Peter Schmeichel says Manchester United’s handling of Michael Carrick’s exit is “very disrespectful”, and that the people running the club “are not Manchester United people”. On the same Overlap Daily panel, Tim Sherwood felt no such sympathy, while the arrival of Mauricio Pochettino has left other pundits underwhelmed.
Schmeichel: “How disrespectful is that?”
Carrick took training at Carrington on Tuesday and again on Wednesday while chief executive Omar Berrada and director of football Jason Wilcox met co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe in Monaco, and while reports of Pochettino’s imminent appointment went around the world. For Schmeichel, that sequence was the problem.
“I think the way this is playing out is very disrespectful to him,” the former United captain said on The Overlap Daily, as reported by the Daily Mail. “If I’m honest, I don’t think he’s doing anything wrong.”
His objection was to the manner rather than the decision itself. “If they’re looking for somebody else, then relieve the man of his duties,” he said. “Don’t let him come into training yesterday. He took training yesterday. How disrespectful is that?” He added that the club should simply tell Carrick he was not the future, pay him and let him move on, rather than “dragging it out”.
The case that Carrick is not to blame
Schmeichel’s defence of Carrick rests on recruitment. United sit in the relegation zone over the international break and have not won a Premier League game since late August, but he argued that the squad’s flaws were obvious long before results turned. “They got through a whole transfer window without signing a single defender,” he said, noting that United bought three midfielders instead, and arguing that a side conceding 30 goals in ten games has an obvious problem.
He doubted that Carrick, appointed permanently only in the summer after his spell as interim manager, had much say in those decisions. His wider target was the hierarchy. “These people are not Manchester United people,” he said, arguing that the club’s decline began when Sir Alex Ferguson and David Gill left and has never been corrected.
Sherwood: no sympathy
Sherwood took the opposite line on the same programme. According to the Mail’s account of the episode, he said he did not feel sorry for Carrick, because Carrick would have understood the brutal situation he was walking into when he took the job. The Overlap billed the discussion as Schmeichel and Sherwood “offering contrasting views”.
The two positions are not as far apart as they sound. Sherwood is talking about the job: anyone who takes the United dugout knows the risks. Schmeichel accepts that managers’ lifespans are short; his complaint is about dignity. A club can be right to change its manager and still be wrong in how it does it.
Pochettino: “a little bit underwhelmed”
The other half of the story is the replacement. United have reached an agreement in principle with Pochettino, the USA head coach, and that has split opinion too. Darren Bent, speaking on talkSPORT Drive, was unconvinced. “My honest impression when I heard the news, I was a little bit underwhelmed,” he said, as reported by talkSPORT. He praised Pochettino as a coach who develops players, but said Eddie Howe had the stronger case, and named eight current Premier League managers he would rank above him, including David Moyes. “If Moyes was called Pochettino, there’d be no argument,” he said.
Rio Ferdinand, speaking on his YouTube channel earlier in the week, sees it differently. He argued that Pochettino’s man-management is exactly what a fragile squad needs. “That’s a big part of Manchester United at the moment because we’ve got far too many broken individuals,” he said, as reported by Goal.
What links the two debates
Schmeichel and Ferdinand, two former United team-mates, end up making a similar point from different directions. Schmeichel says the squad’s problems were built by recruitment; Ferdinand says the next manager’s first job is to rebuild belief rather than win trophies. Both, in effect, argue that the manager is not the root cause.
That is also the strongest case against the change. If Schmeichel is right that the defence was never fixed, Pochettino inherits the same gaps, with a trip to Anfield waiting after the break. Bent’s question, whether he is a big enough upgrade to justify the upheaval, will be answered there first.
For more on United’s recruitment, read Merson’s verdict on the transfer policy, and Schmeichel’s earlier view that the second-half comebacks were papering over the cracks.
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