It has taken the influx of European coaches and their measured tactical ways for English football to embrace the nuances and complexities of the central midfielder. Beginning hesitantly with Mourinho v Benitez in the mid-noughties and culminating in the wholehearted appreciation of Pep Guardiola and Mauricio Pochettino over the last two years, England no longer demands central midfielders are explosive, are surging spearheads of direct attacking football.
The dramatic shift in tactical appreciation in English football is probably best symbolised in the great Lampard/Gerrard debate circa 2006: not in Sven Goran-Eriksson’s inability to get these two playing well together, but in failing to understand why it didn’t work. It wasn’t until after the 2006 World Cup that England finally realised what defensive midfielders were, why Owen Hargreaves existed, and where English football had to change.
It’s no coincidence that it was this very summer when the man who indisputably dominated English football, and who arrived at innovative solutions years before anyone else, Sir Alex Ferguson, shocked the British press by signing Michael Carrick from Tottenham Hotspur for £18.6 million. A lot of football fans had no idea what Carrick really did. He didn’t score, he didn’t get assists, he didn’t even make beefy Roy Keane-esque tackles. And yet 12 years on, Carrick, who announced on Monday his retirement at the end of the season, is widely regarded as a Manchester United legend – albeit one who continues to divide opinion.
In seven seasons under Ferguson, Carrick won five Premier League titles and missed out on another two by a combined total of one point. He was the lynchpin, the driving force behind the most successful period of the Fergie era. Imagine what could have happened, at the 2006 World Cup, had Sven sent Carrick out to scuttle behind Lampard and Gerrard, mopping up the danger to release the creativity of the other two.
Defining Carrick’s qualities isn’t easy, largely because he did everything well. An outstanding tackler and header of the ball, Carrick saw things in slow motion, ghosting subtly into gaps to make an interception or play a clever no-look pass on the half-turn, shuttling about the pitch with a telepathic appreciation of the rhythms of a game. He is probably most comparable to Sergio Busquets, although being English, and playing in England when he did, Carrick was never afforded the praise bestowed on the Spaniard.
Well, not by most, anyway. In April last year Pep Guardiola referred to Carrick as the only “outstanding” player who could have played for his Barcelona side of 2008 – arguably the greatest football team of all time. “He’s the level of Xabi Alonso, Sergio Busquets in Barcelona and Munich,” he said.
But perhaps the most eloquent description of Carrick’s ability comes from Guardian writer Barney Ronay in April 2015:
“Carrick is not a tackler, or a hustler, or even a high-visibility metronome in the Xavi Hernández style. Instead he performs more like the footballing equivalent of a veteran head waiter: so tactful, so artfully effective you half expect to look a little more closely and notice he has spent the last 60 minutes playing in a dinner jacket.”
This description, though true in 2006, could never have been made back then. Carrick is a player whose sheer elegance, both on the ball and off it, has helped modernise English football and redefine the role of the central midfielder in the collective conscious. He was the perfect controlling midfield, a deep-lying playmaker and defensive anchor rolled into one, and while United fans rightly cherish their memories with Carrick in the middle England fans can only rue how long it took for the national coach to see what Ferguson did.
