Home   >   Opinion   >   Carrick quietly pulling the strings for England

Carrick quietly pulling the strings for England

By on March 27, 2015

On a night made memorable by Harry Kane’s goal-scoring, headline-grabbing debut, no player subtlety imposed his will on the match better than Michael Carrick. Kane gets the plaudits for the goals and their glamour. Look up Kane’s name on the internet, and Google will give you more than five times the results than for Carrick, more than a decade Kane’s senior. Carrick, on the other hand, is more naturally distant from the spotlight, both on the pitch and off: he’s only scored seventeen goals in two-hundred-and-sixty-one matches for Manchester United, and is yet to score a competitive goal for England.

If there were one irreplaceable England player today, Carrick should be one of the first names mentioned, yet so underrated are his talents that he’s only notched thirty-two England caps at the age of thirty-three. He’s not a natural goalscorer like Steven Gerrard or Frank Lampard, or a nimble ball-carrier such as Raheem Sterling. Carrick floats in between — he needn’t even touch the ball to control the game with the short runs he makes in central midfield, giving his teammates that crucial extra yard of space. The Englishman is almost entirely unique in England: a no-frills, possession midfielder.

It may often look as if he isn’t turned on, but nonetheless silently pull the strings like no other. It is easy to naturally distrust Carrick this way. He can occasionally pick a through ball like Xavi, but most importantly, he distributes the ball in possession like Sergio Busquets.

Only recently has Carrick received ample plaudits, and with Spain proving well how possession can lead to winning football matches, it is increasingly easy to justify his status as “England’s best defensive midfielder”, if that even need be up for debate any more. Against Liverpool at the weekend, six players in his United team made more passes than he, but his soft dominance was the driving factor of United’s possession-based approach. He began the play that bagged United an early opener with a through-ball to Marouane Fellaini, and while he wasn’t the heart or guts or glamour, he was the brain of United’s performance. He’s a key link between attack and defense. Carrick plays more with his mind than he does with his feet.

The same applied in England’s victory over Lithuania today. Carrick is thirty-three, but given his skill set only ripens with age and experience. His career has been set with false dawns — he has only played once at a major international tournament — but finally, he has a chance at becoming and England regular with Jack Wilshere’s constant injury woes.

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.