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We’ll get on to the more pressing business of whether Michael Carrick deserves the full-time Manchester United job in a moment. There’s plenty to discuss: tactics and philosophy, character and comportment, the squad he inherited from Ruben Amorim and how United might strengthen it in the summer window. But first: I want you to imagine eating an entire dover sole with the bones left in, while under the gaze of the former England international Trevor Francis.

You’re in a fancy restaurant in Birmingham. You’re 18 years old, and have ordered the fish with potatoes on the assumption that it will essentially be a posh chippy supper. The sole arrives, the waiter asks whether you want it filleted, and because you don’t know what that means, you say no. Immediately you feel the painful prickles on your tongue, the unsatisfying gnash of skeletal marine matter between your teeth. Naturally, you don’t want to look rude or foolish in front of your new manager. So you put on a brave face, and keep chewing. Meanwhile, Trevor Francis keeps watching.

How might other great central midfielders of the era have handled this predicament? Frank Lampard would surely have come prepared, perhaps even unveiling his own filleting knife from a monogrammed sheath in his top pocket. Roy Keane would have eaten the bones noisily and with relish. Paul Scholes would simply have ordered a burger. But somehow I adore the image of Carrick quietly keeping it classy, sucking and crunching, his mouth full of bones, trying not to make a fuss. First as a player, and then as a coach, Carrick’s entire method has been based on exuding calm where none appears to exist. The gums are bleeding, the tackles are flying in midfield, and Liverpool have just erased a two-goal lead in the space of nine minutes. Grown men in replica sportswear are hurling abuse at the pitch. Some guy on a livestream is shouting things for money. So what do you do? You stick to the plan. You keep doing your job. You eat the bones you’ve been given.

With three games remaining, Carrick has secured Champions League football for United in 2026-27 and beaten all four of their nearest rivals. Had the season started when he took over, United would be top by five points. The players revere him. Kobbie Mainoo wants to “die for him”. All the same, it’s not immediately obvious what Carrick is actually doing out there. And because this is Manchester United, a club about whom people are fundamentally unable to be normal, there is an assumption that none of this actually counts. That this is all a kind of confidence trick, asterisk football, a coaching joyride that will implode at the first sign of resistance.

We hear that many of the underlying metrics have actually declined from the Amorim era: expected goals, possession, high turnovers, smashed televisions. We hear that Carrick has benefited from early cup exits and a light schedule. We hear about the lack of experience, the cautionary tale of Ole Gunnar Solskjær, the implication that in appointing Carrick long term, United are once more raiding the club shop for vibes and good times.

The first thing to say is that United should probably have made their minds up about this by now. The longer the hierarchy agonise over a permanent appointment, the more strongly they signal that Carrick is a reluctant choice. That weakens him immediately.

The second thing to say is that lumping Carrick in with Solskjær does a disservice to both. Solskjær was basically an ingenue: raw and eager and largely overawed by an opportunity he knew he was fortunate to get. For all this he was still able to mould a misfit team into a fine transition side before the United board dropped a Cristiano Ronaldo-shaped cluster bomb on top of it.

Carrick’s vision, as anyone who watched his Middlesbrough team will tell you, is nothing like Solskjær’s. Insofar as Carrick-ball exists, it is defined by patient buildup, careful overloads, a blood descendant of the clean pass-and-move football that he first learned in the West Ham academy all those years ago. Hayden Hackney speaks of Carrick’s fixation on tiny details, like his first touch and body position: the minute adjustments that may not scale into a headline-friendly brand but discreetly allow individuals to unlock new levels to their game.

When it went wrong, towards the back end of his third season at Boro, there was a common theme to much of the criticism. Too sideways. Not enough dynamism. Not enough passion on the touchline. Changes made too late or not at all. Meanwhile, there was a far more prosaic explanation to their slide: Middlesbrough lost two of their best attackers, Emmanuel Latte Lath and Ben Gannon-Doak, and mysteriously found it harder to attack.

United’s flaws are different. Here the absence of hard legs in midfield has forced Carrick into a meat-and-bread 4-4-2 off the ball, and in more stretched scenarios we still glimpse the infamous United “doughnut”. The lack of quality full-backs has occasionally exposed Carrick’s preference for a narrow buildup. Does he actually want to play like this? The evidence suggests probably not. But while we have no problem accepting that a coach like Roberto De Zerbi, say, has complex ideas but needs to make short-term contingencies, with Carrick there appears to be a presumption that this is all there is.

But we digress. The reason Carrick should get the job has little to do with tactics or dogma or optics or even short-term results. Indeed it is his very lack of overt branding, his refusal to indulge in grand theory, that is perhaps his greatest asset. In his autobiography – wherein the fish anecdote is related – Carrick also reveals his obsession with tidiness. When he gets into a hotel room, the little notepad needs to be put in a drawer, brochures and room service menus cleared away. Books on a table need to be left straight, not at an angle. At home, pans have to be washed up before dinner can be eaten.

And frankly, this is exactly the sort of touch United need right now. Let’s assume there is no undiscovered Guardiola/Ferguson-level genius out there. In their absence, United don’t need an ideologue, a university lecturer, a strutting peacock, a televangelist. They need someone who can take the chaotic and immensely stressful job of playing for the country’s most scrutinised club and make it just a little simpler, a little quieter, a little cleaner.

Let’s be real here: does it actually matter who the Manchester United manager is? Or, to rephrase slightly: if the playing style is set in the boardroom and the quality of the football is determined by the quality of the footballers, and their physical condition is determined by factors like scheduling and injuries, then what exactly is the job?

Perhaps a kind of mood music: part communicator, part training ground sensei, part culture guy. Why did Zinedine Zidane and Carlo Ancelotti succeed at Real Madrid whereas Xabi Alonso and Rafa Benítez failed? Surely because at the very biggest and wildest clubs, the game often needs to be condensed rather than complicated, that there are moments that demand less coaching, not more.

Above all, it is recruitment that will define United’s next chapter. Perhaps it is not surprising that a club weaned on Great Man theory should only now be grasping that in the modern game there is no golden gun, no One Weird Trick, no Press Here For Fergie button: just an endless thicket of small decisions taken well. As a player Carrick understood this better than most. What happens, happens. For now, all you can really do is see the next pass, and play it.