Saluting the Subtle Craft of Underappreciated and Underused Michael Carrick

Every other year the strapline of the summer in England is always the same.

Keep the (profanity) ball. 

At a major international tournament, the sight of an Englishman under little pressure shanking the ball out of touch while suave continental counterparts look on contemptuously as if a dog has encroached the pitch and cocked its leg is about as sobering as it gets as a sports fan.

Keep the (profanity) ball. 

From Penzance to Carlisle, and all points in between, it has been a phrase religiously spat out in pubs and front rooms throughout pretty much every World Cup or European Championship since France 1998.

Keep the (profanity) ball. 

Michael Carrick keeps the ball, or rather kept it. He treated it with the reverence of the kid who takes it to bed on first falling in love with the game. He respected it, but never feared it.

Now that he has decided his body can't keep pace with his mind, English football would be wise to ponder its use of a unique talent. And collectively bow its head.

The eminently popular 36-year-old Geordie was afforded a rapturous and well-deserved send-off at Old Trafford on Sunday, when he made his 464th and almost certainly final appearance for Manchester United. That is unless Jose Mourinho saw enough in his soon to be assistant coach's 80-minute appearance to decide next weekend's FA Cup final against Chelsea would benefit from an old head as soaked in wisdom as Carrick's. 

There's certainly no sentiment in the notion he was the game's outstanding player, albeit one played at testimonial pace. Watford were the perfect patsy, but it's a measure of Carrick's professionalism he looked match fit from the off given his previous jaunts this season have comprised 34 Premier League minutes and three appearances in domestic cup games.

Watford joined Carrick's team-mates in making a guard of honour for him to enter the pitch with his two children, Louise and Jacey, before collectively experiencing a narcolepsy episode to allow him to roll back the years with a vintage, raking pass that created the game's only goal.

From his own half, with Watford simultaneously backing off and holding a kamikaze high line, he lofted an inch-perfect, 50-yard wedge to Juan Mata, who rolled the ball square to Marcus Rashford for a simple tap-in.

It was a quarterback pass Tom Brady would have been proud of. The subsequent dab perhaps less so, but Carrick's children in the crowd seemed delighted nonetheless.

His swan song draws to an end the most decorated of careers that houses a quiet, largely unspoken sadness. Not from the player himself, who is equal parts articulate, proud and modest about a 12-year stint at Old Trafford that saw him win as many major trophies. Nor the Manchester United supporters, who have grown to love him, having at times been split on whether his unhurried poise was pedestrian to the point of being antiquated. No, the sadness resides in those of us who have looked enviously at Spain, Germany and France at various points over the past 20 or so years and sighed, "Why can't England play like that?"

If it seems mawkish to look back at Carrick's career with wistfulness while his boots are still caked in mud from Sunday's game, it is only because he has been at odds with an English sensibility of what a midfielder should be since pretty much day one. Midfielders who keep play moving are the antithesis to the much-loved box-to-box variety. And thus, they are treated with suspicion. 

When Gary Neville recently interviewed his former team-mate for Sky Sports, it seemed to be a rhetorical question when he asked Carrick if he thought he had been given the credit he deserves over his career. The eulogies are coming thick and fast now, but then no one ever says at a funeral, "Never really liked the man, myself."

Certainly when Sir Alex Ferguson elected to make Carrick his solitary signing in the summer of 2006, despite Chelsea having won the previous two Premier League titles, coupled with the departure of Ruud van Nistelrooy to Real Madrid and Roy Keane's banishment in the middle of the previous campaign, it was not a decision universally applauded.

As the always engaging, if perhaps not always prescient, Rob Smyth put it at the time in an acerbic piece for the Guardian ("Shredding his (Ferguson's) legacy at every turn" was the headline): "The signing of Michael Carrick, a Pirlo when a Gattuso was needed, is a band-aid for a bullet wound, and a ludicrously expensive one at that."

