Michael Carrick’s position at Manchester United is hanging by a thread and now he has to run the gauntlet of Old Trafford against Bournemouth.
Manchester United were thrown back into crisis by a midweek Como humbling
Following a mildly improved performance at Elland Road last weekend against Leeds United, Manchester United crashed back into crisis mode with a 4-1 humbling at Como in the Champions League on Wednesday night and further indecorous comments from a senior player after the match.
Still without a league win since the 30th August and without a win in any competition since they beat Sabah 4-0 on the 10th September, the misgivings that were commonplace among onlookers when Michael Carrick was given the job on a full-time basis in the summer have been starting to manifest.
They play a Bournemouth team who registered their first Premier League win of the season last weekend at home against Sunderland, and who won 3-0 in the Europa League on Thursday evening against former United manager Ruben Amorim’s new club, Milan. There was little talk of the Cherries being in ‘crisis’, despite it having taken them six games to register a league win, and they’d also kicked off their Europa League campaign with two straight wins, even before the Milan match.
It’s been several years since United last beat Bournemouth
It’s been three and a half years and six games since Manchester United last beat Bournemouth, with last season’s matches ending in a 4-4 draw at Old Trafford in the middle of December, just as United’s last head-coach-crisis was reaching its apogee, and a 2-2 draw at The Vitality Stadium in March. Bournemouth also won thee first ever league meeting between the two sides, 2-1 in December 2015.
Prior to that, the most famous meeting between the two teams came in the FA Cup Third Round in January 1984, when the then cup-holders United travelled down to Dorset and were beaten 2-0 by a Third Division Bournemouth team managed by a young Redknapp named Harry, thanks to goals scored by Milton Graham and Ian Thompson.
Bruno Fernandes remains Manchester United’s best chance of ending their dismal run
Bruno Fernandes has Manchester United’s highest average ranking and second-most goals and assists, and it feels a little unfair to call on by far their best player to get them out of a hole of their own creation, in some respects. And he’s the one who’s landed the club in a fresh pot of hot water by speaking critically about the tactics used during the Como match, thereby banging another nail into the coffin of the career of his current head coach.
But the truth remains that he’s the player through whom their best football normally flows, and their best chance of taking all three points from this match. So which Bruno will turn up for this match? The one who can dig them out of their problems, or the one who can dig them in still further?
One of Bournemouth’s players in form this season is Marcus Tavernier, who converted a penalty against Milan to add a fifth goal of the campaign, maintaining his position as their top goalscorer. Tavernier is unlikely to dislodge Anthony Gordon from the starting left-wing spot for England, but he’s been capped at U19 and U20 levels, and he may be hoping to make a push for the Euro 2028 squad.
Bournemouth are missing their most-prised asset for the next couple of weeks
Kobbie Mainoo, Luke Shaw, Benjamin Šeško, Patrick Dorgu, Manuel Ugarte and Tom Heaton were already missing for Manchester United, and their injury problems seem to be building. Lisandro Martínez is unlikely to start, while Ayden Heaven and Marcus Rashford are being assessed over illness and a hip issue respectively.
Alex Scott has had an excellent start to the season and is clearly an outstanding talent, so it comes as no surprise to establish that big clubs such as Liverpool and Chelsea are already forming into a fairly undignified scrum to take him away from The Vitality Stadium at the earliest available opportunity.
He’s also out for the next couple of weeks with a thigh injury, which is bad news for Bournemouth. In addition to Scott, Julian Aráujo is a longer-term absentee – he’s likely to be out for another month – but Junior Kroupi may be back following an ankle injury which has kept him out since the summer.
Michael Carrick’s last stand?
By most accounts, Michael Carrick may already be a dead man walking at Old Trafford. The question facing Manchester United’s players is do they want to play for him, or do they down tools and get the job done as quickly and painlessly as possible?
It’s difficult not to have sympathy with Carrick. He came back when Manchester United were having one of their periodic meltdowns, steadied the ship, and took them back into the Champions League, and their reward for this was to hand him one of football’s most poisonous chalices.
As a head coach rather than a manager, he’s not responsible for another extremely mixed summer in the transfer market in which the defence – which has subsequently leaked like a sieve – was not remotely upgraded, and all this while he also faced the prospect of a Champions League campaign as well as the Premier League.
But the Como defeat plumbed new depths for this Manchester United season, a one-sided loss which started with them conceding in the first couple of minutes – for the second time in a row in this competition – and which they never looked likely to get back into. If the Leeds performance was one tentative step forward, then Como was several steps back.
Despite their lowly position in the Premier League, Bournemouth are no pushovers. Their slovenly approach to holding onto a lead has been one of the memes of the season so far, but against Sunderland last weekend they got the job done reasonably efficiently, and their performance against Milan was excellent. Their European performances have been solid and they’ve been let down by lapses from winning positions, which can be fixed. It doesn’t seem likely that they’ll be near the foot of the Premier League table for that much longer.
At this stage in the Manchester United crisis cycle, there’s no way of predicting a win for them, though they have at times in the past shown a tendency to be surprisingly bloody-minded at such moments. Bournemouth are better than their league position suggests, and their first win of the season was the result they needed to overcome that phobia about holding onto a lead. 3-1 to Bournemouth, and the reading of the last rites for Michael Carrick’s spell as the head coach of Manchester United to become so loud that they can no longer be ignored.
(Cover image from IMAGO)
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