When is an interim not an interim?
Having departed ways with Ruben Amorim after debating the nuances of ‘head coach’ and ‘manager’ it is fitting that Manchester United should be the club to raise that question with their not-all-that-temporary appointment of Michael Carrick.
Having spent the week interviewing potential interims to take over from the current interim, the Man Utd board are finally ready to start thinking about who the next actual Manchester United head coach might be, a mere ten days after Amorim’s departure.
Or at least they would be, if they hadn’t tied their hands by stretching the term ‘interim’ to its limits, effectively fragmenting its meaning entirely.
In essence all managerial posts in the modern game are interim, are temporary intervals between two things.
Amorim had 14 months in charge of Man Utd, David Moyes had nine. Carrick will get five – unless he does well, of course, because the other obvious issue with the oxymoronic act of appointing a long-term interim (especially one who, by replacing another interim, becomes by definition something more than interim) is that it openly declares no viable candidate was currently available.
Everyone knows this but nobody can really say it out loud, not inside the club at least, which only muddies the water further. It means Carrick will be there long enough to make his role in the dugout indistinguishable from that of a permanent head coach.
He is both there and not, the solution and the stop-gap. That ought to settle things down.
Michael is at the wheel and he will know he is playing for the full-time position in every single game, piling pressure and expectation onto a club that doesn’t exactly need any more reasons for media scrutiny.
That being said, every Man Utd manager faces the same daily grind. Maybe the club should just cut out the middle man altogether and permanently change the job title to ‘interim head coach.’
Putting the linguistics to one side, there is some logic to the direction chosen. The whole club legend thing does hold meaning in short bursts, and like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer Carrick has experience of management in English football.
But like Solskjaer there are obvious limitations when you look into what that work entailed.
Carrick’s Middlesbrough team were often seen as one-dimensional, their highly-structured possession football showing all the trappings of a modern Guardiola-esque team – a 4-2-3-1 that swings into a 3-2-5, clear automatisms of short-passing football – but without enough verticality or flexibility to keep opponents on their toes.
Middlesbrough surged up the Championship in Carrick’s first season in charge, missing out on promotion via the play-offs, before gradually sinking down as opposition managers worked out that sitting deep reduced Boro to static, sideways passing.
If Championship managers got there quickly, Premier League ones will need no time at all.
Carrick might well approach the Man Utd job differently, of course, although when he left Middlesbrough in the summer it was reportedly because he refused to adapt his tactical strategy going forward.
Playing patient possession football (and doing so without a high-press to match, instead cautiously dropping into a 4-4-2 midblock) was apparently a non-negotiable. Carrick was and is widely seen as a manager with a clear philosophy; someone who puts the model first.
That probably isn’t what Man Utd fans want to hear after the Amorim fiasco, especially not if the possession-based conservatism seen at Boro is transported to Old Trafford.
It would be a long way from the ‘attack, attack, attack’ football that is seen as the ‘United Way’, even if that idea essentially boils down to fast and direct wing-based attacking of the sort that clashes fundamentally with the rhythms of modern football.
But Carrick knows this as well as anyone, suggesting we shouldn’t look too closely at his Middlesbrough days for clues. He will have made promises during the interview and we can safely assume ‘I’ll bring back the glory days of Louis van Gaal’ was not one of them.
Carrick will lean into the Sir Alex Ferguson era, will bring energy and attacking ideas because that is fundamentally what the supporters demand, what the board want to hear, and what gives him the best chance of landing the role on a permanent basis.
It is also the main job of the interim, who is supposed to provide a bit of spark, lift the mood, remind the players of their strengths.
If that happens Carrick will have succeeded, at which point it is up to Sir Jim Ratcliffe and his directors not to be lured in, not to begin again the cycle that started with Solskjaer.
It will be up to them to define for us what ‘interim’ really means - and hold steadfast to the distinction.
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