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Elite-level incompetence is Manchester United’s problem – not Michael Carrick | Barney Ronay
Getting rid of head coach is not going to solve the problems that led to his appointment. Perhaps it’s worth, for once, doing something different At the final whistle at Elland Road the TV cameras cut to a lingering shot of Manchester United chief executive Omar Berrada, looking down pensively from the stands, deciding, it is to be hoped, on a little clemency, a re-sheathing of the managerial shotgun. Here we have the man who hired the man. The man who fires the man. The man who also hired or rehired the previous two men he had to fire. Berrada was poached from Manchester City on the basis of his ability to grow commercial revenue (yes, OK, stop laughing), and appears, like everyone else with any actual reach around here, to exist in a strangely consequence-free bubble. How do you solve what is, on revenue versus results, the worst-run club in world football? By changing the name of the latest patsy on the touchline, of course. For now a hard-fought point is perhaps enough to stave off that pre-programmed emergency response. Stand down the cowboy cops. Call off the blue and white saloons. Although with a run of Bournemouth, Chelsea, Aston Villa and Liverpool next up in the league it will no doubt soon be time to go out there and arrest Lee Harvey Oswald again. What’s that you say? OK, well, dig him up again. Re-arrest him. Whatever it takes. Someone has to stop these lone gunmen, these managerial magic bullet merchants from derailing the Manchester United supremacy. This was a dual-track football match between Leeds United and Manchester United, on the face of it a good, even game between two teams of well-matched players. A 1-1 draw was fair in the end, although Leeds played well and probably should have won. But of course they won’t be the story. Instead this game had already been billed as that familiar thing, a referendum on the future of Michael Carrick. A stay of execution for a week or two. Or another livestreamed firing squad for the Super Sunday cameras. There has been a predictable sense of low comedy about Carrick’s own transformation in the United dugout this season. It was always going to be the case that his widely praised qualities in victory, blazer, T-shirt, jawline, inscrutable sense of calm, would become his fatal flaws in defeat. Where’s the passion, the whirling arms, the range of tailored collars? At Elland Road Carrick simply looked drained in the second half as United were pegged back and overrun at times, the beard a little more ragged, the hair unkempt but still sweeping, the look of a brave, doomed tugboat captain resigned now to the approaching tsunami wave on the horizon. A point leaves United 13th in the league and still struggling to reverse a dreadful start to the season. But it was a good game for two people. First for Carrick, who remains a million miles away from creating the problems afflicting this club, even if you accept that his presence as head coach is one of them. Michael Carrick did not hire Michael Carrick. Getting rid of Michael Carrick is, by definition, not going to solve the problems that led to his appointment. But it might just help to prolong them. Whatever his ultimate ceiling, it is surely worth keeping him just to try, for once, to do something different. This was also a good game for Lisandro Martínez, who went off injured at half-time with United 1-0 up, and who was also vindicated in his allegedly controversial (translation: entirely correct) comments on the club hierarchy in midweek. United’s energetic first-half performance clarified one half of this. The players are committed in support of the manager, at least to the best of their ability. The second half made the other half of the argument, that this remains a mismatched, lopsided, cut-and-paste squad, always likely to be pulled apart by opponents as urgent as this Leeds team, which fully deserves its current seventh place in the table. The problems are so obvious it is barely worth repeating them. But here goes. The third-richest club in the world played a second half with three of its back four out of position. Harry Maguire, signed under José Mourinho, remains the best straight defender. But Maguire is also essentially a man-shaped solid wood armoire in a pair of shorts at this stage in his career, always the slowest person on any pitch, which means you will not be able to cover space, play a high line or counterattack without leaving yourself exposed to the counter-counter. So good luck, guys. And remember Omar, who gave you this whisky bottle and loaded pistol of a squad, will be watching. This was made painfully clear after half-time as Martínez went off and Noussair Mazraoui came on. Leeds scored an equaliser that felt structurally inevitable. They found space down their right side repeatedly. At times they seemed to be constantly peppering the seats behind the United goal, like a group of kids hammering a ball against a garage door. By the end Leeds had more possession, more shots on target and just looked a happier, better structured entity than the travelling heritage exhibit at the other end. The key point here is to accept that all of this is entirely logical. This is not a mystery, a haunted house, a place of bad voodoo. Why do we talk about Manchester United so much? For obvious reasons. It’s a massive part of the English football landscape. Mainly, though, because this is a story of mind-bending waste, real-time elite-level incompetence played out on a weekly basis. Yes, you could sack Michael Carrick. It won’t change much. Let’s destroy Eddie Howe for a bit instead. But the available evidence suggests every single person making executive decisions here is outmatched and outmanoeuvred. There is a reason Manchester United feels like one of those high street legacy chain shops just before it collapses, piles of Quality Street by the door, a rat in the lingerie department, destined to become a pop-up vape shop run by Albanian money launderers. There’s a reason it feels so badly run. This is because: it is. We know the Glazer ownership has zero interest in minding the details, that this has been a wonderful acquisition whatever the performance on the pitch, an asset supremely sweated. We know also that Sir Jim Ratcliffe is pub-level incoherent on the details he promised to fix. Remember when he was going to sit down and decide what the “style of football” would be? How’s that working out? Instead Carrick is left shuffling a first XI acquired by endlessly revolving administrations. Here United had four defenders signed under Erik ten Hag, two Ruben Amorim recruits, two from the mist-shrouded age of Ole Gunnar Solskjær. No players were recruited under Ralf Rangnick, of course. But then Rangnick wanted to sign Erling Haaland, Luis Díaz, and Julian Álvarez, which all sounds far too sensible. An organisation can be built with many hands. But not when so many of those hands appear to be so far from best in class it’s hard to work out which class they’re supposed to be attending. John Murtough, the former Manchester United football director, is currently director of global development at Atalanta, who have a 24,000-seat stadium and almost zero global presence. Meanwhile Berrada, the axeman, seems entirely invulnerable from the axe himself, despite the fact his job seems to orbit around resolving the consequences of his own mistakes. United probably will sack their current manager before the year is out. This is the way this machine has to operate, always looking to buy itself, and those in the executive seats, a little more time on the payroll, an entity that has been hollowed out and allowed to rust, run on buzzwords and brown paper and string. Meanwhile, over to you Michael. We’ll see you next week, and maybe even the week after that, for more of exactly the same.
