Michael Carrick walked off at full time to his own name being sung. Then the players got booed off behind him. That's the entire verdict on this result, delivered live by the people who actually sat through it, and it should end the lazy instinct to make the manager the main character of this collapse.
⚡ Upset:Bournemouth had a 33% chance before kickoff and beat Man United 3–0.
39%
Start with what Carrick had to work with. His only senior left-back was already out. His only senior recognized striker was already out, with the club bracing for a lengthy absence there too. His senior defensive midfielder has been missing since the World Cup. So on the day, a right-back in Diogo Dalot was asked to play left-back and spent the afternoon crossing into nobody, and a young, natural centre-back in Ayden Heaven got thrown into a defensive role he isn't built for and picked up a booking for a lunge that handed Bournemouth a goal from the resulting free kick. Add a bad slip from Leny Yoro for the second, and what you have is a back line improvised on the fly.
None of that happens by accident. By the club's own admission, the hierarchy didn't strengthen at left-back over the summer, didn't secure proper striker cover when they couldn't move Joshua Zirkzee, and prioritized midfield reinforcements instead. That decision belongs to Omar Berrada, Jason Wilcox and the INEOS regime, who decided which positions were expendable and got it wrong on two of them at once.
Benching Bruno Fernandes and still fielding a side with no attacking spark and no fight is on the man picking the team, whatever injuries he's dealing with. Carrick made the call to leave his captain out after Fernandes had publicly said trophies are now "very difficult" to win at this club, and Carrick owns that decision, saying himself it was made to try to change the course of play. It didn't work. A manager doesn't get a complete pass just because the squad sheet was thin.
But thin squads produce exactly this kind of performance. A team that stopped competing the way this one did was failing for reasons bigger than one team-sheet call. Gary Neville said it on air in real time: Carrick is popular, the owners, the sporting department and the players are not, and they have badly let the club down. He's not wrong. The players wearing the shirt chose not to run the extra five yards or close down, and showed nothing resembling pride, and they earned every boo they got. That effort problem sits with them, full stop.
But the structural rot sits above all of them. You don't inherit a club missing its striker, its left-back and its defensive midfielder by bad luck alone, not after years of the same regime failing to fix the same holes. Carrick is managing wreckage of decisions he didn't make, and the players are the ones refusing to fight inside it. INEOS built that wreckage. Stop arguing about who's driving the car and start asking who removed the wheels.
