Fact
I really like facts - they’re irrefutable and in short supply these days. I do, however, prefer to have more details, otherwise those very facts remain elusive and unprovable. I’d ask that at some point you elucidate further or I’ll never know how to assimilate them.
The story that Carrick was responsible for most of the January signings has clearly been leaked to damage him, and to exonerate others, so we can make some reasonable assumptions about its possible source.
Whether it is true or not is quite another matter. We do know that Carrick wanted Giles back against the wishes of the recruitment team because Craig Johns carried the story that if the move did not work out then Carrick would be held solely responsible.
This churlish statement was of a piece with two of Scott's other remarks. When Chris Jones was appointed he was told that if his recruitment team failed to deliver "there would be no place to hide". And at the beginning of the season Scott held Carrick as a hostage to fortune by asserting that anything less than a play-off place would amount to failure. That has been a theme repeated throughout the year and amplified to full volume over the past few weeks.
I should perhaps make clear that I do not know Mr Scott, have never met him and have no personal animosity towards him. But I can recognise the time honoured institutional techniques of evading responsibility and covering one's back if and when things go wrong when I see them.
The obverse of this is making sure that you get the credit when things go right.
Perhaps the recruiting team's greatest success this season has been the signing of Aiden Morris. So it was no surprise when Craig Johns was given an exclusive " inside story" on how the young American was secured.
The crucial element in the story was that the deal had been two years in the making and was the result of meticulous long-term planning on the part of Scott and Chris Jones. For any reader who did not get the point of that two year process it was made explicit in the story's final paragraph. The groundwork had been laid, it was explained, before Michael Carrick had been appointed.
It seemed an unnecessarily petty point to make, but Scott's role in the deal was itself diminished by a detail included in an earlier part of the story. Because it appeared that Morris had been on Jones's watch list of potential prospects for many years when he had been scouting for Crystal Palace. In other words the Morris deal was almost all down to Jones's work and contacts before he worked for the Boro. It was what he brought with him from Palace.
Then last month Morris gave an interview to the Gazette in which he explained that the reason he came to the Boro was because of the attraction of playing for Michael Carrick. As an aspiring midfielder himself he knew that he would learn more from him than anyone else and he waxed lyrical about the amount of time and attention he wanted and received from his coach in improving his own game.
It wasn't something that Carrick himself has ever specifically mentioned or taken any credit for.
For me it's a story that gives the measure of both men.
As much as I am not a great fan of Mr Scott and would favour Mr Carrick above him, I would have to say that if you line up the pros and cons of both (that we think we know)
Then Scott possibly has more credit to his name than Mr Carrick.
Rogers and Latte Lathe and may be VDB. Although MC may have also been influential in them coming to MFC.
Whilst we lost LL and the Doak to injury, with the January window, we should have been more than able to recruite at least two DECENT replacements. Good enough to have made the play offs, especially now we have seen what has transpired with the teams that did make them.
Did Carrick really want Giles. It has to be a yes. Did Carrick really want Inheancho. Yes if you believe the local press. Would they lie? And the other surprise was Carrick wanting Edmundson, if that is true.
Mr Carrick really does need to come up with a new Plan A and B, to show Mr Gibson, he is the Coach to go forward with.
I guess if we're looking at credits and debits we need to put Sammy Silvera, Micah Hamilton, Alex Gilbert and probably Lucas Engel in the Kieran Scott debit column.
@peter-surtees Agree entirely.
It is only because we brought in good money for Rogers and LL, that Scott’s credit is higher than it may be should be, certainly in money terms.
Let us hope that Whittaker is not eventually added to your list.
Thanks for your discretion OFB, I suppose it's one thing for us to speculate on what is behind articles in the local press but perhaps putting a confidential discussion into the public domain does have implications for those involved, with some of those maybe wanting to challenge the basis - which would no doubt be hard to verify without compromising others.
As you say the events you mention will no doubt come to a head at some point if the working relationship is not working - much will depend on who holds the power and who Steve Gibson is backing. I get the impression Keiran Scott has been entrusted with running the footballing side of Boro so he will likely continue calling the shots until he maybe moves onto something else.
