Amorim: Pep’s new deal ‘a problem for everybody’​​

Rúben Amorim said Manchester United will have to “suffer for a long period” before his methods help the club enjoy success again after a 1-1 draw at Ipswich Town denied the new head coach a debut win in his first game in charge.

Marcus Rashford’s opening goal after 81 seconds had given United a dream start at Portman Road, but Omari Hutchinson’s equaliser sealed a point for Kieran McKenna’s team and the home side would have won but for two crucial saves by United goalkeeper André Onana.

Despite having less than a week to work with his new squad on the training ground, the former Sporting CP coach deployed his favoured 3-4-2-1 formation and he said it led to his players over-thinking their performance.

But Amorim insisted he will stay loyal to his principles, even though he said it will lead to more suffering until his tactics bear fruit.

“I know it’s frustrating for the fans, but we are changing so much in this moment with a lot of games,” Amorim told reporters. “We are going to suffer for a long period and we will try to win games, but this will take time.

“We have to win games, but we could lose if it was not for Onana, so I think we have to understand that and think and be pragmatic that these guys had two days to train to change so much.

“It’s hard for the players in three days to cope with everything, but we forget about the new idea. I think that’s why I was brought here in the middle of the season and we try to cope with the things they are used to doing [under Ten Hag].

“Next year in the same stage, we will be here with the same problems or we start now, we risk a little bit, we suffer a little bit and in the next year we will be better at this point so we have to risk it a little bit.

“The [players] are thinking too much because we are changing too much with two trainings now without space to improve in training.

“But what I understood today is they are trying. They are really trying. Even in the difficult moments, I felt they were doing the things we wanted them to do.”

Amorim said that he has already told his players to stop doing what they did under the previous regime, citing the changes he has urged full-back Diogo Dalot to make.

“Some details — they used to pass the ball and go forward, even the centre backs,” Amorim said. “Now they have to go back. These type of things. They start going forward and they have to think too much.

“Dalot used to do it, pass the ball to centre backs, go inside, play as a midfielder, now he has to stick to this position.

“When we want to listen to a lot of you guys that Manchester United doesn’t have a structure, we will have a situation [for] you [to] see a structure and you will [see] that but it’s not fluid.

“This is like steps. We have to put in the heads, the structure. When they start thinking about the structure they will play so much better.

“But we need time to do that and during this time we have to manage to win games. That is very important and I know that.”

United have fixtures looming in the Premier League, Europa League and Carabao Cup in the weeks ahead and Amorim said some players will be taken out of certain games to enable them to work on new methods on the training ground.

“We have to find a way,” he said. “I think the only way to do it is we have games and the guys that don’t play have trainings everybody is going to play, everybody is going to be on the bench, so they have the feeling of the game but they need to train.

“With this schedule, we need to rotate the team so we will try to use that to train, to improve the team and to win matches.

“Without the time we have to find the time, I think this is the only way some of the guys are going to play, some of the guys in the next day will work on our idea and then they will change their position.”

IPSWICH, England — For 81 seconds, it all seemed so easy for Ruben Amorim. In his first game as Manchester United head coach, Marcus Rashford, the player who has embodied the club’s troubled recent past, had scored inside two minutes to make a dream start against Ipswich Town.

Then reality bit, and Amorim discovered just how big of a job he has taken on.

A game that began so brightly for the sixth man tasked with recreating Sir Alex Ferguson’s glory years at United ended with Amorim angrily ordering Joshua Zirkzee, the forward introduced as a second-half substitute, to get into the Ipswich penalty box and offer some attacking threat rather than saunter around while the game passed him by. By that stage, United had let their lead slip following a stunning 43rd-minute equaliser by Omari Hutchinson, and Kieran McKenna’s Ipswich had gone close on several occasions to taking the lead, twice being denied by crucial André Onana saves from Liam Delap.

Amorim wanted urgency, and Zirkzee was moving as though he was taking a leisurely walk on the beach. That summed up the problems that Amorim, recruited from Portuguese champions Sporting CP, must overcome at United.

He has many issues to address, but when a striker needs to be told that he should be trying to score a winning goal in stoppage time, it points to the malaise that runs deep at Old Trafford.

Amorim’s body language at the end of a hard-fought 1-1 draw at Portman Road also told a story: that a point wasn’t enough. The number of times that the 39-year-old waved his players forward and berated them for passing backwards in the closing stages underlined his determination to win. Amorim grew accustomed to that at Sporting, where he ended the club’s two-decade wait for a domestic title with two league championships in three years, but it will take time to change the mentality at United and eradicate the fear and trepidation that his predecessor, Erik ten Hag, was unable to shake off.

“I think my players were thinking too much,” Amorim said after the game. “The players were too stuck, thinking ‘Where should I be?’ We will work and with more time, they will be clear.”

