Luke Shaw's Fitness Check Ahead of Manchester City Clash
Michael Carrick will leave it late before deciding whether Luke Shaw can face Manchester City, with the left-back set for a final fitness check ahead of Sunday’s derby.
Shaw, 31, missed Thursday’s commanding 4-0 Champions League win over Sabah FK after being forced off in the 2-2 draw with Everton. Carrick chose not to involve him in Europe, opting to protect a player he sees as crucial for the domestic showdown.
“We’ll have to see,” Carrick told reporters when asked about Shaw’s chances of featuring against City. “We just kind of looked after him a little bit. He wasn’t quite ready for [Sabah] 100%, so we didn’t risk it. We’ll see how he is over the next couple of days or so.”
United coped without him in midweek, swatting aside Sabah FK with ease, but City bring a very different level of jeopardy. For Carrick, the fixture is loaded with personal history as well.
A full-circle fixture for Carrick
This meeting with Pep Guardiola’s side mirrors Carrick’s first game in the dugout back in January, when he stepped in on an interim basis after Ruben Amorim’s departure. That night, at a tense Theatre of Dreams, United snapped a four-game winless run with a sharp, disciplined display, beating City thanks to goals from Bryan Mbeumo and Patrick Dorgu.
It was the sort of statement win that can change a manager’s career. It did.
Carrick, though, refused to treat that result as any kind of blueprint for what comes next.
“It’ll definitely be different, just because no games are ever the same,” he said. “I think there’s no way we’re assuming we won last year, we’ll do the same things and everything will be the same.
“I think the confidence that we’ve built over a period of time and feel like we’re getting better all the time, I think that helps us. We know it’s a big game, we know it’s an important game. There’s a lot riding on it, it’s pretty obvious to say, but we’re looking forward to it.
“We’ve got a short space of time to recover and prepare for it, but we’ll make the most of it.”
The message was clear: respect the past, but don’t live in it.
From stopgap to standard-bearer
When Carrick first took charge, it was under the “interim” label, a caretaker stepping into a volatile situation. What followed changed the conversation around him. Twelve wins in his first 17 matches forced the club’s decision-makers to look inward rather than scan the market for a marquee outsider.
Speculation swirled around the INEOS-led hierarchy and their supposed appetite for a big-name appointment in the summer. The noise never really went away. Carrick simply chose not to listen.
His focus, he insists, has always been on the long haul.
“I think I said it pretty early on, I was always planning to be [manager beyond the summer],” he admitted. “All the decisions we were making were if we were going to be here for a period of time. I never knew how long that was going to be, I still don’t!
“But you’re always planning for the future, what we want it to look like and the direction we want to go, and that was from day one.
“The performance the lads gave was incredible with all that, but there was definitely always – has been, always will be for me – from the start was planning to try and get this club to where we want to get it in the long term.”
The immediate concern, though, is City, Guardiola, and whether one of his most trusted defenders is fit enough to help him go toe-to-toe again.
