Michael Carrick hits back at Gary Neville as ‘pathetic’ Man Utd limp on at Fulham

Gary Neville has been watching Manchester United for most of his life and rarely wastes a withering word, but the verdict he delivered from Craven Cottage on Sunday was brutal even by his standards. With Lisandro Martinez’s own goal having put bottom-of-the-table Fulham ahead just after the hour, the former Old Trafford captain turned on what he had just witnessed.

In more than four decades following the club, he said, this was the worst quarter of an hour he had ever sat through — pathetic, bereft of effort, and impossible to reconcile with the man in the dugout. He wondered aloud what Michael Carrick must have been thinking.

The context makes that reaction all the more striking. Neville played in a United side beaten 3-1 at home by Fulham in 2003, and has since watched a 7-0 rout at Liverpool and 6-1 hammerings at Old Trafford by both Tottenham and Manchester City.

Carrick’s defence of his players

United did not fold. Matheus Cunha’s deflected strike two minutes from the end of normal time rescued a 1-1 draw, sparing a side already under fierce scrutiny another damaging defeat and handing Carrick his line of argument.

Fitness has been a running sore since pre-season, when Youri Tielemans suggested running was not being made a priority at the club. Carrick pointed to the closing stages instead. His players kept applying pressure, he said, and the equaliser arrived from precisely that; on this evidence, condition is not the issue.

Cunha was less forgiving. He told Sky Sports that Fulham carried more energy than United straight after the interval, and was blunt about how unacceptable he found it. Speaking to BBC Match of the Day, he also mentioned the noise surrounding the club — a noise Neville, directly or through his media work, supplies in abundance.

A club with more on its plate than results

The table offers little comfort. Five points from five matches leaves United twelfth and already ten adrift of the pacesetters, while Fulham climbed above Tottenham and out of the bottom three at their visitors’ expense.

Carrick’s absentee list does not help. Carlos Baleba, the £70m summer arrival, has still to make his debut, Matthijs de Ligt was left out entirely, and Benjamin Sesko missed the trip after a recurrence of the shin problem that cost him three months last season, the extent of which remains unclear.

There was unrest in the away end, too, when Carrick withdrew Kobbie Mainoo with eleven minutes left. The England midfielder is a popular figure and the decision drew boos. Carrick said he had spoken to the player afterwards, found him fine, and praised supporters he called magnificent all afternoon.

Off the pitch, the pressure keeps building

Anger over the club’s touting crackdown and the ticketing mess that came with it has soured the mood further, and on Wednesday United publish full-year accounts to the end of June that will lay bare the scale of the borrowing.

Add a new stadium priced above £2bn, with planning permission potentially lodged alongside the wider Old Trafford masterplan in late 2027, and a sense of drift becomes easy to understand.

Carrick, who took United back into the Champions League with a third-place finish last season, rejects the idea of a deflated dressing room and talks of a long campaign containing spells that must be ridden out. He is entitled to patience. He is not entitled to much more time to find answers.

Based on reporting by BBC Sport’s match analysis.