Ruben Amorim told to follow Pep Guardiola example to save Man Utd job - 'difficult to justify'

Football commentary legend Clive Tyldesley believes Ruben Amorim needs to show a greater flexibility if he wants to turn things around at Manchester United. Amorim's persistence with his 3-4-3 approach has yet to deliver results in the league, to the point that Saturday's home meeting with Sunderland is a real pressure game.

Amorim led United to the Europa League final last season, but defeat to Tottenham in Bilbao ensured his team aren't in Europe this term. That means the pressure is inescapable ahead of every single league outing - especially after a shock defeat to Grimsby in the Carabao Cup - and defeat to the newly promoted Black Cats could spell the end.

"I can't help but feel, and I wouldn't say it any stronger than that, if that if Amorim had not been a little bit more pragmatic and a little bit more practical with the resources that he inherited, and was a little bit more patient in terms of imposing his ideas and his ways upon the club, than actually Manchester United could even have qualified for a Europa League place last season from the position that he inherited," Tyldesley says.

"As it was, they reached the Europa League final, and very nearly, I guess, the Champions League. But I think realistically, they had a long way to come this season.

"I think the recruitment has been better and that he has some very good forward players at his disposal, but the balance of the team is still uncomfortable and the insistence on sticking to his ideas is difficult to justify when arguably the finest coach in our league at the moment, Pep Guardiola, who himself has very clear ideas on how the game has played, has shown himself to be prepared to be adaptable in order to improve results within his team. "

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It's not just Guardiola who has shown that kind of adaptability. Liverpool mixed up their style under Arne Slot last season, adopting a stingier defensive approach when needed, and it resulted in the Dutch coach winning the league at the first time of asking.

"I think that Arne Slot was the most adaptable of all the managers in the Premier League last season," Tyldesley adds. "Liverpool played with a little bit of everything. They went long, they went short. They defended deep when they had to. They'd go 4-4-2 when they want to see out a game. I mean, he is not frightened to try anything that he thinks will work in order to get the points."

That's not to say Amorim has been afraid to try new things. The head coach was criticised for his use of Mason Mount in the defeat at Brentford, and there have been other ways in which he has attempted to be creative with the talents at his disposal.

Tyldesley welcomes that willingness to mix things up - the question for him is whether Amorim is picking the right environment to try them out. "My final point on this is that if you paint a picture of an experiment or a project that is a long term project and ask the fans to bear with you because this will bear fruit in the long term, then it begs the question of whether you can still charge them 70 quid to watch the team while you're having the experiment," he adds.

"The famous comedians of the UK often try out their material in small theatres and sometimes pubs before they take it to the Apollo and the O2 and to a mass audience. They don't charge as much when they're trying out their material, as they do when it's the finished product.

"That might seem a rather strange analogy, but there were games last season when you felt as if this was something that could be done at Carrington, really, rather than in front of 70,000 people at Old Trafford who were going to have to trudge away with another defeat for the money that they'd paid.

"And that would be my question mark against him. If 3-4-3 or 3-4-2-1 was the magic bullet, then every team that had won the World Cup and every team that's won the Champions League in the last 10 years would have played that system, and they didn't."

Clive Tyldesley is raising awareness of The Football Association’s Silent Support Weekend. For more information, please visit https://www.englandfootball.com/participate/behaviour/Silent-Support.

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