Carlos Baleba is going to be the face of this one, because his mistake is the clean, nameable moment: a ball lost in a dangerous spot, Nico Paz pouncing, the finish past Lammens on 57 minutes. That's the clip that gets passed around. It's also the smallest part of what happened to Manchester United in Como on Wednesday night.
A team doesn't lose a Champions League match 4-1 on one misplaced pass. Paz had already curled United open inside two minutes. By the time Baleba gave him the third, Como were cutting straight through the middle, Douvikas lobbing Lammens after De Ligt stumbled, Ramon heading in a fourth. Zirkzee's late header was the kind of consolation nobody asks for. This was ninety minutes of a side being out-thought and out-run. Baleba's error was one symptom among many.
Both the manager and the players own this, but the weight sits on Carrick. The players stopped competing. Organising a group of professionals so they keep competing when a match turns, so a single turnover doesn't snowball into a rout, is the job. It's literally the thing a manager is paid to deliver. United delivered none of it.
This didn't drop out of a clear sky. The defeat in Como left United winless in seven straight games across all competitions. Carrick had already watched his side post their worst Premier League start in forty years, their lowest points total after six games since 1986, and said the boos at Old Trafford "hurt." After losing 2-0 at Atletico, Lisandro Martinez called the display "really poor" and a "mirror of how our club is at the moment." His own players were describing the rot weeks before Como made it unmissable.
Some will say changing the manager again fixes nothing, that this is a squad short on quality and effort and no new voice solves that. Martinez himself more or less said it: "You can't keep changing, changing, changing the manager." He's right about the chaos. The chaos doesn't explain Como. A squad short on quality still turns up and makes a game ugly. United didn't. They were passive and disorganised long before the fourth went in, and that passivity is a coaching fingerprint.
Cesc Fabregas showed exactly what the gap looks like. His Como played sharp, joined-up football, and Paz ran the whole thing. UEFA's own observer, Roberto Martinez, said watching him was like "watching Maradona, watching that type of player that gets the team on his shoulders." Paz had a plan and the game to run; United just had Baleba to point at afterwards.
Carrick earned real credit last season, taking over in January and steering United to third before signing on permanently. That credit is gone now, spent in a week. By Thursday his job was under real threat ahead of Sunday's match with Bournemouth, with his own captain, Bruno Fernandes, publicly questioning the tactics and Carrick himself apologising for the defeat. Blame Baleba if you want the easy answer. The hard one is that United are being badly managed, and everyone inside the dressing room already knows it.
