\n<\/p>\n
While there’s clearly nothing wrong with United’s academy (Shea Lacey had a very promising pre-season), Carrick won’t want to be relying on youngsters to fill the glaring holes in his squad – holes that were ruthlessly exposed by Ruben Amorim of all people.<\/span><\/p>\n There were reports ahead of Saturday’s friendly with AC Milan, that several figures at Old Trafford were determined to get one over on the club’s former manager. <\/span><\/p>\n However, despite twice taking the lead against Amorim’s new team, United slumped to a 4-2 defeat in Poland that made it painfully clear that Carrick doesn’t have anywhere near enough quality at his disposal to compete in the Champions League this season.<\/span><\/p>\n Remember, while the former England international undoubtedly did a fine job cleaning up the mess left behind by Amorim, he pretty much had a week to prepare for every Premier League game, with United already out of every cup competition when he took over on January 13.<\/span><\/p>\n The big question, then, going into the 2026-27 campaign is whether Carrick’s can cope with playing every three-to-four days. As it stands, you’d have to say that the answer is no – and you get the feeling that he agrees.<\/span><\/p>\n “We want more [players], we need more, we keep looking for how we can do that,” <\/span>Carrick told reporters <\/span>before <\/em><\/i>the Milan debacle.<\/span> “Money’s money, I get that. We feel like we have to be pushing for everything we’re involved in, while being realistic of what the recent history’s looked like over a period of time.<\/span><\/p>\n “For now, we’ve got to make the most of it, but we’ve got to push every boundary we can to be able to win again, basically. That’s the challenge.”<\/span><\/p>\n And how United deal with it will determine the success of their season – and indeed Carrick’s tenure.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While there’s clearly nothing wrong with United’s academy (Shea Lacey had a very promising pre-season),…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23888,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}