Amorim’s personality and self-confidence will rub off on his players and, sooner rather than later, the best of them will begin to play with greater freedom and belief. And while the unconvincing performance against Ipswich denied Amorim a debut win, it may ultimately have done him a favour in keeping expectations at a realistic level because, make no mistake, he has a big challenge in front of him to turn United around.

He was welcomed with a fans’ banner at Portman Road that said, “Good Luck Ruben Amorim – Make Our Team Great Again,” yet his team selection against Ipswich highlighted the task ahead.

Having promised to stick to his principles, Amorim started with the 3-4-2-1 formation that brought success at Sporting, but he had to deploy full-back Noussair Mazraoui in the three alongside Matthijs de Ligt and Jonny Evans because of injuries to centre-backs Lisandro Martínez, Harry Maguire and Leny Yoro. And his selection of Casemiro and Christian Eriksen, both 32 years old, in central midfield was an example of his lack of options with neither Manuel Ugarte nor Kobbie Mainoo deemed fit enough to start.

It meant his team lacked legs and energy at its core — a problem that Ten Hag repeatedly failed to address — and allowed Ipswich to camp in United’s half. The forward three therefore became ineffective, aside from Rashford’s early goal.

The big positive from the game was that the players at least looked like they knew what they were expected to do in terms of positioning and responsibilities, but the old problems run deep and could never be corrected with just a handful of days on the training pitch.

“I think we have to understand and think and be pragmatic that these guys had two to three days to train to change so much,” Amorim said. “It’s hard for the players in three days to cope with everything.

“I know it’s frustrating for the fans, but we are changing so much in this moment with a lot of games. We are going to suffer for a long period and we will try to win games, but this will take time.”

Amorim tried to impact the game from the bench, making five substitutions in the second half, but aside from withdrawing the tiring legs of Casemiro, Eriksen and Evans and injecting some younger energy, the switches did little to make a difference.

Amorim shouldn’t be surprised by that. He will know that the squad he has inherited from Ten Hag is not designed to suit his system and he has already acknowledged that his players need to be better “physically.”

He and his coaches can make them fitter, and some of the players will evolve to be able to play in Amorim’s system, but it will take time.

Forget the 81-second sugar rush. The real United, and the one that needs to change, is the one that came after.

Mikel Arteta has hit back at anyone questioning Bukayo Saka‘s commitment to England by insisting he would “send an MRI scan” to prove the winger was injured during this month’s international break.

Saka was one of 10 withdrawals during England’s recent UEFA Nations League double header against Greece and Republic of Ireland, a situation which captain Harry Kane described as “disappointing” before suggesting that “it’s a tough period of the season and maybe that’s been taken advantage of a little bit.”

Saka was unable to complete Arsenal‘s 1-1 draw at Chelsea prior to the international break due to a thigh problem but capped a fine individual performance as he opened the scoring in Saturday’s 3-0 win over Nottingham Forest at Emirates Stadium.

After Thomas Partey and teenager Ethan Nwaneri — with his first Premier League goal — completed the scoring in a comfortable win, Arteta defended the contrast in Saka’s absence for England and fine form for Arsenal.

“Well, we can send an MRI scan, it’s very simple,” Arteta said. “That’s a communication that was very clear between the medical staff of Arsenal and the England national team.

“He hasn’t done anything, he was away and needed time to heal. He’s done one training session.”

Arsenal secured their first league win since Oct. 5 to generate some positive momentum ahead of a difficult week which continues with Tuesday’s Champions League trip to Sporting CP.

“I sensed a great energy in the last 48 hours,” Arteta said. “The way everybody came back, I sensed a great togetherness and desire to change the situation and what has been a different period for us with all the situations that we had to come across. And the team is there straight away from the beginning. It was a flow, it was a dominance, there was an enthusiasm about it. That is what I demanded.”

United States striker Ricardo Pepi continued his rich vein of scoring form, netting a hat trick in PSV Eindhoven‘s 5-0 victory over FC Groningen in the Dutch Eredivisie Saturday.

Pepi, who scored for the U.S. in both legs of its Concacaf Nations League quarterfinal win over Jamaica in the recent international break, has now scored six goals in his past four appearances for club and country.

His hat trick put the 21-year-old top of the Eredivisie scoring charts, level on nine goals with FC Twente‘s Sem Steijn. Pepi has amassed that total despite starting just four times in his 12 appearances in the Netherlands‘ top division.

PSV top the standings, eight points clear of second-placed Utrecht but having played two games more.

Olivier Boscagli and Guus Til got the first and third goals for PSV, but it was Pepi who stole the show against the team he played for on loan during the 2022-23 season.

His first goal, in the 37th minute, was a superb solo effort, sprinting in from the right touchline and driving into the penalty area before chipping the ball over the Groningen goalkeeper.

Pepi’s second came in the 64th minute, after beating a defender and finding the bottom corner of the net. And the former FC Dallas starlet completed his hat trick with 12 minutes remaining with a well-placed header from 6 yards out.