Ruben Amorim won’t know a whole pile, presumably, about the 2FM breakfast show. To be fair, they probably wouldn’t claim to know a whole pile about him either. A few weeks back, during one of the morning show’s top-of-the-hour sports bulletins, one of the presenters announced that Limerick “hit zero to thirty as they prevailed by four points” over Tipperary. That’s a 0-30 to 1-23 victory to you and me.
The point is, keeping across the granular tick-tock of sport isn’t exactly a priority of the 2FM breakfast crew. And more power to them. Written down for the uninitiated to read out blind, of course it looks like Limerick hit zero to thirty. It’s good sometimes to be reminded that sport is a niche pursuit and that we’re the weirdos, not everybody else.
Anyway, as if poor Ruben didn’t have enough on his plate, it got to the point this week where not just his plate but all the plates at Manchester United suddenly found themselves of interest to the morning zoo. Jim Ratcliffe’s decision to close the staff canteen in yet another craven cost-cutting measure at United is exactly the kind of offbeat, you’re-not-going-to-believe-this-happened story that crosses over into normie world.
[ Let them eat fruit: Manchester United close staff canteen in latest cost-cuttingOpens in new window ]
When you’re explaining, you’re losing, the politicians say. Sport is a little more visceral than that. First off, in a very real sense, when you’re losing, you’re losing. Amorim has been in charge of United for 23 games. He’s lost nine. He has won five Premier league games out of 16, including midweek against Ipswich. All four of the wins before it were immediately followed by a defeat by at least two goals in United’s next league game.
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(That is, of course, exactly the sort of pitiable, nerdy, push-your-glasses-up-on-your-nose sports stat that the good people of the 2FM breakfast show are able to live their life completely unburdened by. The lucky bastards.)
So it isn’t just that Amorin’s time at United has been heavily flavoured by losing. It’s more that his team have become experts at it, world leaders in the art of the debilitating defeat. United haven’t merely been losing games, they have taken to losing them heavily on the back of every victory that ought to have served as a ray of hope.
The win over Manchester City in December was followed by a 3-0 home defeat to Bournemouth three days before Christmas. January’s calamity was the 3-1 home defeat to Brighton, coming three days after they’d beaten Southampton. February started with a 2-0 defeat at home to Crystal Palace, zapping the chimera of momentum brought on by a flurry of wins over Rangers, Fulham and Steaua Bucharest.
On and on and down and down. United haven’t won two games in a row in the league this season, either under Amorim or Erik ten Hag. The last time they did so in the Premier League came in the who-cares final two matches of last season. They had won only one game in eight before that, of course, taking a bazooka to their already anorexic chances of Champions League football.
All of which leads here, to this low point beneath all the other low points. When you’re explaining, you’re losing. When you’re losing, you’re definitely losing. But when you’re the Wait-Till-You-Hear-This funny bit on blissfully sport-agnostic breakfast radio, it’s really impossible to overstate the extent to which you’re losing. You’d say there’s nowhere worse to go if you weren’t so sure that United will surely find it.
Amorim’s side play Fulham this weekend in the FA Cup, followed by two legs against Real Sociedad in the Europa League on successive Thursdays. The long and short of it is that they’re heading into a 10-day period that could bring an end to whatever hopes they have of winning a trophy this season. And all anyone is talking about is soup and sandwiches in the staff canteen.
Worse again, it’s the right thing to be talking about. After all, why would anyone waste their breath talking about winning trophies? United may well get past either Fulham or Sociedad or maybe even both. As it stands, both sides lie ninth in their respective leagues and provide United with exactly the sort of middling, unthreatening opposition that might usually be a springboard to better things.
But the way things are, nobody would be shocked if United went out of one or both competitions in the next fortnight. And even if they do progress, who would dream of backing them to go on and win either competition? It just seems such a ludicrous conceit. Maybe not as ludicrous as Old Trafford staff having to count cartons of screws to avoid over-ordering but still fairly out there.
The season is a bust, plainly. Amorim seems like a decent guy who has been given a hospital pass but he must know that it’s not going to be long before he becomes the main focus here. United fans have been mad at the Glazers for two decades at this stage and there’s plenty of ire left over for the Ineos crowd too.
But Amorim is ultimately the one who has to stand on the sideline during every game and front up for the cameras before and after. Although there is sympathy for him, it isn’t limitless. The ghouls above him have tied one arm behind his back but the job is still the job. He can’t go on presiding over something this terrible indefinitely.
Amorim’s league record so far is: Played 16 Won 5 Drew 3 Lost 8. That isn’t just the worst of all the post-Fergie United managers, it’s comfortably the worst. For context, 16 league games into his sad spell, David Moyes’s record read: Played 16 Won 7 Drew 4 Lost 5. Ten Hag won 10 of his first 16 league games, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer won 12. They all got ground down to nubbins in the end.
The only thing Amorim has going for him right now is that the higher-ups in Old Trafford are more ripe for ridicule than he is. There are two ways Ineos and the lads can change that – they can either fix everything that’s wrong with Man United or they can fit him for a fall-guy’s suit.
Which would you imagine might be more likely?
