Schmeichel says United’s second half is “papering over the cracks”. Warnock says Carrick’s story is “absolutely perfect”

Kasper Schmeichel says Manchester United’s second half against Roma is “papering over the cracks”. Stephen Warnock says the story that came out of it is “absolutely perfect” for Michael Carrick.

United trailed 2-0 at Old Trafford before Bruno Fernandes scored a retaken penalty and Matheus Cunha added two goals in the last seven minutes for a 3-2 win. It ended a nine-game winless run and, according to the BBC, left the pundits “unanimous in their dismay” at the first half and generous about the second.

Schmeichel: a benchmark, not a fix

The former Leicester and Denmark goalkeeper was critical of what came before the interval. “I said at half-time if you’re going to go down, go down fighting. You can accept losing if you’ve given absolutely everything,” Schmeichel said. “They didn’t do that in the first half, but they did in the second half.”

He accepted the improvement but would not overstate it. “Things look a little bit better. Don’t get me wrong, the second half is papering over the cracks from the first half, so now it’s a case of using this as a benchmark and now having even more of those conversations,” he said. His wider point was about unity: “You have to put your differences aside because you aren’t able to change your players now, so you need everyone on side.”

Warnock: the reaction is the evidence

Warnock took the opposite emphasis. “What’s happened is Manchester United have gone in, a vulnerable team, a team lacking in confidence, they’ve gone 2-0 down – now what’s the reaction?” he said. “Now we’ve just seen the reaction, so we know it’s in there. The team are fighting for the manager and they’re fighting to turn results around.”

For Warnock, that is the narrative Carrick needed. A team that fights back from two goals down and a missed penalty is, in his reading, a team still playing for its head coach.

Rooney’s view and the fine print

Wayne Rooney, who was critical of the first half on Amazon Prime, was also generous at the end. “I think Michael Carrick deserves a lot of credit,” he said. “Whatever he said to the team at half-time, that got them on the front foot and got that belief in them that they could win the game.” We covered his first-half verdict in our earlier piece on Rooney and Fernandes.

Carrick himself was cautious. “It’s one win, so we’re not getting too carried away with things, but it was an important win,” he said, and he added that he had not felt relief. Fernandes, whose penalty started the comeback, said: “We don’t need to save anyone’s job.”

The numbers explain the caution. United are 17th in the Premier League with one win from nine, and they have gone seven league games without a win. The BBC pointed out that Jose Mourinho in October 2018 and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in October 2021 both won 3-2 comebacks of their own and were gone within weeks. Mourinho lasted 13 more games; Solskjaer was sacked within a month.

Why Sunday decides which view is right

Schmeichel and Warnock are describing the same 90 minutes and drawing different conclusions about how much it tells us. If United beat Aston Villa on Sunday, the “reaction” reading gains weight. If they lose, the “papering over the cracks” reading will look sharper, especially with a defeat potentially leaving them in the bottom three.

It is also a question about what the club is looking for. Henry Winter has argued that the problems run deeper than the head coach, as we reported in our piece on his view. A comeback does not settle that argument either way. What it does is buy a few days, and the pundits will be watching what Carrick does with them.