Ruben Amorim has identified Manchester United's leaders as the people who can help drag his players out of their current situation. The head coach touched on the theme of his squad being nervous and anxious several times in his press conference ahead of a trip to Anfield, a stadium that has recently only fuelled United's anxiety level.

Amorim touched on the topic after the 3-0 defeat to Bournemouth at Old Trafford before Christmas and then returned to it several times on Friday, particularly when discussing how his squad is "starving for leaders."

The 39-year-old will have benefitted from what has been his longest spell yet on the training ground and will hope his team can show improvements for that at Anfield, but to do so will also require a shift mentally as well as technically and tactically.

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Asked what had been worked on this week, Amorim said: "The small things, the transitions, I think you can see the lack of possession in the last game in the first half, the control of the game. Everybody was so anxious, so nervous."

Amorim again talked about his players going through "a tough moment" and that his focus is to prepare the team "to not suffer that difficult moment". He clearly believes that his coaching and some more leadership on the pitch can halt United's slide of late.

But this is not a new issue at Old Trafford. When Ralf Rangnick joined the club as interim manager in December 2021, he appointed a sports psychologist to try to change mentalities. It was the first such appointment at United since Bill Beswick in 1999, and nobody has replaced Sascha Lense since he left with Rangnick.

Lense is now performance manager at Sheffield Wednesday, and looking back at Rangnick's reason for appointing him, a lot of it made sense, just as a lot of what Rangnick said at the time has proven to be an issue at Old Trafford since his own slightly acrimonious departure.

“I don’t know what the situation is like here and in other clubs,” Rangnick said. “In Germany most clubs have employed sports psychologists or mental coaches – whatever you would like to call them. It is absolutely logical. I even had someone like this back in 1998 [Hans-Dieter Hermann at Ulm].

“If you have special coaches for goalkeeping, physical education, even for strikers, fitness, whatever, you should also have an expert for the brain. It’s not so much putting them on the red sofa and holding hands for the players because most of them won’t do that anyway. It is about helping the players: that their brain should assist the body, not work against it. The players and everybody in our team should think in the right way.

“Whenever we speak about football we know that the major part is up here [the head]: what do you think, how do you analyse the situation?”

Rangnick outlined Lense’s approach. “I am very happy to have Sascha on board. He is hands-on. He is not working too much on the theory. The players have to buy in. I can tell them whatever I want, but I need to convince them. I need to get into their heart, into their brains, into their blood.

“Having worked together at Leipzig I know we will benefit a lot [from Lense]. For me it is vital that we should have the best possible person for this job."

Rangnick went on to speak about how he would make Lense available to the squad the night before a game and how he was leaning on him to help end a habit of throwing away leads during a run of games that ended 1-1 after United had scored first.

“In 11 of 13 games since I arrived we score the first goal and were 1-0 up but we only won half," he said. "When you are 1-0 up in three consecutive games and concede an equaliser, this affects the mindset of the players. They say: ‘We should have been 3-0 or 4-0 up and all of a sudden it is 1-1’. If we concede early in the second half, it affects the confidence of the players. They are human beings, not robots.

“I spoke to Sascha and we speak regularly about that. The only thing we can do is speak to the players, one by one, to the group and the whole team."

Not every head coach or manager believes in the power of a sports psychologist, and not many embrace it quite as explicitly as Rangnick did.

But the fact that, nearly three years on, many of the same issues are being talked about at United suggests a problem that has not been fixed. It is very clear that this is a group of players afflicted by nerves and anxiety when things start to go wrong.

Perhaps they will improve for a greater belief and understanding of Amorim's unique tactical system, but for now, it is all sounding very familiar.