Carragher says Carrick wants out. Neville says United’s delay is a failure of planning

Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville agree that Michael Carrick’s time at Manchester United is close to over. Where they part company is on why the club is waiting, and on who ought to be taking the blame.

Manchester United go to Chelsea on Saturday with Carrick still in charge. They are eight league games without a win and sit 16th, one point above the relegation zone, after a 3-0 home defeat by Bournemouth that followed a 4-1 loss at Como. The expectation among most pundits was that Carrick would not survive the Bournemouth game. The club thought otherwise, and the latest Stick to Football episode is where the two Sky Sports analysts try to explain the decision.

Carragher: the players have already moved on

Carragher’s argument is about Carrick’s own position as much as the club’s. “I think he can never say publicly, but I think Michael Carrick would want to put out of his misery. I really do,” he said on Stick to Football. It is a more sympathetic line than the one he took on Sunday night, when he said the head coach should go immediately, and it fits with his view that the relationship between Carrick and his senior players has broken down.

His second point is more cutting. “Those players know that Michael Carrick’s not going to be there in two or three weeks,” Carragher said. If that is right, the Chelsea game is being played by a squad that has already priced in a change, which is a difficult basis on which to ask for a reaction.

Neville: a decision born of drift

Neville does not dispute that Carrick is likely to go. His focus is on the people who kept him. On the same programme he said the club had “literally debated it back and forth”, and he put the outcome down to a lack of preparation: “I think staying with him is a result of the lack of planning.”

That reading matches the position he set out after the Bournemouth game, when he argued that the real failure sits above the head coach. It also sits alongside his more recent admission that he had been certain the club would act, and that he hoped Carrick could still get the players playing for him.

Neville then turned to his own career. “Sometimes a manager needs sacking for their own good,” he said, adding: “I needed sacking at Valencia.” Coming from a man who knows what a failing dressing room feels like from the inside, it is a pointed way of saying that delay does not protect the person who is struggling.

Where they differ

On the surface this is two men who want the same outcome. The difference is the emphasis. Carragher’s version is about the squad: the players have lost faith, Carrick knows it, and everyone is waiting for the inevitable. Neville’s is about the owners and executives: if the exit is coming, the failure was not having a successor ready, and the club is now improvising in public.

Both views carry a risk for United. If Carragher is right, Saturday is a game with little to play for in the dressing room. If Neville is right, a result at Stamford Bridge will not fix the structural problem, and the search for a replacement will begin from a weaker position because the club has not started it.

What to watch at Stamford Bridge

A performance with visible effort would count against Carragher’s claim that the players have already checked out. A flat display would add weight to it, and would make the question Neville is asking about planning a very immediate one. Either way, the argument is unlikely to be settled by one match. The two men who analyse the club every week are, for once, saying much the same thing in different words.

For more on how the pundits have read the situation since Como, see how Carragher and Morrison backed Carrick’s stand on Fernandes.