In fairness to Smyth, it is unlikely Carrick contacted his solicitor on being compared to Andrea Pirlo, yet the idea he is a thinker rather than a doer has stuck. He was certainly not alone in thinking Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy had done typically astute business in getting United to stump up £18 million. 

It seems a universal truth there are few nicer guys in football than Carrick, yet no player survives 12 years at Manchester United without possessing an edge.

Endowed with a dry wit, he's an authoritative voice in the dressing room and not averse to speaking his mind. Paul Pogba credits the turnaround in his two-goal match-winning display in April's Manchester derby, after an atrocious first half, to what Carrick said to him. The Frenchman would do well to watch Sunday's game back and note how Carrick's Hollywood pass for Rashford's goal was the exception, not the rule.

Mourinho has obviously spotted enough steel in him to want to keep him around. Give him a season working with the Portuguese and he'll be chasing Jurgen Klopp down the touchline come May.

Carrick finishes his career with 34 England caps. That's one fewer than Stewart Downing, two less than Wayne Bridge and 25 shy of Phil Neville's total of 59.

He made his debut under Sven-Goran Eriksson as a West Ham United player in 2001, before making his final appearance for his country against Spain in November 2015. Four England managers–Eriksson, Steve McClaren, Fabio Capello and Roy Hodgson–fed him scraps over a 14-year period. To put that longevity in terms of international football into context, World Cup-winning captain Bobby Moore's 108-cap England career spanned 11 years.

As England yet again desperately check the sofa for central midfielders who can dictate the tempo of a game ahead of the summer's World Cup, Carrick, in idle moments over the coming weeks, may rue being a perennial usher at the marriage of convenience that was Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard's partnership in midfield.

Starting that pair together was like serving up steak and chips, only with no chips and two steaks. Yet still a succession of England managers persevered to the tune of 220 caps between them. Would playing Carrick in a three behind them have worked?

That Jack Wilshere sits on 34 caps too, dreaming of a handful more in Russia, further underlines how Carrick can feel aggrieved at being such a bit-part player for his country. He made just one start for England at an international tournament, against Ecuador in the last-16 of the 2006 World Cup in Germany. Despite an impressive performance, he was dropped for the quarter-final defeat to Portugal on penalties.

Four years later, he was an unused squad member in South Africa as Capello's prosaic England were humiliated 4-1 by Germany in Bloemfontein. In April this year, on BBC2’s Premier League Show (h/t the Press Association, via the Guardian), Carrick made the frank admission that being away on international duty with England left him feeling depressed. After the farce of South Africa, he asked the Football Association to stop considering him for selection.

At 29, Paul Scholes arrived at the same decision having spent too much of his international career festooned out on the left wing. In four years playing under Capello's England tenure, Carrick won seven caps.

Hodgson didn't fancy him much either. In his infinite wisdom, he didn't bother to have a chat with Carrick to see if he fancied going to the 2012 Euros (he did), despite Gareth Barry and Lampard both missing the tournament through injury. As Andrea Pirlo gave a masterclass as a punctilious playmaker from deep as Italy beat England on penalties in the quarter-finals, a nation pondered just where could Hodgson find a player of a similar ilk, an expert at making angles for his team-mates to bounce passes off. Carrick was sat at home watching the game in flip-flops while playing with his protractor.

In the following campaign, Carrick had the best season of his Manchester United career. He was nominated for the PFA Player of the Year, named in the Team of the Year and won the club's Players' Player of the Year as United stormed to the Premier League title.

Hodgson didn't pick him for the 2014 World Cup or 2016 Euros either. It's fair to say one doesn't have to possess the football knowledge of Johan Cruyff to deduce England could have done with a passer at both of those tournaments. That a succession of England bosses didn't rate him, while Ferguson emphatically did, says plenty.

As if often the case these days, the best diagnosis of Carrick's game perhaps belongs to Gary Neville, per an interview he gave to United fanzine Stretty News' Dale O'Donnell.

