Carragher and Morrison back Carrick’s stand on Fernandes. Laurens says it was only half a sanction

Michael Carrick left his captain out of the Manchester United side to face Bournemouth. Jamie Carragher and Clinton Morrison said he had to. Julien Laurens thought the punishment did not go far enough.

When a head coach drops his captain for criticising his tactics, the verdict on the decision usually arrives with the result. Manchester United lost 3-0 at home to Bournemouth on Sunday, which settled the football argument. The argument about principle is more interesting, and the pundits did not agree on it.

The case for the stand

Carragher, speaking on Sky Sports, as quoted by the BBC, gave the decision his backing. “He had to make the stand, Michael Carrick,” he said. In his view a head coach whose authority is challenged in public cannot let it pass.

Clinton Morrison, the former Crystal Palace striker, reached the same conclusion on BBC Radio 5 Live. “It’s a big call but I think it’s the right call,” he said. He added: “You can’t call out the manager like that tactically.” His warning came with a condition: if United did not get a result, he said, “it will fall back on Michael Carrick”.

The case that it went too far, and not far enough

Julien Laurens, also on Radio 5 Live, supported the principle but not the execution. His complaint was that a place on the bench is a soft sanction. “Leave him at home, he doesn’t need to be on the bench – it’s half of a sanction again,” he said.

That is a harsher line than Carrick took, and it exposes the weakness in the compromise. Dropping a captain to the bench sends a message to the dressing room, but keeps him close enough to be needed. If the sanction was meant to restore authority, Laurens argues, it should have been complete. If it was meant to be proportionate, it left the coach exposed to the very question the scoreline then asked.

What Sunday evening did to the argument

The result changed the weight of each view. Carragher’s support for the stand was a view about authority. Within hours of the final whistle he was making a different point, saying that Carrick “needs to be relieved of his duties tonight”, according to Yahoo Sports. The two positions are consistent only if you accept that a coach can be right in principle and still lose the room in practice.

That is the uncomfortable reading for United. Carragher had already called Fernandes’s attack on Carrick a disgrace, so his backing of the decision was no surprise. What the Bournemouth result adds is the cost. A head coach can win the argument over discipline and still lose the match, and the supporters watching on Sunday saw the second one, not the first.

Morrison’s condition was a fair test, and United failed it. The argument over how far Carrick should have gone is now secondary to the question of whether he gets the chance to go further. The wider split in the pundit room, between those who think he was entitled to act and those who think he should have acted harder, ran through the earlier argument between Keane and Neville over Carrick too.

Whatever happens next, the principle Carragher and Morrison defended has now been tested against the one measure no pundit can argue with. The decision may have been right and the outcome wrong. Carrick will be judged on the outcome.