Amorim deviates from Man Utd blueprint vs Tottenham as ‘something different’ milestone reached | OneFootball

Ruben Amorim doing “something different” against Tottenham feels hugely significant for Manchester United.

Tottenham’s last 19 Premier League games at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium comprise three wins, four draws and 12 defeats. It’s a harrowing run which would ordinarily make firm Manchester United favourites amid their promising uptick in form.

But the Red Devil somehow contriving to lose not once, not twice or even thrice to Spurs last season but four times, combined with Amorim’s side winning just once away from home this term, makes this a particularly hard game to call, with their respective impossible-to-gauge quality making it near impossible.

Much of the criticism aimed at Amorim in his time at Manchester United, before the improvement of late which saw him named Manager of the Month for October, has been based around his obstinacy.

It’s 3-4-3 or bust and it’s typically been the latter. He’s stubbornly refused to deviate from his formation and philosophy, and while we don’t expect that to change too much against Tottenham, it could feel a tad perverse to some that – as he admitted in a pre-match interview – he’s made changes to his team with the aim of “doing something different” on the back of three wins and a draw in his last four games.

“We’ve been working on it this week,” he added, and that’s a luxury he has over Thomas Frank and most of the other managers of teams vying for places towards the top of the Premier League, with no European football this season granting him the space to make tactical tweaks and work on new things midweek to make the push for qualification this season.

Amorim made three changes to his starting line-up, with Harry Maguire, Noussair Mazraoui and Patrick Dorgu all returning in place of Leny Yoro, Diogo Dalot and Benjamin Sesko, who drop to the bench.

Perhaps the changes have been made in a bid to replicate their performance against Liverpool, where the lack of a focal point caused no end of problems for Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konate, or maybe Tottenham’s insipid display vs Chelsea prompted him to pack his team full of pressers to push a panicking Spurs into ceding possession as regularly as they did against the Blues.

But after Amorim naming an unchanged side against Nottingham Forest for the first time in the Premier League was a landmark call to show why Manchester United should be in the running for a return to the Champions League, so too is this newfound will to do “something different”.

It points to a level of comfort, from Amorim in his players and from his players in him. Having taken a very long time to come to terms with the basics of his philosophy, they’ve now reached a stage where Amorim believes he can make adjustments to the blueprint for individual games.