Michael Carrick will leave it as late as he dares on Luke Shaw.
The 31-year-old left-back faces a race against time to be fit for Sunday’s showdown with Manchester City, with Carrick confirming a final assessment will determine whether he makes the squad. Shaw sat out Thursday night’s 4-0 dismantling of Sabah FK in the Champions League after being withdrawn during the 2-2 draw with Everton.
Carrick refused to gamble.
“We just kind of looked after him a little bit,” he told reporters, explaining why Shaw was nowhere near the midweek squad. Shaw, he stressed, simply wasn’t at “100%” and so the medical and coaching staff agreed not to take any risks. Now, the next “couple of days or so” will decide whether one of his most trusted defenders can be thrown back into the intensity of a derby.
Fixture Significance
For Carrick, this fixture is more than just another date on the calendar. It drags him straight back to January, to the night everything started.
Back then, he had just stepped in for Ruben Amorim on an interim basis, a caretaker with a clipboard and a restless fanbase watching his every move. His first assignment? Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City. His response? A sharp, disciplined display that snapped a four-game winless run and set a different tone. Bryan Mbeumo and Patrick Dorgu supplied the goals, but the wider message came from the touchline: United could still stand up in the biggest games.
This weekend, though, Carrick is having none of the easy narratives about history repeating itself.
“It’ll definitely be different, just because no games are ever the same,” he said, cutting off any sense that last season’s win offers a ready-made blueprint. There will be no complacent copy-and-paste job, no assumption that what worked once will work again. The difference now, he argued, lies in the accumulated belief.
The confidence has not come from one result but from a body of work. Since that first audition against City, Carrick has built a record of 12 wins in 17 matches, enough to turn a short-term stopgap into the permanent manager at the Theatre of Dreams. Performances have hardened, patterns have emerged, and the dressing room has bought in.
That is why he talks about “getting better all the time” and why he leans into the scale of Sunday’s occasion instead of playing it down. Everyone knows what this game means. Everyone knows “there’s a lot riding on it”. The schedule is tight, the turnaround short, but Carrick’s message is clear: embrace it, recover fast, prepare smart, and go again.
The context around him has shifted too. When INEOS took the reins and the summer loomed, the noise outside Old Trafford grew louder. Big names were linked, big reputations floated. The assumption in some quarters was that the new hierarchy would chase a marquee appointment and move on from the man who started as a temporary fix.
Carrick never treated it that way.
He insists his mindset from day one was that he would be in the job beyond the summer, that every call on training, recruitment and style had been made with the long term in mind. He didn’t know how long the club would give him. He still doesn’t. But he has behaved as though he would be the one steering the project, shaping what United “want it to look like and the direction we want to go”.
The players responded. Performances under the weight of uncertainty, he said, were “incredible”. That, in turn, strengthened his conviction that this is not a quick repair job but a journey measured in seasons, not weeks.
Which brings it back to City, and to a manager who now stands in the dugout not as a caretaker, but as the man entrusted with dragging United back to where he believes they belong. The stakes are obvious. The rivalry is fierce. The margin for error is thin.
And somewhere in the middle of it all, a decision on Luke Shaw’s fitness could tell its own story about how bold Carrick is prepared to be in the biggest game of his reign so far.