It may well be that Carrick has had a hand in bringing some players to the club but like all players some will succeed and others will fail as many are a gamble. Recruitment can't take the sole credit for the success of players if it is the head coach who has revived their career by coaching and mentoring to take them from bargains to multi-million pound assets - indeed, lets not forget the player himself has probably had the biggest role in that with their application!
@martin-bellamy - The "i" and the FT....
So two, out of how many? And two with relatively small readership numbers compared with the other main protagonists. Disappointing isn’t it?
I am glad I don't have to make the decison that will be made by Steve Gibson - does he stick or twist with Michael Carrick? I don't know what I'd decide. I suppose to some extent it may be influenced by who else is available to do the job (do "top managers" really make it known they'd be available, if asked?) and by how much it would cost to replace Carrck and "his" backroom staff.
I guess that an honest answer if the question were asked of Michael Carrick is that, no, he isn't proud of how the 2024-25 season panned out at Boro. He will have hoped and probably expected better. He may have some explanations. Some may hold some water but others may not. Boro suffered injuries to key players (don't most teams have inuries?), sales of players who'd have made a difference (obviously the club was not able to replace Latte Lath with anyone offering a similar level of threat up front) and the failure of those players brought in to make any positive impression (I doubted Giles would make a difference at the time, and the fact he didn't start many games suggests that was not a good move).
The lack of contribution by Iheanacho, despite the gold thrown at him and despite his history which suggested he should be more than OK at Championship level, was a nightmare that few would have predicted but became fairly obvious when we saw him on the pitch. It wasn't a single poor game when he was new to the club and perhaps unready to play. Rather than a 28 year old at the peak of his physical abilities he played like a washed-up old pro, but without any apparent commitment. What might Boro otherwise have done with the £30K-£37K a week paid to him (if, indeed, the club agreed to pay half the salary he receives from Sevilla)? I can't imagine his presence would have improved changing room dynamics ("What, he's getting £30K a week from Boro and I get £7K? Have you seen him play?").
Carrick knows more about football than I ever will. He will know how well he has performed as manager this season, and he will have a fair idea how Steve Gibson thinks about the matter. He seems a calm and measured fellow. That can be seen as a positive. Hopefully he is realistic. I don't know how he is in the dressing room before or after games, only how he appears in interviews and how he looks in the "technical area" during games. He doesn't seem very animated most of the time. You can certainly tell that he is British rather than Italian or Spanish! Does he shout at players if unhappy with their performance or does he take them to the side, one at a time, to make subtle points as to how he'd prefer the players to do things in the second half?
We know, it's almost a cliche now to say it, that he is reactive rather than pro-active on the substitute front. "It's 65-70 minutes into the game, I'll have to make a substitution soon." Unless someone had a broken leg, you can't imagine him deciding that the team he had set up wasn't working, and therefore to make a change(s) after 20 minutes rather than allowing the "failure to work" to continue. Instead we battle on until that 70th minute and THEN look at things - maybe prompted by the opposing manager's second set of substitutions. But he still knows more about football, about the players he has at his disposal and their current level of fitness and what they have been doing in training than me. There MUST be a method in his madness. Surely?
Is management merely smoke and mirrors? It is almost traditional to think that your local publican could have managed Liverpool in the '70s and '80s, Bayern Munich since 2000 or Real Madrid (most years, to be honest): "Look, lads. There's the ball. Just go out and win, again...!" If you've got the most money you can buy and pay the best players, and you're then in with a shout of winning. But there's the rub - a manager might come into his own when his players are NOT necessarily as good as the opponents' players, by dint of better organisation and tactics, better team spirit and confidence.
Often it is said that the successful teams tend to be the ones with the biggest wage bills. So let's look at the wages bill for Championship Clubs in the 2024-25 season and see how that looks. Acoording to Capology, online, there is a preponderance at the top of the list, of recently relegated clubs:
1. Leeds - £36.79M pa
2. Burnley - £29.51M
3. Sheff U - £27.17M
4. Luton T - £23.61M
5. BORO - £22.53M
7. WBA - £21.98M
7. Cardiff - £20.91M
8. Norwich - £19.94M
.....
