Amorim's United future is bleak - unless he can adapt

Big Ange Postecoglou was not for turning. Or so we thought. High lines. Front-foot football. Almost all-out attack. It brought Tottenham Hotspur some thrilling victories in the early days of Angeball. Since teams worked out how to counter it, however, results have taken a dramatic downturn.

- PETE HALL IN BILBAO

Ruben Amorim took a similar hardline stance when he arrived on our shores, but since then, a clear trend has developed. It was music to new Manchester United overlords Ineos’s ears – after a period of apparently directionless travel under Erik ten Hag, someone was willing to come in and instil a philosophy, an identity, on the club.

All along, as, like Spurs, their season lurched from one recordbreaking disaster to the next, Amorim has been as bullish as his Australian counterpart.

The difference in a match that could now take Tottenham and United on very diverging trajectories, such was the significance of winning the Europa League to both beleaguered teams, was that, when it really mattered, one coach was willing to sacrifice his ideals for the greater good, and one wasn’t. And even more so after Brennan Johnson’s scruffy finish, Postecoglou was posed a philosophical question and willingly leaned further into the task at hand.

As Spurs sensed glory, they retreated and yet, Amorim failed to push his chips all in, delaying the requisite changes to pin Postecoglou’s side back even further and ultimately make them crack under pressure.

“Of course we have a plan beforehand, but everybody can change it when we need to,” Micky van de Ven, man of the match in Bilbao, said. “You can say what you expect from the game but the game is always going to be different.