Carrick departure 'not a knee-jerk reaction'

Middlesbrough's decision to sack Michael Carrick may surprise some outside Teesside but one thing it can't be described as is a knee-jerk reaction.

More than a month has passed since Boro's 2-0 defeat at Coventry on the final day of the Championship season.

That loss was their 18th of a desperately disappointing season and was followed by the head coach insisting "I'm carrying on" in his BBC Radio Tees Sport post-match interview.

Many Boro fans had come to the conclusion he would be doing just that as the days and weeks ticked by without any sign of white smoke from the club's Rockliffe Park training ground. However, that silence was not indicative of inaction.

Boro's hierarchy had let it be known they would be conducting an in-depth review into the reasons a season where promotion had been targeted and budgeted for ended in a failure to reach the play-offs despite an unusually low points total – the lowest for a decade - being required to make them.

They were as good as their word, conducting a series of meetings, a number of which involved the head coach, while trying to block out the chorus of disapproval from a fan base which had largely become disenchanted and detached by the season's end.

Chairman Steve Gibson is known to be a big supporter of Carrick and backed his man in February when it seemed his time was up after a home defeat by a Watford side in miserable form led to boos around The Riverside and a seeming acceptance from the man himself that the end could be nigh.

So Wednesday's news is a sign that despite how much everyone at Middlesbrough might have wanted it to work for Carrick, after nearly three years in charge he was judged to be more of the problem than the solution to their promotion woes.

Carrick's first season in charge proved to be his best. He succeeded Chris Wilder in October 2022 and hauled an underachieving squad away from the lower reaches of the table before launching a run to the play-offs boosted by the January loan signings of Cameron Archer and Aaron Ramsey and a striker having the season of his life in Chuba Akpom.

In hindsight, those play-offs were also a sign of problems to come as Boro lost out to a Coventry side they'd allowed to sneak into the top six on the final day of the season while failing to score a goal over 180 minutes of football.

The following season saw Boro start terribly, losing five of their first seven Championship games and not recording a win until the eighth game of the season.

Promotion was effectively lost in those early couple of months but a run to the EFL Cup semi-finals gave the season some excitement and a strong end to the campaign (Boro lost just one of their last 12 games) and an eighth-placed finish gave hope this season would be different.

That was the belief inside the club too with last summer's impressive transfer window and the retention of coveted players like Hayden Hackney, Rav Van den Berg and Emmanuel Latte Lath showing the strength of Boro's backing for their head coach.

Backing brings expectation though and throughout the season Boro failed to meet it.

Carrick's supporters will point to January and the club-record sale of Latte Lath as the reason for Boro's 10th-place finish. The counter to that is the fact the player who replaced him, Kelechi Iheanacho, was one the head coach pushed strongly for. Iheanacho's record of one goal and two assists tells its own story.

The fact less well resourced clubs like Bristol City, Millwall and Blackburn all finished above them was a damning indictment of Boro's performance this season while Sunderland's play-off promotion rubbed salt into the wound.

Regis Le Bris showed what was possible with a squad of largely young, inexperienced players allied to imaginative coaching from a tactically flexible manager.

There will be a sense of sadness on Teesside that Carrick was unable to follow up on the promise of that first season when some of the football left fans purring. That sadness will be weighed against the reality the club have gone backwards in the seasons since.

Attention now will be on who comes next? Rob Edwards is known to be highly rated by head of football Kieran Scott while Sheffield Wednesday's Danny Rohl will be of interest to any Championship club without a manager after his sterling work at Hillsborough.

It is now 10 years since Boro's last promotion to the Premier League.

The next manager needs to be the one who brings that long wait to an end.