15. Sun'land - £14.97M
16. Swansea - £12.98M
17. Coventry - £12.66M
....
21. Bristol - £11.57M
22. Oxford - £11.13M
23. Plymouth - £9.71M
24. Portsmouth -£8.44M
Well, that shows quite a lot! The theory ("Pay higher wages, get better players, and do better") does seem to work, with exceptions. For example the top three wages bills belong to the teams which finished, 1, 2 and 3. Plymouth, with the 2nd lowest wages bill finished second-bottom. There were some outliers, though, and none more catastrophic for the club than Luton Town, freshly relegated from the Premier League and crashing through the Championship like a sky-diver without a parachute (save that Luton DID have a parchute payment, and its 4th highest wages bill transferred to a 3rd bottom place in the league). Sunderland, on the other hand finished 4th in the table despite a wages bill 15th in the list, and Bristol City finished in 6th place despite paying the 21st highest wages.
Boro is a disappointing 10th in the league table despite paying the players the 5th highest wages in The Championship. Was that a good return on investment?
Basically Boro is punching below its weight on that metric. I guess that if Boro had been paying only two-thirds of its current wages bill yet finished 4th in the table (as Sunderland did) Steve Gibson would be a happy man. He'd not be expecting to have to chuck in so much money next year, for starters!
I pay my ST. Steve Gibson ends up throwing MILLIONS into the club, year after year, and without the club having found its Holy Grail for some years. I may be disappointed in how things have turned out again. Michael Carrick might be disappointed and some of the players might feel the same way (obviously the loanees will be on their way back to their parent clubs and have other things on their minds for next season). But Steve Gibson must be absolutely GUTTED. As I said, I don't envy him the decision he has to make.
A £22.5m wage bill for a 25-man squad works out at an average of just under £17k a week for each player - I think I recall Borges was on over £20k a week so I can imagine many of the plethora of new signings are probably getting something similar - apparently Burgzorg is also on £20k a week and Whittaker £25k a week but with Tommy Conway and Aiden Morris getting only half that (they really must get new agents). Incidentally, Luke Ayling is on £30k a week so we're probably stuck with him - Jonny Howson was getting £25k a week - so you pay for experience!
So it would appear the trend for getting in new players is seeing them receive higher than club average wages - especially forwards - while perhaps not performing better than average - you don't always get what you pay for. So it's easy to imagine getting similarly performing players for a lot less - or even worse performing players for a lot more!
On the issue of Carrick not making subs early - I read that the average time a substitute spends on the pitch in the PL has not varied much in the last 10 years and is around 25 minutes. That would seem to indicate Carrick is in line with that stat as he waits until the 70th minute.
Now the other question was just how effective subs are and whether they've been involved in scoring goals - again there were no stats for the Championship on this but there was a lot of variation with Marco Silva, Bournemouth's Iraola and Villa's Emery topping the list with 21,21 and 20 respectively - note a substitution by David Moyes is yet to lead to a goal at Everton.
Now Carrick hasn't exactly had much on his bench this season to consider that they would make a dramatic change in the scoring stakes - however, given Boro lost 25 points from winning positions and conceded 40% of their goals in the final quarter, there is a question mark on whether he needs to use his squad better and introduce more energy onto the pitch.
Incidentally, just to demonstrate the huge gap in Championship to PL - Boro's weekly wage bill is equivalent to what Villa are paying for loan signings Marcus Rashford and Marco Asensio each week.
@werdermouth - I get that Premier League average of 25 minutes on the pitch for substitutes, but it must be very difficult to measure that up to players for the various teams. In Boro's case there is likely to be an early subsititution only in the case of an injury to a player and often the subs are later and fewer in number than the opposition.
In recent games (I don't have the Coventry timings) the subs for Boro have been made on:
Norwich - 61mins, 78+78mins (2 together). (Norwich used all 5 subs).
Sheff W - 67, 77 and 91 mins (Iheanacho with an excuse for not having got up a sweat there)
Plymouth - 62, 73, 81 and 89 mins (Burgzorg that time). (Plymouth again used all 5 subs).
