Michael Carrick says Manchester United’s 2-0 defeat at Chelsea turned on a few moments. Barney Ronay, writing in the Guardian, says the moments are not the story at all. The gap between those two readings is the clearest picture yet of where United’s season stands.
Carrick: the game was in the balance
United played well in the first half but missed a series of clear chances. After the break, Morgan Rogers ran through the middle of the team and scored. Carrick was asked about that goal afterwards. “It’s never a good goal to concede,” he said. “Morgan went through the middle of us and at that point the game was right in the balance. To concede like that was a big moment.”
He declined to criticise Lisandro Martínez, who was sent off, with Cole Palmer scoring the resulting penalty. “It was a major part of the game,” Carrick said. “The second goal and losing the man at that stage had a big influence on it.” The result extended United’s winless run to nine games, their first such run since 1988, and Carrick insisted he will still be in charge for the Champions League tie against Roma on Tuesday. His comments are reported by the Guardian.
Ronay: Carrick is not the story
Ronay’s analysis of the same afternoon starts from the opposite place. “Michael Carrick is miles away from being the actual story here,” he writes, and he describes the manager as “a little more pre-doomed, pre-sacked” after the defeat. He reads Rogers’ goal as a symbol: a player running 40 yards through a packed half without having to dribble past anyone, finding “an anti-United, a non-United”.
On Carrick himself, Ronay is sympathetic, if not complimentary. He calls him “a coach who is not at the peak of his profession” and writes: “It’s not his fault he’s not cut out for this level. He didn’t hire Michael Carrick.” The target, in Ronay’s account, is above the dugout: the people who appointed an interim manager and who, he says, will now pronounce on him.
The dressing-room dimension
Ronay also addresses the public disagreements among United’s senior players. He writes that Bruno Fernandes started with one player who thinks the hierarchy has betrayed the club and another who thinks the manager is tactically poor, and that “they’re both right”. Fernandes, in his view, broke the code by undermining his manager, but he adds that it is hard to blame the players too much for losing the run of themselves. That is a harder line than any Carrick has taken in public.
It also sits against the argument we covered earlier in the week, when Carragher said Carrick wants out and Neville said United’s delay is a failure of planning. Ronay’s piece is the third voice in that argument: it says both are right that the club has failed, and adds that a change of manager does little to fix it. Neville’s earlier hope that the players will play for Carrick looks harder to defend after this performance.
What each side gets right
Carrick has a point. Concede like that at 0-0 with the match “in the balance” and a team can lose control, and a red card and a penalty in quick succession will end most games. United’s first-half chances are a legitimate part of his case.
Ronay’s counter is that the pattern is more telling than the incident. A manager can only explain so many afternoons by pointing at the second goal. If the same shape of defeat keeps arriving, from Como to Bournemouth to Stamford Bridge, then the explanation has to come from somewhere other than individual moments.
The next test is Roma on Tuesday, and then an international break that Ronay writes will arrive with alternatives already being lined up. Until then, the question of whether the problem sits in the dugout or above it will go on being answered differently by the manager and by those who write about him.
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