“How long do Manchester United keep waiting?” Roy Keane fed up with Ruben Amorim ‘excuses’

Former Manchester United skipper Roy Keane questions how much longer the club should tolerate their poor results under manager Ruben Amorim following their 3-0 derby defeat to Manchester City.

The Portuguese arrived as Erik ten Hag’s replacement last season but is yet to oversee an improvement in the club’s fortunes, despite having had a full summer and a busy transfer window to try and turn things around.

United have taken just four points from their opening four games of the campaign, leading Keane to wonder whether we should still be making excuses for Amorim.

Keane said on Sky Sports following that derby defeat: “This United team, they lack that real quality. They struggle defensively, the midfield…you’re on about United breaking that press, but when teams get United, they look all over the place.

“I think they’re just an average team, an average Premier League team, the stats will tell you that. I’m going back to to last season as well.

“So again we’re sitting here and United’s record going against the top six teams or whatever is really, really poor. They can’t seem to compete. They’ll have maybe a good 45 minutes or a good hour, they kind of done it quite well against Arsenal, but they lost the game at home to Arsenal.

READ MORE: Erling Haaland and Phil Foden show signs of ending Manchester City identity crisis

“Ultimately, you are playing for Man United to win football matches, and when they say ‘we’re coming up against quality teams’…yeah, but that’s part of the challenge. When you sign that contract, you’re going, it’s no good just beat the lesser teams, you’re playing for Man United to compete against other good teams – and United can’t do that, whether they’re not good enough, there’s obviously issues.

“You talk about the system, but the manager’s come in, he’s sticking to his guns, he’s not budging, but the results, and I look at the points per game and goals for, goals against, it does concern me. It’s not good reading.

“As soon as the game starts, you’re looking going…you’re worried. And when you get that feeling when they’re playing any decent team.

“We said ‘they’ve scored four goals [this season] and you’d think United a bit better going forward now’…two of them were penalties, so they’re not exactly a free-scoring team. It’s not like they’ve gone ‘we might score two or three, and we might give up a few’.

“It’s almost the same problem as last year. We were told ‘the new manager needs a pre-season, he needs his own players’. They’ve spent over £200m.

MORE MANCHESTER UNITED COVERAGE ON F365
👉 ‘You don’t know me’ – Fernandes hits back at critics after Man Utd legends question behaviour
👉 Romano reveals what Man Utd think of Lammens after Bayindir is given Man City start
👉 Liverpool ‘flop’ Florian Wirtz among Big Six sextet needing to step up after the international break

“So we keep making excuses, but at some stage you go ‘when are we going to see the signs?’ Now people say you need to give managers time…of course, but we saw Slot going into Liverpool last year, and Liverpool might have been a better team than United at that stage, but he ends up winning the league. You look at other managers, you can see Thomas Frank going into Spurs, you go, ‘are we going to see signs of Spurs improving?’ Yeah[, we are].

“So how long do you keep waiting when this team are probably getting a point per game?

“My worry is with the players now, maybe the players haven’t got that much faith in it. So as much as the manager’s going ‘this is where we’re going lads’, and at the start you’re probably going ‘new manager, new ideas, something different’…but as the results don’t come and you keep getting beaten and you’re struggling against the better teams … it’s like they’re going around in circles.

“If some of the players are now starting to doubt that – and I’m not saying they are, but you see the goals they’ve given away – and you’re going ‘are some of the players fully on board with this manager?’.

“I hope it can change, but we gave him the benefit of the doubt when he first came in. United have thrown money at it, and if those are brilliant coaches, you’re going, when are you going to coach these players to make them better?”