Gary Neville has urged Ruben Amorim to start showing consistency with his team selections after Manchester United’s 3-2 defeat to Nottingham Forest on Saturday.
United have suffered back-to-back losses for the first time since Amorim replaced Erik ten Hag as manager with Forest securing their first win at Old Trafford in 30 years.
United fell behind after just two minutes as Nikola Milenkovic put Forest in front with a header from a corner. Rasmus Hojlund pulled United level with a goal from close range before Morgan Gibbs-White restored Forest’s lead with a low shot that Andre Onana should have saved.
A mix-up between Onana and Lisandro Martinez then allowed Chris Wood to score Forest’s third goal of the game with a header before Fernandes pulled another goal back for United in the 61st minute.
Amorim made four changes to his starting line-up following the 2-0 defeat to Arsenal on Wednesday evening and made five substitutions during the game, with captain Bruno Fernandes one of the players replaced as United chased an equaliser.
Neville believes Amorim needs to settle on a core group of players for his new-look system and believes Enzo Maresca has set a strong benchmark by having two separate starting line-ups for Chelsea’s Premier League and Conference League campaigns.
‘When you keep changing players, when you keep changing your back three, you take five players off, you’re basically saying to all of them effectively, because they’ve obviously been left out of the start of the game, is that you don’t trust them,’ Neville said on NBC Sports.
‘Ten Hag kept doing that a few weeks ago, he kept changing the back players, changing the midfield, all of a sudden you’ve got a completely different system, a completely different set of players on the pitch at the end of the game and you never get stability or consistency.
‘There’s just an element of just leave the players on. They weren’t playing that bad in the first half, obviously they were undermined by the set-pieces in terms of the corners but the football generally wasn’t that bad.
‘Then you allow two mistakes that were made after half time within the first 10 minutes to undermine you, then you basically make changes and all of a sudden everything falls to pieces.
‘It looked really scruffy, really scruffy, it looked a mess at the end, with no real shape. I actually think at least in the first half they weren’t brilliant but at least they had a shape to them.
‘I think I said this with Ten Hag for about 12 months – pick an eleven that you think are the best.
‘I thought today, we all agreed before the game, we thought that eleven, apart from Luke Shaw, was close to United’s best eleven as you could get.
‘I’m not saying don’t make a substitution but almost give that eleven the faith and trust.
‘Maresca is doing it now at Chelsea, he’s playing an eleven on a Sunday or a Saturday and then he’s playing a different eleven in midweek. He’s sending some messages to the players that there’s stability here, this is what we’re going to do, this is how we’re going to play, this is an idea I believe in.
‘When you change players all the time you’re almost saying to everybody you’re just juggling plates all the time, there’s no consistency or familiarity that can build with players, you need to build patterns together, you need to build an idea of what you’re doing together and they can never do that if you’re changing players in all areas of the pitch.’
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