Carrick Will Manage Rashford

What happened with Michael Carrick and our success last season with Manchester United. It’s a bit different to the argument that this is just another Ole Gunnar Solskjær appointment for me personally. Carrick wasn’t a part or near the class of 1999. So in that sense, it’s vastly different.

Carrick came into Manchester United in a more modern time. Most of the time Alex Ferguson would laud him as one of our most important midfielders and without question knew the capabilities of what Carrick could achieve as a player. If we look at attributes and character.

Carrick isn’t just the nice guy in that dressing room that’s suddenly become boss. In fact, a lot of ex-players have come out and stated that as calm as Carrick’s demeanor is he will not settle for timewasters and he will assess the situation from a point of where the club is today.

Listening to him recently talking about Marcus Rashford. I see that depth to him completely. I mean, whatever we think as fans about the reemergence of someone that made mistakes last time out. I think actually, you couldn’t have a better manager in Carrick in there right now who can handle that and the expectations he will have if he does return.

Now it’s a whole other conversation to ask if Marcus Rashford deserves that return or if the club itself has rewritten its history on allowing players to have a second run at being the player we know they are capable of being. It all comes down to how you manage that. On reflection, I think Carrick has worked with Rashford as a player and as a manager now.

If he can get the ‘right’ Marcus Rashford in form and firing. It becomes a story of how a player can redeem themselves and answer the most important questions where there are concerns. Essentially, this has to be handled impeccably. It could turn out to be an absolute behemoth return and set the club right or essentially be the biggest mistake that dressing room has had in there in a while.

It’s about attitude, and it’s about looking at it from a position of seeing if the maturity and understanding of what went wrong before and how that can be made right going forward is there.

If we frame it as a reason for the mentality to be there, we can come back, go to the corner of the pitch, and point to our heads and celebrate. It certainly could have the potential to be that. But also, it can have the potential to come back to us in a big way no matter what side of the debate you sit on.

There’s no wrong answer here. Whatever happens, there’s a player in Marcus Rashford that has a lot to prove. If and when his return comes, and I hope it works out in the best way for us. What is absolutely true though is that second chances weren’t in the fabric of who we were before, but it has to be fundamentally understood that this is an entirely different era, and aura to what we know.

And this is ultimately going to be the biggest challenge of keeping that dressing room together that there’s been in awhile.

That’s the task set to Micheal Carrick and we have to get behind any decisions he sees even if from our perspectives we look at it asking the question, why? It’s those sort of questions that will be answered in time and which will define whether it was the right or wrong decision. And of course, we all hope it’s the former.