Michael Carrick will aim to succeed where Darren Fletcher and Ruben Amorim couldn’t, and he wants to do so in a new way.
Darren Fletcher only had two games at the helm of Man Utd, while Ruben Amorim spent 14 months at Old Trafford and managed to win back-to-back league games just once.
Still, despite that disparity in time spent at the club, both Fletcher and Amorim diagnosed the Man Utd squad with the same problem.
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Neither managed to solve it, and now, Michael Carrick has identified a new way to tackle it that can hopefully produce results.
Darren Fletcher the interim caretaker head coach / manager of Manchester United during the Emirates FA Cup Third Round match between Manchester United and Brighton & Hove Albion on January 11, 2026
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How Michael Carrick aims to tackle “fragility” of Man Utd
The number of points Man Utd have lost from winning positions this season could have easily seen the club sit cosily in the top four right now.
As it stands, they are in a fight to qualify for Europa in a congested league table, and that is because they have a soft underbelly.
The team is incapable of holding on to a result, winning ugly, or coming back from adversity.
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Both Fletcher and Amorim arrived at the same conclusion that the team is “fragile”, but neither man’s solution was like Carrick’s.
Carrick was asked how he wants to go about solving this issue, and he put forward an interesting and extremely simple theory.
He said: “I think it’s funny confidence actually because you can sometimes get it from a little kind of moment or you can get a little situation, all of a sudden, it kind of sparks you and that’s sport, top-level sport.
We’ve seen it throughout in every sport, when you’re confident and you’re in the zone and everything kind of happens a little bit slower but everything’s really clear and you’re calm.
“I think sometimes, when you want something so much and you’re so desperate that you can almost over-try, and it over-affects you at times.”
Fletcher and Amorim wanted to see more from United
Unlike Carrick, who thinks a single moment can spark a full turnaround, both Fletcher and Amorim approached this from a different lens.
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Amorim, for instance, wanted to make toughness a way of life, from how the players train to how they play games.
Fletcher, on the other hand, thought the turnaround in confidence can simply come from getting that winning feeling back by going on a run.
Carrick isn’t even going that far ahead, saying that a single moment can change everything, giving the players confidence that they are one moment away from a turnaround.
Considering the mental state of the squad, setting short-term goals might be the way forward, which is what Carrick is doing.
Now it just remains to be seen when that moment arrives, and what effect it has on the psyche of the players.
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