Manchester United drew 1-1 at Leeds on Saturday, Dominic Calvert-Lewin cancelling out United's goal to deny Carrick a win away at a ground that has rarely been kind to his club. Bryan Mbeumo was United's best performer on the day. None of that will satisfy anyone who wanted blood after the final whistle, and the calls for Carrick to be sacked immediately are already loud again.
They're wrong. Carrick has been inconsistent at best, and his substitutions routinely arrive too late to change anything, which is a fair knock on his game management. But a draw away at Leeds, with this squad, at this point in the season, is roughly the floor you'd expect from a team still trying to find a settled way of playing under a new head coach. Judging Carrick by the standards of a team playing with confidence and rhythm, when this one has neither, is grading on the wrong curve.
The case against Carrick rests on something real: the football has looked slow, and short on conviction and fitness. That's on him. But it doesn't justify ripping up another managerial project a matter of months after the last one. Ruben Amorim was sacked after roughly 14 months in the job. If United keep churning through head coaches at that pace every time results dip, they'll never build anything. No manager shapes a squad's identity in a handful of games, let alone fixes the deeper rot in one afternoon at Elland Road.
That rot didn't start with Carrick. It started with the people who hired Amorim, backed him, then discarded him, and are now reportedly treating Carrick's tenure as a live decision after barely any time to judge it properly. Every version of this cycle, going back through Erik ten Hag and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, ends the same way: a manager takes the public hit for a structure that keeps producing the same results no matter who's picking the team. Sack Carrick now and United just plug someone else into the same mess, under the same ownership group that's shown no sign it understands why the last three changes didn't work either.
Real change at United starts with the people making these decisions, who keep burning through coaches instead of fixing recruitment and structure. Firing Carrick over a point at Leeds would just let the people who created this mess blame someone else for it.
