Micah Richards believes Ruben Amorim hasn’t yet grasped how to handle the media pressures that comes with being Manchester United manager.
United’s start under Amorim continued to worsen as the Red Devils suffered a 1-0 defeat to Tottenham on Sunday to slide down to 15th in the Premier League table.
Jamis Maddison’s first-half strike was the difference in an edgy encounter which condemned Amorim’s side to their 12th league defeat of the season – their most in the top flight in 31 years.
And with a slew of key first-team players unavailable due to injury, the task for Amorim does not appear to be getting any easier as they prepare for a tough trip to Goodison Park at the weekend against an in-form Everton.
After the game, the under-fire United boss pushed back against the suggestion that his job was under threat, but conceded that it jobs remains ‘so hard’.
And while Amorim’s style of play and tactical inflexibility have come in for criticism, Richards believes that the United manager’s handling of the media is also not helping his cause.
‘Some of the comments that he’s making, like when he said he’d rather play the goalkeeping coach instead of Rashford, or the toing and froing with Ange before the game, I just feel like he’s honest but in a naive way,’ Richards said on the Rest Is Football podcast.
‘At first, I thought he had conviction but now I feel like he doesn’t understand the scrutiny of a Manchester United manager and everything he says.
‘When he said this is the worst team in United history, whatever quotes he wants to use, what he doesn’t understand is that’s a headline every single week.
‘If he doesn’t like a player, if he doesn’t like Rashford, that’s his decision. We can accept that as pundits, that’s your decision, we respect your decision.
‘But all the other stuff around it he’s actually making it harder for himself. He doesn’t understand what he’s doing because everything is chaos. It’s chaotic.’
‘I don’t want to tell him to focus on the football but stop giving people nuggets to make bigger stories than there needs to be.’
Amorim also faced criticism for not bringing on any of his academy players until the dying moments of Sunday’s contest.
But the Portuguese coach insisted that he needed to be careful with United’s young talents.
‘It is the hardest competition in the world,’ he said. ‘I am trying to be careful with them. I felt the team was pushing for the goal and I felt I don’t want to change. But they will play.
‘You try to read the game, understand what you see in training. The team were pushing for the goal and I didn’t feel the need to change.’
For more stories like this, check our sport page.
Follow Metro Sport for the latest news on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
