For a moment, Ruben Amorim's relaxed smile disappeared and his eyes narrowed.
'New system? Wolves play a new system?' Amorim fired back at his inquisitor in the Molineux press room.
'They played the same system and Vitor Pereira worked the same system in Saudi Arabia. Wolves are a completely different situation. The team is built on this system.'
Late on Boxing Day, and perhaps for the first time, we saw the tension on Amorim beginning to show.
Manchester United's new Portuguese coach had just suffered his third defeat in a row and took issue with suggestions that Wolves' new Portuguese coach has succeeded in one week while struggling at United in two months.
As Pereira finished his first home game, orchestrating the cheers of the Molineux crowd with fist pumps, Amorim sank to his haunches on the sideline, bringing his team to its knees once again.
On the journey back to Manchester and his home in the south of the city later this evening there will have been plenty of time to reflect once again on the scale of the task he has taken on.
United are 14th in the Premier League, the same position as when they sacked Erik ten Hag at the end of October, and are showing no signs of improvement. In any case, the only movement seems to be backwards.
Monday's match against Newcastle marks the halfway point of the campaign. This is neither a slow start nor an in-between season. If United are not careful, they will be staring a relegation battle in the face.
At 39 years old, Amorim is a young coach, but he has been around the game long enough to know the consequences of failure.
Dan Ashworth, one of the men who flew to Portugal to negotiate his move to Old Trafford, has just been sacked as United's sporting director after 159 days in the role. Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Ineos have made the bold decision to sack a further 250 staff. Another wouldn't hurt.
Amorim's replacement at Sporting Lisbon, Joao Pereira, was sacked on Christmas Day. This is a cutthroat industry, and he knows it.
He also knows better than to look on social media where the troublemakers are reveling in United's misery. Ruben Interim, they started calling him.
“I know the business I'm in,” he said. 'The manager of Manchester United can never feel comfortable in any case.
“I know that if we don't win, regardless of whether they pay the buyout or not, I know every manager is in danger.”
It seems ridiculously early to even entertain such talk, but the question he raised at Molineux prompts a more sensible debate.
Wolves played a back three under Gary O'Neil and in Pereira they have appointed a like-minded coach.
Amorim shares the same philosophy and Liverpool's emphasis on keeping four players was one of the reasons for leaving him out when Arne Slot was appointed.
At Amorim it is 3-4-3 or bust. He has made that abundantly clear since joining United and you have to admire the man's principles.
United, on the other hand, were equally insistent on Amorim taking over mid-season rather than in the summer as he would have preferred.
So he was parachuted into Old Trafford in November and a growing crisis to carry out ongoing repairs and introduce a system that was foreign to the majority of his players. In retrospect, it might have been wiser to wait.
The transition has been made all the more difficult as Amorim has had little time to work with them on the training pitch due to the tough fixture list.
The result? A coach who won 16 of his 17 games in Portugal this season – the other a draw – has lost half of his first 10 games in England.
He's talked about literally mentoring the players at Carrington to get them up to speed; it is an incredible scenario as these are experienced international footballers who would not require grooming through a tactical change.
When Mason Mount was injured again in the Manchester derby, Amorim took some solace in the fact that Mount's time on the sidelines could be put to good use by 'teaching Mase how to play our game'.
In Molineux on Thursday evening, Amorim estimated that he had only four training sessions with his players. Is this why he wanted to postpone the United job until the end of the season?
“I knew this was going to be hard,” he replied. 'You expect to win more games, to have players with more confidence to sell the idea and get going and improve things.
'It's very difficult at the moment. We have to survive to have time and then improve the team.”
Of course, Amorim's philosophy doesn't start and end with a back three. It concerns full-backs, which means that wingers have to learn to play closer; a high press and 'running like mad dogs', as he puts it.
For a club built on a tradition of wingers – and of which there are quite a few in the undersized squad he inherited from Ten Hag – it has been a difficult adjustment.
Some, like little Amad Diallo, have prospered. Others, such as Marcus Rashford and Alejandro Garnacho, have not.
Both dropped out for the derby. Rashford has now been left out of the last four games. Garnacho has returned for the final three, but only on the bench.
Amorim arrived with the reputation of an astute man-manager, but there is clearly an iron will behind the smile.
There's also a fine line between establishing authority and cutting off your nose to look in your face. Ten Hag did a great job dealing with Jadon Sancho. He also had a fragile relationship with Rashford, which frustrated him immensely.
Amorim has taken an even stronger stand against Rashford and is to be commended for that. But the longer the player stays away from a losing team, the more pointless it becomes.
If Amorim can't get a signal from Rashford, he can at least get a decent price for him in the January transfer window, and neither goal is served by leaving him at home.
Therein lies another problem for the new head coach: United will have to sell to buy the players he wants to better suit his system, after £600m of spending under Ten Hag left the coffers empty.
There will be no quick fix. Amorim will be stuck with the majority of this team for the rest of the season and for some time afterwards.
To be honest, he has been at the forefront. No question has been avoided, no answer withheld. Things are bad at United, he says, and it will get worse before it gets better. Not least because there will be trips to Anfield and the Emirates after Newcastle come to Old Trafford.
Amorim has taken the blame for United's results and even problems on set pieces, having taken those responsibilities from Ten Hag's man Andreas Georgson and given them to his Portuguese assistant Carlos Fernandes.
He has been surprisingly honest about the fear in his team spreading around Old Trafford.
“We have to expect that any Newcastle play near our penalty area will make the stadium nervous and our players have to deal with that,” he said ahead of Monday's match.
By then, the bottom six may have crept a little closer to United's shoulder.
More optimistic fans would argue that a few wins would propel their team higher. Give it a month or two, and this can all feel like a bad dream.
But for now, the nightmare scenario for Manchester United and Amorim looms.
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