Manchester United manager Ruben Amorim was left furious by what he saw from his players during Monday night’s defeat to 10-player Everton at Old Trafford.
Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall scored the only goal of the game for the Toffees midway through the first half, even though David Moyes’s side had already seen Idrissa Gana Gueye bizarrely sent off for taking a swipe at teammate Michael Keane.
United, without the injured duo of Matheus Cunha and Benjamin Šeško, were unable to muster a reply despite dominating possession, and just six of their 25 shots on goal forced Everton goalkeeper Jordan Pickford into a save.
Victory would have lifted United into the Premier League’s top five, two points shy of Chelsea in second place, but instead the Red Devils sit 10th in the table after a fourth defeat of the season.
Amorim: We Were Not Ready to Perform
Venting to Sky Sports post-match, Amorim suggested that he’d not got carried away by United’s recent promising displays—and stated that it was no surprise to him that his players are still “nowhere near” where they need to be in terms of performance levels.
“We are not there, not even near the point that we should be to fight for the best positions,” the Portuguese huffed. “We have a lot to do. We have to be perfect to win games, we were not perfect today.
“When we see the results of the weekend, we should get onto the pitch with a different excitement. Old Trafford was there saying 'we are all here for a big step up'. And we were not ready.
“These five weeks, everyone is praising our evolution. But I'm always saying the same things: we are nowhere near the moment we are meant to be in this club.
Neville Tears Into ‘Complacent’ Man Utd
The performance also drew the ire of Manchester United legend Gary Neville, who was on punditry duty. Often an outspoken critic whenever his former side are beaten, he again didn’t hold back in his assessment of an “unacceptable” display and said that the injuries to Cunha and Šeško could not be used as any kind of excuse.
“It was nowhere near good enough,” Neville said on his post-match podcast. “That was a really bad night for Man Utd, it was an embarrassment at times.
“Forget [the injuries to Cunha and Šeško], there are no excuses. I'm not entertaining that one bit. Everton dominated them with 11 men and with 10 men, in a different way of domination, but they dominated them through their fight and their spirit.
“It's complacency, and complacency will kill you. The minute that you think as a football player that you just have to turn up on that pitch and you're Manchester United and you can play or any football club, you're done. It just smelt of complacency. They weren't at it from the beginning. That is a bad one for United.
“You can't go from the fight that they showed in certain games to that. It just erodes confidence, it erodes trust. We're trying to build a trust in a manager, we're trying to build a trust in a team.
“The fans booed collectively at the end. It was loud, and rightly so. That was a really poor performance. It's almost as if you've gone sort of like two or three steps forward, everyone's feeling a little bit better about themselves, and you've just gone back to the start again.
“You can lose football matches, but you can't lose them like that. That's nowhere near good enough, it's not acceptable.”
United’s opportunity to make amends comes at Selhurst Park next weekend with their Sunday clash against Crystal Palace kicking off at the unusual time of 12 p.m. Struggling West Ham and Wolves then follow, before Bournemouth make the trip to Manchester 10 days before Christmas.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Ruben Amorim Launches Scathing Attack on Man Utd.
