- Written and published prior to United's 1-1 draw at Ipswich
Here we are then, at last.
A full 23 days after Ruben Amorim was officially announced as Manchester United manager the hypotheticals are over and real life comes crashing into view.
Football managers are at their best when they’re purely theoretical so Amorim did well to bask in that liminal space for nearly a month. But that time is over. No more blue-sky previews, no more hushed whispers about the man’s genius. Reality will bite hard.
If they lose at Ipswich Town on Sunday everything said about Amorim over the last few weeks will go up in flames. Just ask Erik ten Hag, whose opening defeats to Brighton and Brentford were uncannily like his final death throes. The end is woven into the beginning. And it’s hard to recall a Premier League debut ever having quite so much riding on it.
A good start is needed for a good rest of the season. A good rest of the season is needed for a good summer. A good summer is needed for a good first full campaign. And a good first full campaign is needed if the new Man Utd board is to avoid a catastrophe of public opinion; is to avoid the ultimate sliding doors moment for a club on the precipice of cultural abyss.
Because the simple truth nobody inside the club dare say out loud is that if Amorim doesn’t succeed, nobody will.
If the new directors can’t turn this thing around with a bright young manager at the helm then this isn’t just a club in a daze but a club in permanent recession. It’s win or bust, and the chain of events to one of those outcomes begins in what ought to be an innocuous – and relatively stress-free – debut at Portman Road.
Lose at Ipswich and people start talking about Ruud van Nistelrooy’s polo necks.
The ensuing hesitation helps Everton grind out a point at Old Trafford the following week, which leaves Amorim chasing a first league win from Arsenal (a), Nottingham Forest (h), Manchester City (a), and Tottenham Hotspur (a), a horrid set of games that could easily end without a single victory. Then what? Does anyone stay calm in that scenario?
If this all sounds senselessly hyperbolic that’s because it is. But the melodrama that chases Man Utd and feeds it, both self-inflicted and created by a media that loves to watch the old giant fail, invites gloominess until it becomes self-fulfilling. It’s the death spiral in action. Belief in it makes it come to pass.
But they said all that about Liverpool before Jurgen Klopp came in and changed the story. We know it can be done, then.
All Amorim has to do is replicate one of the most decorated managers of the 21st century with a club at a much lower ebb and with a much higher wage bill than Liverpool in 2015.
No manager’s success or failure is ever predicated on their first game in charge, you might think. But then there isn’t another club like Man Utd, whose every misstep is scrutinised with a fury that contains within it a decade of failure.
We can now add to that sagging weight another layer of meaning, another crushing subtext, another unconscious anxiety to raise the heat: the implicit understanding that if Amorim fails, the whole system fails; that if this one doesn’t work, maybe the club is in managed decline. There is no neutrality, no stasis, no ‘good enough’ job. This one is all or nothing.
Everything feels so much lighter before a ball has been kicked. If only it could stay that way. But no, on Sunday the world will lean in.
Take a deep breath Ruben. Things will never be the same again, not for you, and not for Man Utd.
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