Were the reputation of one of our great football clubs not being traduced and one of its great servants not being so diminished, then you might say there was something laughable about the dithering and indecision of the geniuses currently running Manchester United.
Michael Carrick spent three hours at the club’s training ground on Monday, watching the Under 21s play, while somewhere across the complex, Omar Berrada and Jason Wilcox were putting their heads together about whether to sack him or not.
No word was forthcoming as darkness fell – not the remotest sense that Carrick was wanted, or appreciated, or that the wagons were being circled around their man. Just pictures of these vastly overpaid executives driving home in their high-powered vehicles.
United fans had nothing but guesswork to go on until Carrick arrived back at Carrington just before 8am on Tuesday morning, wearing a Manchester United tracksuit.
So, after 48 hours of uncertainty, we are told that Carrick is to continue. People are talking about his chance to ‘turn the season around’ though no one has actually stated the fact and we now know all too well that United bosses – people somehow deemed competent to dictate the direction of this proud football club – are not so sure he can.
Wilcox is an Eddie Howe man, apparently. Christopher Vivell, United’s head of recruitment, has a leaning for Nagelsmann, architect of Germany’s disastrous World Cup, as they worked together at RB Leipzig.
Michael Carrick is not the man to lead United out of the wilderness. That much is written all over his face
United supporters aren’t buying either one of those candidates and, more through sympathy for one of their legends than conviction in his management, applauded Carrick from the field after the indignity of a 3-0 home defeat by Bournemouth on Sunday.
That support apparently didn’t go unnoticed by the United front office staff and it seems to have precipitated the latest drift. The same paralysis and indecision which led Sir Jim Ratcliffe to allow Erik ten Hag to blindly blunder on, two years ago, is being visited on supporters all over again.
Carrick is not the man to lead the club out of the wilderness. That much is written all over his face, in the pained and melancholic air he’s been giving off as the side he leads have tanked.
But Berrada and Wilcox are incapable of intuiting the fact. Just as they are incapable of seeing that a dressing room smells a manager’s weakness, knows when he is mortally damaged, is alive to the way the ego merchants are successfully spinning against him in the public realm.
Carrick carries so much United history into that training ground – five Premier League titles and a Champions League trophy – yet Bruno Fernandes, the weasel, will have been able to look him right in the eye on Tuesday morning, knowing that he has mortally damaged him and emerged intact.
It would have been gratifying to have heard, in a statement bearing the name ‘Manchester United Football Club’, that Fernandes is to be fined several weeks’ wages for his vicious little digs at Carrick, including the Instagram post – laughably, about ‘loyalty’ – which he ‘liked’ as Carrick’s future lay on the line, on Monday.
It would have been gratifying to have heard, in another message put into the public sphere, that Berrada and Wilcox believe in their man and have his back. Instead, we will have Carrick the lame duck in the Stamford Bridge dugout on Saturday lunchtime.
A placeholder, we must assume, until United secure Howe or Nagelsmann or Antonio Conte or any other of the dismally pedestrian names who will condemn United to more of these infernal, ever-decreasing circles.
Of course, the solution to all of this resides way beyond the imagination of cheapskate Ratcliffe and his executive stooges. United, as we argued on Monday, require a manager with the kind of clout, class, gravitas which Carlo Ancelotti, the Godfather of management, would bring.
It would have been gratifying to have heard, in a message put into the public sphere, that Jason Wilcox (left) and Omar Berrada believe in Carrick and have his back. But no
There was no sense on Tuesday that Carlo Ancelotti had been approached by Berrada or Wilcox and entreated to give up a Brazil international posting
The reaction to that Daily Mail Sport piece underlined the depth of United fans’ wish for Ancelotti. ‘Could it happen?’ many asked us.
There was no sense on Tuesday that Ancelotti had been approached by Berrada or Wilcox and entreated to give up a Brazil international posting which is heading nowhere to succeed where so many others have failed at one of the great European clubs. Ancelotti is a proud man and flattery might have worked. We may never know.
Carrick will probably survive the games against Chelsea, Roma and Aston Villa which precede the next international break but few will be betting on him still being there at the other side of that interval, when the trip to Liverpool arrives.
It feels like another season is being sacrificed – games just given away and, needless to say, the dithering authors of all this, Berrada and Wilcox, will sail on through it all, untouchable and immune to the latest catastrophe.
