He did not change as a manager. Always polite and friendly but not generating headlines for the sake of it.
His exuberant celebration after a 3-1 win at Sheffield United in February 2023, triggered by some pre-match needle between the sides, is remembered because it was so out of keeping with Carrick’s normal behaviour.
One pre-match dressing room chat was recalled in gathering background on Carrick for this article.
With players on the pitch completing their warm-up, many managers want to be left alone in silence. Others obsess with their tactics board. On this particular day, Carrick engaged in a chat about the old TV remotes.
“Never too up, never too down,” says the source. “That is Michael. He doesn’t waste 10 words when one will do. At Middlesbrough, everyone loved him.”
Everyone apart from the fans in the end.
When Carrick arrived on Teesside in October 2022, he resurrected a club flirting with relegation and did so by delivering exciting, winning, possession-based football.
After losing his first game against Preston, Boro won 16 out of their next 22 league matches. Carrick deployed a number of different formations, including three at the back at times, and scored three goals or more on 11 occasions.
When they beat Preston in the return game at the Riverside on 18 March, they were three points off automatic promotion. Striker Chuba Akpom was on his way to 29 goals for the season and a return to the Premier League after a six-year absence was on the cards.
But Boro’s form deserted them at the wrong moment. They won two out of their last eight games, missed out on automatic promotion by 16 points and were beaten by Coventry in an attritional play-off semi-final that produced one goal in two legs.
It never got better than that for Carrick at Boro, even though he lasted two more seasons.
The first of those never recovered from a rotten start, when they collected two points from their opening seven games. The second lacked consistency and five straight defeats from January into February ensured there was no late run to the play-offs.
On the plus side, there was a run to the EFL Cup semi-finals in 2023-24, where Boro were eventually beaten by Chelsea.
Carrick could also point to the sale of Akpom to Ajax in the summer of 2023, five key loan players not returning and Morgan Rogers’ £15m exit to Aston Villa in February 2024 as mitigation for not hitting the same heights, as Boro profited from the work he had done developing players.
Supporters did not see the situation in quite the same terms.
In the end, they felt he was too wedded to a 4-2-3-1 formation they did not believe was working. “No Plan B” was a familiar criticism.
Carrick’s response of “I’m not going to change the style of play, it is what I know and what I believe in. We wouldn’t be good coaches if we suddenly went down a totally different route” has echoes of Ruben Amorim.
Yet it is clear Carrick can see the benefit of tactical switches.
On Match of the Day 2 in October, summing up United’s win over Brighton, Carrick explained how his old club had achieved their success by forward players dropping and Luke Shaw pushing forward, condensing the space midfield pair Casemiro and Bruno Fernandes were being asked to cover.
“In the end, it’s a numbers game and a space game,” Carrick explained.
“You can see there is something building with the connections.”
