Carrick Hungry For FA Cup Success

With eight major honours to his name, including five Barclays Premier League titles, Michael Carrick has achieved enviable success throughout his Manchester United career and the 34-year-old vice-captain is certainly among the most decorated players in the club’s rich history.

The only domestic trophy that eludes him is the FA Cup and that remains a personal frustration for the versatile midfielder, whose pursuit of football’s oldest cup competition continues on Sunday when his former club West Ham visit Old Trafford in the sixth round. Victory would send the Reds to Wembley for the last four and a step closer to the final, which is an opportunity that Carrick is eager to grasp.

During an interview that will appear in Sunday’s United Review, the official matchday programme at Old Trafford, he discusses the players’ ambition to lift the cup. “We are hugely determined and it is a great opportunity for us,” he explains. “Obviously West Ham have been great this season and have gone further in this competition than they have for some time.

“In the league their form has been amazing, especially from what they might have expected at the start of the season. It is going to be a tough game for us. It was a tough one earlier on in the season at home [0-0] and we expect something similar on Sunday.”

Expanding on United’s 12-year run without lifting the FA Cup, Carrick continues: “It has been too long since we won the FA Cup. Before our last success [in 2004], we had won a number of FA Cups and it seems such a long time that we haven’t been able to get our hands on it. I have said before, we need to put that right and this club needs to be winning things.”

The closest Carrick has come to winning the FA Cup was in 2007, when United were beaten in the final 1-0 by Chelsea in extra time, and he concedes that experience “was not quite good enough”. Although he remains desperate to win the trophy, he doesn’t look back on that occasion with regrets.

“No, to be honest I have put that in the past,” he says. “Whether we win or lose you have to move on quickly. That was just how it was and we didn’t do enough to win. Well, I still think Giggsy scored a goal that day… it was behind the line but they didn’t give it, so it could have been different but that is how it is. We have an opportunity now to go further in this competition and we want to take it.”