What is Michael Carrick about?
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I was trying to work this out when he was hired. There were two paths he could go down. The first was the English midfielder who played under Sir Alex Ferguson, the ex-player who was part of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s coaching staff. He could be another heir to Ferguson, trying to restore the Manchester United “way” and inevitably failing to do so because the man in charge for so many years didn’t exactly leave much of a blueprint. Would he just be another Mark Hughes or Steve Bruce?
Then there was the alternate option. This was Carrick the cultured passing midfielder, the _regista_ England never properly appreciated. It was the Carrick who played under Louis van Gaal and had exposure to a more structured positional style of football. Carrick the manager might look like Carrick the player, the man who had Pep Guardiola obsessed.
So which is it?
Eight months later, I feel like the answer is closer to the former, but with elements of the latter. I don’t mean that as a criticism. He’s trying to do Solskjaer with better coaching.
Let’s try to understand this by looking at the team’s obvious star player since he arrived in January 2020: Bruno Fernandes. Solskjaer signed him to play as a sort of maverick number ten, doing it all himself and playing beyond strict tactical instruction. This worked well in and of itself, though an issue during the manager’s last six months was that too many attacking players were in the side to do their own thing rather than play a specific role. Under subsequent managers Ralf Rangnick, Erik ten Hag and Ruben Amorim, Fernandes was still a very strong contributor, but he was asked to play more specific tactical roles, sometimes being seen by some as a detriment to the team’s tactical cohesion.
But as soon as Carrick took over, Fernandes went straight back to playing as the all-action number ten. And he’s back to being the player everything orbits around. The team looks pretty improvisational at times, which isn’t innately a good or bad thing. But it is definitely familiar at Old Trafford.