Ruben Amorim is finding life difficult as the manager of Manchester United but has promised the club and her fans that the bad moments will pass.
He made these comments after watching his team get beaten in front of their own fans at Old Trafford by Andoni Iraola’s high-flying AFC Bournemouth team, who are now fifth on the Premier League log heading into Christmas.
The Portuguese tactician started Alejandro Garnacho on the bench and left Marcus Rashford out of the squad again, while giving Tyrell Malacia and Joshua Zirkzee chances to impact the game from the start. None of these decisions paid off as the Cherries defeated the Red Devils 3 – 0 on Sunday afternoon.
Speaking with the media after the disastrous outing, the former Sporting CP Lisbon manager said: “Everybody saw the game. You cannot speak about fair in football because they scored and we didn’t, but we didn’t give anything [away] until the set-pieces and then we were so near [to scoring] the goal.
“But I think everybody felt a little anxious, not just the players but also the fans. It’s a very difficult moment for our club, you can feel it every game and especially at home. Two goals, like against Tottenham, very quickly, so you want to respond but you cannot do it because you suffer another goal, and then we suffer until the end of the game.
“I felt we created a lot of situations for our opponent [to deal with] but they managed to score and I think that makes the difference.”
One thing that stood out is United’s continued struggles with set pieces. Bournemouth defender Dean Huijsen opened the scoring with a header from a Ryan Christie set piece and United fans had bad flashbacks. Asked what the problem was with their set piece defending, Amorim said: “All the areas are of concern, especially of course set-pieces. We are training on that, we have to improve. There’s a lot of teams that are really strong on that, so we are working on it a lot of the time.”
Then he added: “Of course it’s [another] one of our focuses – to maintain the calm when you concede a goal. The last match, we suffer a goal and then another goal very quickly, so we have to manage these moments. Try to pass some calm to the players and say the game has difficult moments. We have to manage these difficult moments.”
