Is there an English footballer who’s suffered with more bad luck than Michael Carrick? When he does get a rare game for England, he’s taken off injured and misses the next game, too.
One of the foremost central midfielders of his generation, Carrick has won five Premier League titles as well as the Champions League for Manchester United. He’s actually played in three Champions League finals, losing twice to Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona.
Carrick isn’t just a midfielder England have left out over the years, he’s also a midfielder England have needed over the years.
Carrick’s obvious problem was being born into a generation that favoured the Frank Lampard/Steven Gerrard combination. It’s unfair on Carrick in a way, he’s a very different type of player to both Lampard and Gerrard, but he was just shunned in favour of those two.
Campaign after campaign, that was how England operated. Carrick was a victim of the slavish dependence to 4-4-2. The debate centred on whether Gerrard and Lampard could play in the same midfield, could one stay back to hold whilst the other attacked? The pains of having two box-to-box midfielders in midfield were heightened by their attacking tendencies.
Carrick’s name held lower recognition and prestige when it came to being chosen, and those two kept him out. This is partly thanks to the fact he came along a little bit later – he’s three years younger than Lampard, for example. Yet the Manchester United midfielder was crucial to his club’s success during the Steve McClaren and Fabio Capello eras. Carrick played in more Champions League finals than either of those two more famous midfielders and has won more Premier League titles than both of them combined.
It’s not just bad luck that’s limited him to 34 England caps, it’s bad decision making, too. Bad decisions from the managers who kept him out of the squad.
McClaren and Capello’s systems would have been greatly aided by having Michael Carrick in midfield. Instead of having a debate about Gerrard and Lampard, why not stick Carrick in behind them both? Why not have your country’s best holding midfielder, and possibly its best passer, sit behind the two wonderful attacking midfielders? Why not allow Gerrard and Lampard to do what they do best: arrive late in the box and bag goals? England would have been so much stronger with that change of system, but instead they simply alienated the man who could have helped so greatly.
Even when Roy Hodgson left him out of the squad for the 2012 European Championships, it was because Carrick claimed he didn’t want to go along to the tournament to be a bit-part player.
It smacks of the Paul Scholes situation all over again. Instead of being left to rot on the left wing, as happened with Scholes, he just wasn’t played at all.
And now the thought is that the Manchester United man is just too old to start in England’s midfield ahead of EURO 2016. Yet the team lacks a real holding midfielder. The closest England have to a Michael Carrick is Jonjo Shelvey.
Hopefully, for England’s sake, Roy Hodgson will learn from his mistakes of the past and rely on Carrick this summer in France instead of leaving him out of the squad as he has done for the past two tournaments.
Hodgson’s first tournament, EURO 2012, was won by Spain, who beat Italy in the final. But the best player in that tournament was one of its oldest, Andrea Pirlo. His role in the Italy team was to sit back and run the game from deep, using his experience, footballing brain and unrivalled passing range to win matches for his team.
Carrick can do that for England this summer. And with the likes of Barkley and Wilshere ahead of him in the England midfield – two men in the mould of Gerrard and Lampard, even if they’re not as good – Carrick should be tasked with sitting behind and running the game just as Pirlo did four years ago.
When you have a grand old man at your disposal, a man who’s won it all and who has all of that experience as well as all that technical skill, you have to get the most out of him. He may have been a victim of the misuse of England’s ‘golden generation’, but the one coming up right now isn’t half bad. After all they’re only the sixth team ever to have won all their qualifying games for a major tournament.
In order to win, a team needs to be more than the sum of its parts. It needs cohesion and team spirit, and those things come from confidence in your team-mates. With Carrick sitting behind the midfield helping the others to play, the confidence will be flowing and the fear of mistakes will decrease. If England use him wisely, he can do for England what Pirlo did for Italy.
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