Systems evangelist Amorim meets Slot's simplest pragmatism at Anfield | first division

PPerhaps the most striking aspect of Rubén Amorim's time in manchester united It is the physical effect of the work, the altered optics. Amorim turned up at Old Trafford looking like a handsome pirate: the jawline, the lordly smile, the elite European jacket style, the sense that here is someone who smells like high-spec car upholstery at all times.

Seven weeks later, he has the air of a doomed royal hostage, joylessly transported from the hallway to the touchline by invisible handlers. The smile has fractured, the shoulders have slumped. More recently, United's head coach has developed the habit of squatting mid-match and peering deep into the Old Trafford turf, as if searching for a) a contact lens; and b) the remaining fragments of his own crumbled and tender soul.

Welcome to the meat grinder. Amorim has gone almost overnight from notions of perfectibility, systems, control, six-month undefeated streaks, to looking like a catalog item model in existential crisis, buckled under the weight. of all that scar tissueThe ghosts in the eaves, the voices through the wall.

And so, to Anfield. The real problem for Manchester United ahead of Sunday's trip to face the league leaders is not the run of four consecutive defeats with no goals scored in the last three. It's not the fact that their recent results against these opponents include losses of 3-0, 7-0, 4-0 and 5-0. It's not the prospect that almost every part of this ghost ship will begin to rattle and squeak on its hinges, from the tearful new additions to the faded celebrity time servers.

It is rather the growing sense of some basic disjunction between Amorim's rigid tactical requirements and the ability to meet them at a club that is both overstaffed and understaffed, wealth-rich and cash-poor, ceremonially grand but also chaotic and childish.

In this context Liverpool and Arne Slot They are a perfect point of contrast. The systemic obsessive versus the pragmatic: it is a key dichotomy in modern coaching. On the one hand, the unwavering merchant of philosophy, the evangelist of the way we play.

This has become the norm and a necessary form of managerial self-promotion. Vincent Kompany defeated Burnley in delightfully fragile style and was rewarded with one of the best positions in world football. Ange Postecoglou continues mask the failures of your equipment behind a kind of challenging ideological challenge, as if there is simply too much at stake here, brother, too much art, too much love, to waste time learning to defend, adapt or find other gears.

Amorim is a version of this. Here was a manager who came to United announcing weeks in advance the exact tactical way his teams would play, as if with three defenders plus vigorous midfield pressing he had discovered some kind of incontrovertible truth.

On the contrary, the key to Slot's success so far is the absence of ego, the ability to resist tearing everything down and rebuilding it in your own image. Instead, Slot has been confident enough to absorb Jürgen Klopp's legacy, adapt, modify and perfect it. Clearly, this is much easier to do when our inheritance is a fully functional eight-year-old model, rather than a Frankenstein monster of cuts and failed eras. But this simple pragmatism has become a kind of superforce in the era of systemic maniacs.

Amorim was always going to impose its advertised model, a shape and set of patterns that every opponent in the world's toughest league has been able to prepare for, even when it clearly doesn't have the players to make it work. There is no doubt that real improvement will occur over time. He is clearly an excellent manager. But to date he has accomplished the genuinely amazing feat of making this United team worse In almost all areas, a rare case of anti-bounce.

There are two aspects to this. In hindsight, and with full knowledge of United's lack of transfer ability, Amorim has gone from looking like an entirely sensible signing to a strangely tinkling, ill-fitting role. Right man, wrong basket case.

He has also been criticized for some ill-fitting selections, but given his candor from the start about his tactical intentions, this seems pointless, like criticizing a squirrel for liking nuts. Instead, Amorim's role has been to illustrate in precise detail the pre-existing flaws of his employers, especially during the current year of living stupidly under Ineos.

It seems doubly absurd now that Sir Jim Ratcliffe's first round of interviews talked about sitting down with a committee to decide the exact style Manchester United would now play: a ludicrous suggestion even without the implication that a 70-year-old chemical billionaire so many years should be involved. in this process, but doubly so now in the context of hiring one of the most uncompromising systems coaches in Europe. Oh yes, Mr. Jim. Tell me again about “forward football.”

In the same manifesto speech, Ratcliffe promised that the Champions League would be a non-negotiable requirement, and then hired a manager who failed to deliver. United then blew the entire £100m transfer budget in Erik ten Hag's doomed final window. Chuck on hiring and then Fire “best in class” football director. Top it off with a politburo of scowling blokes, there to teach elite football about high-performance culture.

In the end, it is not surprising that the options on the field are sometimes incoherent. In Amorim's recent midfield selections there has been a sense of a man sitting in a dying car pressing every pedal and flipping every switch in the desperate hope that something will work. The last five games have brought four combinations in that key Amorim position, the last of which was the strange spectacle of Casemiro and Christian Eriksen. against Newcastlewith Harry Maguire and Matthijs de Ligt behind, four men playing football through a giant patch of glue.

No one here is prepared for Amorim's intense midfield planning. And we will still try to play with a high-intensity midfield, because that's how we do it here. In this sense, Amorim's struggles also help explain Slot's early successes.

Klopp has been slightly written out of Liverpool's current season, as if what happened here was some kind of rescue job. In reality, Klopp left behind a strong team and a powerful team culture. that Slot has improved and expandedbringing out new levels of Ryan Gravenberch, Luis Díaz and even Trent Alexander-Arnold in a team that is now allowed to rest on the ball, to leave its defenders less exposed.

Beyond this, Sunday at Anfield represents a contrast between two models of American ownership: financially careful, data-driven but undeniably competent, on the one hand; and the hugely successful free-riding of the Glazer family and their chosen cost-cutting partners.

Of course, there will be further tests for Slot when this initial version hits bumps in the road or loses key personnel and the club must rebuild. For now, Sunday presents a healthy contrast between intelligent, adaptive training and the weirdness of hiring a systems evangelist and asking him to fill in the gaps with pieces that don't fit. Amorim can get this working in time. For now it feels like a case of a man with a plan, in the place where plans go to die.