A total of 757 minutes and 10 substitutions so the average time for each substitution being made is 75.7 minutes. Ignoring the injury-time substitution of Iheanacho in the Sheff Wed game (which would have further reduced the average time spent on the pitch by Boro's subs) the other 9 players played a total of 144 minutes (less than 16 minutes each).
My IMPRESSION without going through the figures for the season (I do have a life, honestly!) is that Boro uses fewer substitutes than many other teams and the subs come on later - very often in the last few minutes. The point made in the last para of your post at 2.39pm is a good one. Maybe Boro should have been putting more of its subs on with half hour to go, so those fresh players could influence the game (and defend the scores which had often been positive at that time).
And the wages in the EPL are obscene.
Sounds about right for Carrick - send someone on for 15 minutes and hope they do something. Though in reality Boro's bench has been weak this season with often several academy prospects sitting on it for matchday experience without ever expecting to play.
The bench for Coventry was 3 central defenders a left-back, Barlaser who never comes on and then Iheanacho, Burgzorg and Forss. There's absolutely nothing there to change the game in any meaningful way - just fresh legs in attack with barely time to get into the game and it's not as if they are super subs like Duncan Watmore who could read a game and know where to affect it.
It would be good to have a wise head on the bench who could come on and give a good 30 minutes - even young Josh Coburn would offer an alternative to pose different problems. I find Forss is usually a better starter than sub as he needs time to get into games work out his runs and find space.
No wonder Carrick starts rubbing his chin after 65 minutes as he doesn't think he has any better options on the bench and keeps hoping something will happen until players start looking tired and need to come off.
Watford sack Tom Cleverley.
Come on BORO.
@forever-dormo @ 2.27.
I said that you may be on a roll, and it came to pass.
Lots of good replies, especially from werder.
With respect Championship wages as quoted by the media and fan blogs, generally they use Capology.
What I do not know is,
The annual figure quoted, is that just for the contract players? Or does that include ALL employees. Players, Carrick and staff, Scott, Bauser even.
There will be probably a few million to add to the 22.5 million quoted by Dormo if it does not, and Thames need paying.
The wage figures, I am a little sceptical with those.
Some of the wages, for some of the better or even best are ridiculous compared to recent arrivals.
OK, Ayling on 30K, even though it is too much IMO, was a free. Howson the same on around 25K, also a free.
Then we have Burgzirg, McGree and Borges. Are we REALLY paying them those levels of wages?
Against that, although I guess they were happy to sign the contract at the time, we have, Hackney, VDB, Fry and others on a lot less.
If that does not cause friction in the dressing then I don't know what will.
I'm surprised Cleverly lasted the season at Watford given where they finished and how trigger happy the owner is 🙂
[...] you will all know one of the two main newspapers in Russia was called Pravda (which ironically means "truth" or "justice"). The other main paper, Izvestia, was the offical organ of the Supreme Soviet and its name translates as "news".*
Which gave rise to the old assertion that there was no news in "Truth" & no truth in "News"... 😉
The debate since Pedro published the link to the Scott Wilson article on the apportionment of blame for Boro's failure to make the play-offs this season (which I wasn't able to read beyond the first paragraph because I got a message saying that I needed to subscribe to see the rest! 🙁 ) has been fascinating. I seriously doubt that we'll ever know the real truth of what goes on behind the scenes. 🙁
@stircrazy - Boro does seem to be a very secretive club. Many of the transfers are for figures that are "undisclosed". I don't know what the club believes would happen if the figures were known. We tend to find out only if the selling club reveals the fee.
No point letting the Plebs know what is going on!
And the fact that we don't know what is going on in the background (as per OFB's comment, or Latte Lath saying there are things best left unsaid for the present) only encourages rumours to start.
In reality there is no answer to honesty but for lots of organisations and people that seems to be difficult, perhaps because secrets would be revealed. Economical with the truth seems to be chosen substitute.
I for one am glad the torture of the season is over. ATB everyone.
UTB,
John