“You want to follow him. You want to fight for him. You want to die for him on the pitch. We showed that today.”
Kobbie Mainoo’s assessment of manager Michael Carrick on Sky Sports after Manchester United beat Liverpool 3-2 in the Premier League resonated.
It resonated because when Mainoo scored his 77th-minute winner at Old Trafford, the stadium announcer made a point of hailing the homegrown, local-born 21-year-old, who signed his new long-term contract on Thursday.
Mainoo has become the poster boy for the club.
That is amazing because he had a request to join Napoli on loan turned down last summer, did not start a league game for the first five months of the season and was preparing for tough discussions over his future in January before Ruben Amorim got the boot.
Former Manchester City defender Micah Richards told Sport: “Watching him play, you really can see the difference that Carrick has made, in terms of the previous manager not believing in him, and then the new manager coming in and giving him so much confidence. You can see that self-belief in his performances.”
Bringing Mainoo back into the fold – and getting him to play at a high level – is just one of Carrick’s completed tasks since he was asked to guide his old club through to the end of the season.
He has also restored skipper Bruno Fernandes to his favourite position and overseen wins over City, Arsenal, Tottenham, Aston Villa, Chelsea and now Liverpool – the first time United have done the league double over their old rivals since 2015-16.
In addition, the 44-year-old has taken United back into the Champions League after a two-year absence.
Typically, Carrick did not want to speak about his future.
“Whatever it is going to happen is going to happen,” he said.
But, in talking around the situation as he was peppered by the media in his post-match briefing, he did seem to go slightly further than he has before.
“I love doing what I am doing,” he said. “It feels pretty natural. To be sat in this position is a good position to be in.”
Over the past four months there has been a lot of focus on what Carrick is not.
He is not a demonstrative individual, in news conferences or on the sideline. He does not charge around like Diego Simeone at Atletico Madrid.
His most expressive reactions on Sunday were in his exchanges with fourth official Anthony Taylor when it seemed decisions were going against his side in the first half.
We cannot know how he will react to playing games every three or four days, rather than once a week and sometimes not even that, although he did OK at Middlesbrough at the start before key players were sold.
We cannot know either how he will react to a losing sequence because it has not happened yet. United have won 10 out of 14 matches under Carrick. No team has accumulated more points during that period.
That is the reality. That is what United hierarchy will be discarding if they choose to replace Carrick in three games’ time.
Unless Paris St-Germain manager Luis Enrique can be persuaded to ditch Europe’s best team to switch to the Premier League, it is difficult to conceive of United coming up with an alternative that would be acceptable to either the fans, who bellowed Carrick’s name after the final whistle, or the players, who, if not quite in such blunt terms as Mainoo, are repeatedly praising their boss.