"When you are on a football pitch playing against Liverpool or Manchester City, you need peace around you as well. You sometimes don't want people running around...

"Scholes and Carrick together was peaceful. It was like going into a bar and hearing a piano playing.

"It's relaxing. Listening to some good rock is good and you like that too but sometimes it's nice to listen to a piano. Carrick's a piano."

His detractors argue he's about as mobile as one, too. 

Carrick's doomed international career is not just a moot point with the bourgeoisie football fan, the type who see Carrick as much as an interpreter of space as he is a midfielder. Football's professional intelligentsia love him, too.

Testimonials from the game's great and good often credit Scholes with being the finest player of his generation, the inventor of penicillin, site foreman on the Pyramids job and brains behind the theory of evolution, but Carrick's own meme game is going to be pretty strong post-retirement.

Pep Guardiola, not a bad midfielder in his own playing days, proposed, per Football365, "Carrick is one of the best holding midfielders I've ever seen in my life by far. He's the level of Xabi Alonso, Sergio Busquets."

While many would balk at Carrick's name being bandied around with two pillars of a Spain side that will go down in history as one of the greatest ever in international football, Alonso's own words on the Manchester United man are telling. 

"In English football sometimes it seems hard for people to rate those who, instead of shining themselves, make the team work as a collective. For example, Michael Carrick, who makes those around him play. I've always seen myself in Carrick."

Xavi is another who credits Carrick as being one of the most complete English players, while Arsene Wenger said in 2013, per the Guardian's David Hytner: "Carrick ... is a quality passer. He could play for Barcelona, he would be perfectly suited to their game."

For those who laugh at the idea Carrick could have played for Barcelona, it is worth reminding how he played in three consecutive UEFA Champions League finals between 2007 and 2009, winning the middle one against Chelsea. That he was the last man standing from that fateful night in Moscow will be lost on neither the player nor supporters. In the period he played under Ferguson, he won five out of a possible seven Premier League titles. The other two United lost by a point and goal difference, respectively.

That his last cap came against Spain somehow seems poignant. Without wishing to breach into "Samuele Allardici" territory, it is hard to dispute how, by and large—at least in terms of neutrals and the press, if not his team-mates—Carrick is more appreciated overseas than in England.

It's easy to see why Guardiola loves him. Just as Xavi feels making a clearance is an intellectual defeat, Guardiola looks on tackling as eating soup with a fork. Tackling in this respect is the last resort of those who can't read the game, even if Keane would propel you into the stand for even suggesting as much. Carrick at his best could play in a three-piece dinner suit without having to worry about getting his knees muddy. He could probably carry a round of drinks without spilling a drop, too.

Like the chess player who reads his opponent's next move before his fingers have left the piece, Carrick's clairvoyance made the hardest things look easy. As the centre-halves who played behind him readily attest, it is not a coincidence that opponents seemed to find him so often with errant passes. As an interceptor, he was arguably peerless before the arrival of N'Golo Kante into English football.

It seems apt his final decisive act in a Manchester United shirt was a gorgeous pass, with back straight and head up, as ever looking forward as Ferguson used to purr about him.

That it will be Mata who goes in the books as assisting Rashford's goal when his part in it was all the more impressive will suit Carrick just fine. After all, that is what he has always been about since arriving in Manchester in 2006. Making his team-mates look better.

As Scholes put it upon coming out of retirement in 2012, per the Daily Express' Richard Tanner: "Ryan Giggs, Wayne Rooney, we all recognise how important [Carrick] is to the team, and at the end of the day that's the important thing, that your team-mates know what you're doing in the team.

"As long as they do and the manager is happy, that's all that matters. There's no better player at just keeping the ball and keeping it simple."

Maybe that's something to consider when over the summer you find yourself repeatedly screaming: "Keep the (profanity) ball."