And who can blame him?
When Manchester United were knocked out of the Carabao Cup by League Two Grimsby Town on Wednesday, one of the main sticks used to beat Ruben Amorim was how he retreated to the dugout during the shootout, staring at the floor, unable to watch.
He did the same as the clock ticked into the 96th minute at Old Trafford on Saturday. He sat down, this time with his feet up on the wall in front of the manager’s seats, initially with his head snapped back as if he was in one of those G-force machines that astronauts use to prepare for a space flight, then he stared in the opposite direction to where Bruno Fernandes was lining up the penalty.
He relied on the reaction of the Stretford End to let him know what happened. When Fernandes drilled the ball into the bottom corner, sealing a hugely needed 3-2 win for Manchester United over Burnley, there was no huge celebration, no roar of joy or relief, no punching of the air. He got up and made the same trip as he had dozens of times in the game, shuffling up that little astroturfed hill between the stands and the pitch.
Watching Manchester United in 2025 be like: pic.twitter.com/NDRRxy9Sln
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“I like to see the image of the fans,” he said after the game, when asked why he didn’t watch. Maybe that’s true, maybe it isn’t. But it certainly fitted with how he looked for the previous couple of hours.
It’s an experience, watching Ruben Amorim during a game. He is the most stressed man in the world. Whatever your job is — brain surgeon, air-traffic controller, whoever deals with the transfer paperwork at Chelsea — you are not as stressed as the Manchester United manager.
He constantly moves. He shuttles back and forth between dugout and the touchline. When there, he paces constantly: it’s genuinely noticeable that the ground in the home technical area is more worn than the away. It’s like the baseline at Wimbledon on the first day of the championships compared to the last, after Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka and Jannik Sinner have pounded across it for two weeks.
At one point early in the game, he even ran after the ball when it went out for a throw, getting there before the ball kid. When a change is to be made, he doesn’t call the substitute over himself, but instead gets one of his backroom staff to shout down the touchline. Why? Who knows. Maybe it’s so it doesn’t interrupt his pacing.
He’s permanently tense. His hands are very slightly raised, fists half-bunched, as if he’s anticipating throwing them up in either celebration or despair. It looks like you could twang the tendons on his forearms and get a decent tune out of them.
When he’s not moving, he’s squatting, sometimes looking at the pitch, sometimes staring hard at the floor, like a man trying desperately not to be sick. When he’s not squatting, he’s occasionally sitting, but for most of us, that’s a time to relax. Not Ruben. When Matheus Cunha went down injured in the first half, he slumped over the wall in front of the dugout, head in his hands. This was real ‘the world is conspiring against me’ stuff.
(Martin Rickett/PA Images via Getty Images)
You do sometimes wonder how wise it was to make the Sir Alex Ferguson Stand the one opposite the dugout at Old Trafford. When he was their manager, he could look up and see the sign bearing his name, a clear monument to his success, an immediate visual reminder of their glorious moments. The trouble is that when whichever subsequent manager is in place and failing, he can look up and see the sign bearing his name, a clear monument to his success, an immediate visual reminder of their glorious moments.
This win won’t rank among them. United needed it, but should have achieved it much earlier, and without the need to lean on a penalty in stoppage time. They dominated the first half without scoring, missed chances, and fell apart at various points by allowing Burnley to twice equalise. But they won.
Amorim was asked afterwards whether this would represent a turning point in his tenure, 10 months after he took charge. He quite rightly rejected the idea. “I’m not thinking about a turning point,” he said. “It’s day by day. Sometimes we play well, sometimes not so well. But we’re returning to the sort of team we have to be. We returned a little bit to our level today.”
One of the main reasons he rejected the notion was probably that he recognised how different it all could have been. Had Jaidon Anthony not brainlessly pulled on Amad’s shirt and conceded the penalty from which Fernandes got the winner, the narrative of Amorim’s failure would have continued.
And it didn’t help that, like against Grimsby, it was raining again.
Of course it was. At the moment, it feels like there’s a raincloud constantly following Ruben Amorim — and Ruben Amorim alone — floating above him like he’s in a tragic cartoon. This time, there were no sights to rival Amorim playing around with his sad little Ludo board, no anguished post-match interviews. United won, so there was just relief.
You can’t see Amorim changing, even if we do look back on this soggy afternoon as the day when it all clicked. He’ll still be pacing, still be tense, still be stressed. He’ll still hate penalties.
