Michael Carrick: Man United interim is giving INEOS a huge headache | OneFootball

Raise your hand if, on the day Michael Carrick was confirmed as interim head coach, you predicted that Manchester United would eat Manchester City alive in the derby. Keep it raised if you saw them following that up with a deserved three points at league leaders Arsenal.

If your hand is still raised, you’re either a football soothsayer banned by the bookies, or you’re just lying. Mr Wilcox, you can put your hand down now.

Low-key arrival

The sacking of Ruben Amorim felt inevitable and unexpected at the same time when it was announced earlier this month, and the lack of new manager bounce under Darren Fletcher was more numbing than shocking.

The subsequent appointment of Carrick, dismissed in the summer by Middlesbrough after his earlier success at the Riverside went sour, didn’t send many shockwaves rumbling through the Premier League.

The hopeless romantics looking for a Solskjaer redemption arc were left to gaze into the middle distance as the focus shifted onto whether the man who took over after the Norwegian’s 2021 dismissal could pick up where he left off as United’s interim boss for a second time.

High-key introduction

If his return to the club was relatively understated, the performances of his team on the pitch have been anything but.

It is no exaggeration to call his first game back in charge, the 2-0 win over City, one of the best United performances of the last decade. As well as netting twice and keeping a clean sheet, the Red Devils had three goals ruled out for narrow offsides and struck the woodwork twice in a truly dominant display over their noisy neighbours.

They were less commanding against Arsenal but fully merited their first league victory at the Emirates Stadium in eight years; Carrick is already righting historic wrongs, as well as some considerably closer to home.

Look no further than the restoration of Kobbie Mainoo to the midfield, which has been much improved by the youngster’s presence, as an example of him quietly getting on with making the right calls.

Food for thought

The Englishman’s immediate implementation of a 4-2-3-1 formation has got an entirely different tune out of United’s squad compared to the freeform jazz Amorim achieved, but there is far more to the dramatic turnaround than simply changing the system. Fletcher tried that and found that it was no magic bullet.

In so emphatically beating two of United’s biggest rivals, and two of the Premier League’s best sides, Carrick has laid down a marker. He and the coaches he brought with him mean business, and it is now impossible not to think that the business could continue into next season with Carrick as the permanent head coach.

The beauty of thinking is that it’s free and in itself it means nothing. Thinking that Carrick could be the next boss does not mean that he should be, or that you really believe it. It’s just thinking the thinkable, in a way in which picturing Fletcher in charge next season really would have been thinking the unthinkable.

Value in the market

Make no mistake, the next managerial call INEOS take will be their biggest United decision to date and for years to come. They slipped up by not sacking Erik ten Hag sooner and dropped a clanger in appointing then being surprised by their Portuguese tactical iconoclast – the next permanent head coach needs to be the right man for the job.

The market for managers will be unusually fecund this summer, with the likes of Oliver Glasner out of contract and international bosses like Thomas Tuchel and Carlo Ancelotti likely to be available after the World Cup.

The United hierarchy will have been feverishly scribbling names on scraps of paper for months already and Carrick’s two matches in charge won’t, and shouldn’t, have changed any plans.

Potential no-brainer

But if his team maintains the form it has found under his guidance, if – as he promised after the Arsenal game – they are “just starting off”, then the picture changes.

He has 15 games left in charge, a possible 45 points, before his deal is up. What happens if he wins them all? Or secures 40 points? Or does neither of those things but secures Champions League football for next season?

There is no saying this happens – the upcoming clash with Fulham will in some ways be the biggest test yet as United go into a game as favourites rather than underdogs. It’s exactly the kind of banana skin which has led to the slapstick all too often, and the mood at Old Trafford is notoriously changeable.

But if the best does happen, it would be madness for INEOS to stick blindly to a plan several months old and not consider Carrick as a viable option for the permanent role. Just because it didn’t work with Solskjaer doesn’t mean it wouldn’t with him, and just because Luis Enrique has won La Liga and Ligue 1 doesn’t mean he’d storm the Premier League.

If Carrick ends the season with a team fighting for him as they have been these past two weeks and a place in Europe, then he deserves to at least be given an equal chance and not be dismissed out of hand as just another interim. And if he doesn’t, we’ll always have the derby triumph and the win at the Emirates.

Featured image Carl Recine via Getty Images

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