He might be our best midfielder when he actually turns up. In fact he is by some distance, but performances like today are just completely unacceptable really, and he's another one where it just happens too often.
You can't even put it down to his age because he's been at it since Moyes took over. He just has these games where he seems to think he's allowed to take 10 seconds longer than everyone else on the pitch to bother reacting to anything. He's 34, not 64. It's not an age thing.
A big part of our problem in recent years is we've gone from relying on players like Giggs, Keano, Scholes, Ronaldo, etc. as our backbone. Players who are made of the right stuff...to the likes of Carrick. A massive pansy who despite his obvious talent wouldn't win a thing if he didn't have other winners in the team to rely on. When it comes down to him, he melts or goes into a shell.
And yeah, Schneiderlin was bad today which didn't help, but that doesn't stop Carrick from playing well under difficult circumstance. The reality is he was just shite aswell.
Why is he getting so much stick? Nearly all of our play in the first half went through him.
Which was a big problem really. Three things; He was taking far too long to play any kind of pass, he was playing the wrong pass half the time, and a lot of the passes were fecking awful. No part of it was anywhere near up to scratch. Mata was the one we should have been playing through but we couldn't get the ball to him in the first place.