Michael Carrick: Time For England To Appreciate Him?

Michael Carrick has been a key factor in Manchester United finding form this season and his performances have earned him a recall to Roy Hodgson's England squad. It's time that the national team appreciated what the midfielder brings to a team, argues Adam Bate...

Consecutive wins over Tottenham and Liverpool have changed the mood surrounding Manchester United and their season. "A bolt out of the blue" is how Sky Sports pundit Gary Neville described the first of those two victories. It also happened to be the first game Michael Carrick had started in almost two months.

It's not the first time this season that Carrick's presence has brought an instant impact. His belated full debut under Louis van Gaal in November coincided with a sequence of six successive victories. Indeed, United have only lost once this season with Carrick in the starting line-up. When Van Gaal said it would take three months to get things right at United, perhaps he ought to have measured it in terms of Carrick starts instead. Fifteen in and all seems well.

It's almost like a whodunnit mystery in which the clues must be pieced together before the common thread becomes clear. The presence of the understated Carrick certainly seems a feature of this United team's success. "At the start of the season, we were struggling," Neville told Stretty News in January. "Ask yourself who wasn't playing? Michael Carrick wasn't playing. When you play with Michael Carrick you think there is authority, control, peace."

Van Gaal is a confirmed admirer and rewarded the midfielder with a new contract this month. "He is one of the best passers," said the United boss. "Not only wide but also forward." Sideways passes have been a consistent criticism of Carrick over the years but Van Gaal was quick to see through that misguided assessment. Fast passes into the feet of forwards as well as lofted balls like the one that found Juan Mata against Spurs are Carrick specialities.

As the team struggled to find that type of delivery in his absence, United became characterised as a sterile team. But as well as providing the insurance that has encouraged the full-backs forwards and his midfield colleagues to play with more freedom, Carrick has got Van Gaal's men progressing the ball between the lines. He's the only United player to hit more than 10 passes per 90 minutes into the final third.

They are invariably good passes too. Carrick makes more accurate long passes per game than any United player. Crucially, he finds the target with 78 per cent of those balls. Paddy McNair, Jonny Evans and Tyler Blackett can't top 50 per cent with Daley Blind (66 per cent) the only deep-lying player to get anywhere close to that figure.

It's a testament to his passing range and reading of the game; the sort of savvy that saw Van Gaal describe Carrick as a "trainer-coach" in a recent Telegraph interview. Perhaps not an overt leader of men but someone who is willing to take responsibility, as he did in his post-match interview on Sunday. What his mea culpa for Liverpool's goal lacked as a grand gesture of Steven Gerrard proportions, it more than made up for on the grounds that it wasn't strictly necessary. He was superb again.

These are the qualities of style and character - on and off the pitch - that don't particularly lend themselves to the heroics demanded of Englishmen in international football. There is no room for the enabling of others when friendlies amount to glorified trial games and the Boy's Own heroics of David Beckham against Greece represent the standard. Even Paul Scholes could not hold onto a central midfield berth while Gerrard and Frank Lampard were firing in the goals.

Carrick's chances in that environment were never likely to be good and his England career has been characterised by misfortune. It began when Sven-Goran Eriksson left the stadium minutes prior to a brilliant Carrick goal for the Under-21s in 2001 and perhaps reached a low point five years later when dropped to accommodate the returning Neville for a World Cup quarter-final defeat to Portugal after arguably being England's best player in their win over Ecuador. Serendipity, it was not.

That remains the one and only game at a major tournament that Carrick has played for his country. It's also the last knockout game that England have won at a major tournament. Despite being unbeaten in nine appearances under Hodgson, including a win over Italy and a draw in Brazil, Carrick was overlooked for last summer's World Cup squad. The facilitator omitted once more as England opted to take the Lampard-Gerrard partnership to its logical conclusion - paired together in their farewell game for the final 20 minutes of a dead-rubber draw against Costa Rica.

"You could see him sitting in central midfield if you played with three," Harry Redknapp had argued years earlier when hailing the "terrific craftsman" he'd worked with as a youngster at West Ham. "Lamps and Steven Gerrard would give you the energy going forward, he'd be the quarterback if you like." It wasn't to be as England persisted with 4-4-2 and Carrick's supporters were left to rue the fact that his most memorable England performances have continued to come in absentia.

Given that he will turn 37 in July 2018, when the next World Cup reaches its climax, it's too late to shake that sense of an opportunity wasted. But Carrick's inclusion in Hodgson's latest squad is a reminder of the enduring quality that has become evident once again in a Manchester United shirt under Van Gaal. And if England should defeat Italy in Turin next week with him in the starting line-up, perhaps someone will finally make the connection. Michael Carrick just makes teams better.

Credit: Skysports.com