Michael Carrick: Is he the right fit for Manchester United?
He did not change as manager. He’s always polite and friendly, but he doesn’t make headlines for the sake of it.
The jubilant celebration following a 3-1 win at Sheffield United in February 2023, triggered by a pre-match jab between the sides, is remembered as being so out of line with Carrick’s normal behaviour.
While collecting Carrick’s history for this article, I was reminded of a conversation in the dressing room before the match. While the players on the field complete their warm-up, many managers quietly want to be left alone. Others are obsessed with the tactics board. On this particular day, Carrick started chatting about old television remotes.
“Never too high, never too low,” the source says. “This is Michael.
“He wouldn’t waste 10 words if it had to be done. Everybody loved him at Middlesbrough.”
In the end, everyone except the fans.
When Carrick arrived on Teesside in October 2022, he revitalized a club flirting with relegation and did so by delivering exciting, winning, possession-based football.
After losing their first game against Preston, Boro won 16 of their next 22 league games. Carrick used a number of different formations, including three at the back, and scored three or more goals in 11 appearances.
They were three points adrift of automatic promotion when they beat Preston in the return match at Riverside on 18 March. Striker Chuba Akpom was on track to score 29 goals in the season and a return to the Premier League after a six-year absence was on the cards.
However, Boro’s form abandoned them at the wrong moment. They won two of their last eight games, missing out on automatic promotion by 16 points and losing to Coventry in a harrowing play-off semi-final that yielded one goal in two games.
Despite two more seasons in charge, Carrick’s situation at Boro was never better.
The former never recovered from a poor start, picking up two points from their first seven matches. The latter lacked consistency and five consecutive defeats from January to February ensured that a late run to the play-offs would not happen.
On the plus side, there was a run to the EFL Cup semi-final in 23-24, where Boro eventually lost to Chelsea.
Carrick could also point to the sale of Akpom to Ajax in the summer of 2023, the failure of five key loan players to return and the £15m exit of Morgan Rogers to Aston Villa in February 2024 as a mitigation for failing to reach the same levels as Boro profit from the work they do to develop players.
Fans didn’t quite see the situation in the same light.
In the end they felt he was too committed to a 4-2-3-1 formation which they did not believe worked. ‘No Plan B’ was a familiar criticism.
Carrick: ‘I won’t change the way of playing, that’s what I know and believe. ‘We cannot be good coaches if we suddenly turn to a completely different path’ has echoes of Ruben Amorim.
But it is clear that Carrick can see the benefit of tactical changes.
Summing up United’s victory over Brighton on Match of the Day 2 in October, Carrick explained that his former club had achieved their success by condensing the midfield pairing Casemiro and Bruno Fernandes were asked to fill, with strikers dropping and Luke Shaw stepping up.
“Ultimately it’s a numbers game and a space game,” Carrick explained.
“You can see something is being built with the connections.”
