Can Man Utd’s unexpected new coach turn Ruben Amorim players into ‘mad dogs’? | OneFootball

The football world wasn’t ready for Sir Clive Woodward when he joined Southampton as performance director in 2005. Two years after masterminding England’s Rugby World Cup glory, Woodward arrived at St Mary’s to much ridicule, summed up by a newspaper cartoon which depicted two players lifting up striker Peter Crouch like a second row catching a rugby lineout.

Woodward later said, on seeing the cartoon: “My immediate thought was, ‘Can you do that? Can you actually lift someone up?’”

New ideas weren’t particularly welcome inside the game’s conformist culture, let alone wacky ones, and Woodward didn’t last long in the job. He clashed with Southampton manager Harry Redknapp, and his grand plan to eventually become a key player at the Football Association never materialised.

Yet football today is more open-minded to outside influence. Coaches from rugby, tennis and cricket have all switched over to the more lucrative world of football in recent years, and it was intriguing when news broke on Wednesday of Manchester United’s latest hire, the athletics guru Harry Marra. The 78-year-old American is considered one of the outstanding coaches in the history of track and field, and is best known for helping US decathlete Ashton Eaton to two Olympic gold medals.

Marra will work closely with United’s interim performance director Sam Erith, according to The Athletic, and part of his remit will be to hone the players’ sprint mechanics as they try to match Amorim’s high demands.

“Even with the best starting XI on the planet, without running, they will not win anything,” Amorim said about his players in December. “It’s very clear. If you want to win the Premier League, you have to run like mad dogs. If not, we are not going to do it, that is clear.”

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Amorim marshalls training from the centre of the pitch (Manchester United via Getty Images)

Marra explained his coaching philosophy in an interview with YouTube channel Coaching The Standard. “The most important thing a coach should focus on … are the fundamentals. Those are the things I try to stress. It all starts on the initial movement on the part of the skill. If it’s incorrect, then there’s a problem.

“If I bring my car into an auto-mechanic, and he goes through every part of it and says, ‘this is your problem’, your fuel filter’s plugged or something, he figures it out. Then from there, he can fix it. And that’s exactly what a coach should do. They should be able to look at an athlete, see what he or she is doing, find out where the problem area is, dial the event backwards to where that problem began and fix that part.”

How much he can achieve in what is reported to be only a short-term mission at Old Trafford remains to be seen. Manchester United are probably pound-for-pound the worst football team on the planet, given how much money has been spent on the squad and how badly they have been playing. Fitness and running technique feels like one tiny piece of a much bigger puzzle to solve.

But then perhaps this could be about more than improving running stats and efficiency of movement, but about sending a message both inside and outside the club. Simon Austin, founder of the football coaching news website Training Ground Guru, points to another example. “Sean Dyche, when he came in at Everton, he had them doing bleep tests, I think a few of them were sick,” he tells The Independent. “But is that psychological, maybe, some of it, to show the players what he wanted?”

Austin adds: “There’s a big focus in football at the moment on sprinting and speed [but] it’s quite unusual to get someone in for a very short time, and I wonder how much impact it can have.”

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Mo Bobat, pictured in charge of England Cricket U19s, now works at Derby County (Getty)

Football’s embrace of other sports’ expertise has been noticeable over the past few seasons. In a previous life Brentford’s performance director, Ben Ryan, led Fiji’s rugby sevens team to Olympic gold and was gifted a three-acre plot of land on the Pacific islands as a show of appreciation. Coventry City’s performance director is Claire-Marie Roberts, who held the same role at Bath Rugby. England Cricket’s former sporting director Mo Bobat now works at Derby County.

But behind the scenes, United appear to be well behind their rivals in almost every area and are having to play catch up. They finally began building a data science team in 2022, but Ineos axed department head Dominic Jordan last summer after acquiring a minority share in the club. “In data science, they were very much behind the curve with that,” says Austin. “Liverpool had already been doing it for 10 years or more, and Man City are really developed in analytics.”

Austin cites Liverpool as the ideal model of an elite structure in the modern game, creating a consistent environment that helped Arne Slot seamlessly take over from Jurgen Klopp.

“A lot of the senior staff have come back after Klopp went, but Liverpool are the great example of continuity. You hardly notice a change when a new manager comes in because the structure is so good, because they’ve got the right roles, the right people, enough people, and they’re clear on how they want to play. They’re clear on how fit you need to be to do that. Whereas at Man United there never seems to be that continuity. It’s always being ripped up with every new manager.”

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Ruben Amorim has plenty of problems to solve at Old Trafford (Martin Rickett/PA)

At Old Trafford, the club are still trying to find the right structure, as sporting director Dan Ashworth’s messy departure showed, leaving after only five months in the role having been expensively prised from Newcastle. That structure is only just starting to fit together, and it is still early days. Erith’s performance director role is still only interim. Meanwhile Amorim is completely different from any manager that came before, and probably anyone they will go to next, such was the desperate need for a new direction.

So perhaps Marra’s arrival is another clutch in the dark. But it does show the club’s backing for Amorim fitness demands, and that perhaps a more thoughtful approach is coming into force. That much is needed at Old Trafford. Two decades on from Woodward’s misadventure, elite football is a place for many different minds.