.
This is so rare for any manager to admit, never mind one who has just engineered a 4-1 win over probably the best team in Europe. He admitted they were “lucky” and warned against extrapolating any information from that game to the Premier League.
Yes, he has a system that has proved incredibly successful in the Portuguese league, but he is taking over a team in the doldrums of 13th in the Premier League. They have no momentum. They have no learned processes. They have very little except a famous name and a rich history which has been largely untouched by anybody currently at the club.
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And Amorim knows all this. He won’t be tricked into saying he can make Manchester United great again or that he is anything approaching special. We cannot imagine him imploring fans to ‘trust the process’. He pulled off a momentous win and immediately said ‘nope, that doesn’t tell us anything, we were lucky’. Can you imagine Erik ten Hag saying that? Mikel Arteta?
But the most important word he used on Tuesday night was ‘fun’. He is leaving a massive pair of loving arms in the midst of incredible, almost unprecedented success to move to a club in crisis with players that do not match his system and have been worn down by poor decisions made at every level, and he is talking about ‘fun’. And even ‘very fun’.
It’s been a long time since anybody saw Manchester United as potential ‘fun’. A project, yes. A challenge, yes. A Sisyphus-style utterly thankless task, yes. But fun? That gets us far more excited than a smash-and-grab victory on a night when City officially entered CRISIS mode.
