**Michael Carrick will be a happy man after Man Utd’s win against Ipswich, but he knows his biggest challenge at the club now. **
Man Utd put forward a rampant second-half performance to get their first points of the Premier League season on the board.
The 5-2 win against Ipswich also had a contribution from Harry Maguire, who forced an own goal to give United their first lead.
After the win, Maguire’s comments showed Michael Carrick his biggest challenge at Old Trafford.
Photo by Paul ELLIS / AFP via Getty Images
So far, Carrick has done a good job in diffusing the tension around the club after a poor result, but the noise is deafening.
Even Carrick had to come out fighting in the press after the Hull loss, such was the discourse in the media and the public.
He doesn’t add to the fire as Amorim did, but even his calmness isn’t enough sometimes, as crisis talk engulfs the club after a single poor result.
Maguire accepted as much after the game, saying that the players dropped their shoulders and got caught up in a “here we go again” feeling when Ipswich took the lead.
He said: “We started the game really well. The goal knocked us back a lot. When you lose at this club, there’s a lot of noise and you feel like you’re in a crisis again. We spoke about it at half-time. We proved we could’ve got more.”
Clearly, what Carrick said to the players worked, as he might have given them perspective to stop them feeling sorry for themselves.
Therein lies the Man Utd manager’s biggest challenge at Old Trafford.
If the players are openly accepting how much the fabricated and overblown crisis talk affects them, Carrick’s biggest challenge is to create a cocoon around the club.
He is already a master of not giving anything to the media, and he doesn’t get too high or too low based on the most recent result.
He needs to find a way to get that level-headedness into the Man Utd squad, because the talent and personality are no longer the issue.
The issue is clearly a mental one, as these players fear the worst at the first sign of trouble, instead of pulling their socks up and turning it around.
Having turned it around against Ipswich, it should start a virtuous cycle for this group that things don’t always have to go bad because outside forces think so.
Once Carrick starts making them believe it, the sky is the limit for this group.
