How ‘Ruben Interim’ blew his Man United honeymoon – and why they are surely in a relegation battle

Just for a moment, Ruben Amorim’s easy smile disappeared and the eyes narrowed.

‘New system? Wolves play a new system?’ Amorim shot back at his inquisitor in the press room at Molineux.

‘They played the same system and Vitor Pereira worked the same system in Saudi Arabia. Wolves is a completely different situation. The squad was built up for this system.’

Late on Boxing Day, and perhaps for the first time we were seeing the strain on Amorim starting to show.

Manchester United’s new Portuguese coach had just suffered his third defeat in a row, and took issue with the suggestion that Wolves’ new Portuguese coach has succeeded in one week where he has struggled in two months at United.

While Pereira ended his first home game orchestrating cheers from the Molineux crowd with fist pumps, Amorim sank to his haunches on the touchline, his team on their knees once again.

On the journey back to Manchester and his house in the south of the city later in the evening, there will have been plenty of time to reflect once again on the magnitude of the job he has taken on.

United are 14th in the Premier League, the same position as when they sacked Erik ten Hag in late October, and showing no signs of improvement. If anything, the only movement seems to be backwards.

Monday’s game against Newcastle marks the halfway point of the campaign. This is neither a slow start nor a mid-season blip. If United aren’t careful, they are staring a relegation battle in the face.

At 39, Amorim is a young coach but he has been around the game long enough to know the consequences of failure.

Dan Ashworth, one of the men who flew to Portugal to negotiate his move to Old Trafford, has just been sacked as United’s sporting director after 159 days in the job. Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos have taken the brutal decision to axe 250 more staff. Another wouldn’t hurt.

Amorim’s replacement at Sporting Lisbon, Joao Pereira, was fired on Christmas Day. This is a ruthless industry, and he knows it.

He also knows better than to look on social media where the mischief-makers are revelling in United’s misery. Ruben Interim, they’ve started calling him.

‘I know the business that I’m in,’ he said. ‘The manager of Manchester United can never, no matter what, be comfortable.

‘I know that if we don’t win, regardless, if they pay the buyout or not, I know that every manager is in danger.’

It seems ridiculously early to even entertain such talk, but the question he challenged at Molineux raises a more sensible debate.

Wolves played a back three under Gary O’Neil and, in Pereira, they have appointed a like-minded coach.

Amorim shares the same philosophy and Liverpool’s insistence on keeping a back four was one of the reasons for discounting him when they appointed Arne Slot.

With Amorim, it’s 3-4-3 or bust. He’s made that abundantly clear since arriving at United and you have to admire the man’s principles.

United, on the other hand, were equally insistent that Amorim take over in mid-season rather than the summer, as he would have preferred.

So he was parachuted into Old Trafford and a growing crisis in November to carry out running repairs and introduce a system that was foreign to the majority of his players. In hindsight, it may have been wiser for him to wait.

The transition has been made all the more difficult because Amorim has had little time to work with them on the training ground due to the heavy fixture list.

The result? A coach who won 16 of his 17 games in Portugal this season – drawing the other – has lost half his first 10 games in England.

He has talked about literally walking the players through their paces at Carrington to get them up to speed; it’s an incredible scenario considering these are experienced international footballers who shouldn’t need wet-nursing through a tactical change.

When Mason Mount suffered another injury in the Manchester derby, Amorim sought some consolation in the fact Mount’s time on the sidelines could be put to good use by ‘teaching Mase how to play our game’.

At Molineux on Thursday night, Amorim estimated that he has only had four training sessions with his players. So is this why he wanted to delay taking the United job until the end of the season?

‘I already knew that was going to be tough,’ he replied. ‘You expect to win more games, to have players with more confidence to sell the idea and to work and improve things.

‘At this moment it’s really hard. We have to survive to have time and then to improve the team.’

Of course, Amorim’s philosophy doesn’t start and end with a back three. It involves wing-backs which means wingers having to learn to play more narrowly; a high press and ‘running like mad dogs’, as he puts it.

For a club built on a tradition of wingers – and with quite a few of them in the sub-standard squad he inherited from Ten Hag – it has been a difficult adaptation.

Some, like little Amad Diallo, have prospered. Others, like Marcus Rashford and Alejandro Garnacho, have not.

Both were dropped for the derby. Rashford has now been left out of the last four games. Garnacho has come back for the last three, but only on the bench.

Amorim arrived with the reputation of an astute man manager, but there is clearly an iron will behind the smile.

There is also a thin line between establishing authority and cutting off your nose to spite your face. Ten Hag cut it fine with his handling of Jadon Sancho. He also had a fragile relationship with Rashford who frustrated the hell out of him.

Amorim has taken an even firmer stance with Rashford and should be applauded for that. But the longer the player stays out of a losing team, the more pointless it becomes.

If Amorim can’t get a tune out of Rashford, he can at least get a decent price for him in the January transfer window, and neither purpose is being served by having him sat at home.

Therein lies another problem for the new head coach: United will have to sell to buy the players he wants to better suit his system after £600m of spending under Ten Hag left the coffers empty.

There will be no quick fix. Amorim is stuck with the majority of this squad for the rest of the season and some time beyond.

In fairness, he has fronted up. No question has been ducked, no answer fudged. Things are bad at United, he says, and they will get worse before they get better – not least because there are trips to Anfield and the Emirates after Newcastle come to Old Trafford.

Amorim has accepted the blame for results and even United’s problems on set-pieces, having taken those responsibilities off Ten Hag’s man Andreas Georgson and given them to his Portuguese assistant Carlos Fernandes.

He has been surprisingly honest about the anxiety in his team that spreads around Old Trafford.

‘We have to expect that any play from Newcastle near our box is going to make the stadium nervous, and our players have to cope with that,’ he said ahead of Monday’s game.

By then, the bottom six may have crept a little closer onto United’s shoulder.

Fans of a more optimistic nature would argue that a couple of wins would propel their team up the table. Give it a month or two, and this might all feel like a bad dream.

For now, though, the nightmare scenario for Manchester United and Amorim looms large.