Ruben Amorim's Manchester United training plan for Liverpool shows the scale of his task

The good news for Ruben Amorim this week is that Manchester United had three training sessions to prepare for Sunday's trip to Liverpool, but what they worked on at Carrington shows the scale of the task in front of the head coach.

Amorim used the final session to prepare a few details of what to expect from Arne Slot's Premier League pacesetters. However, two sessions earlier in the week were focused entirely on improving his own team, who the head coach admitted are now "afraid on the pitch."

That is an unprecedented run on the training pitches for Amorim so far, having taken over during an international break and then had a constant run of midweek games, denying him the chance to get his ideas across.

But with United on a run of four defeats in a row and five in their last six in the Premier League, Amorim went back to basics to try to improve his team rather than focusing too much on probing for Liverpool's weaknesses.

"Every team has their problems, even the best and we will try to find them - but to be honest I am more focused on our basics," he said.

"So rather than trying to find things in Liverpool’s shape, I’m just really concentrating on the way are supposed to play our game, the way we clearly must play to win a football match and to maintain our ideas.

"When you don’t have the basics, you can’t do it and so you have to focus on them. We have one more training session and we will focus on the opponent then, but for two days we have just been doing the basics, focusing on our idea to play football, and doing our thing."

United head to Anfield with their head coach telling them they are in a relegation scrap, while Liverpool have a healthy lead at the top of the table and are on course to draw level with their