'The best football to the most infuriating' - Boro fan on Carrick's reign

Manchester United fans can expect a 4-2-3-1, as that is the formation Michael Carrick switched to and stuck with throughout the majority of his time at Middlesbrough.

In his first season, his tactical blueprint was a 3-2-5 build-up with the left-back becoming a winger and the left winger tucking in to become a number 10. The opposing winger would operate as a wide striker.

It resulted in the best football I have seen a Middlesbrough team play.

His biggest masterstroke was playing Chuba Akpom as a second striker, which produced 29 goals - the best tally of his career and the most goals a Boro striker has scored since Bernie Slaven in 1989-90.

Carrick struggled to adapt to losing influential players - Akpom included - in the following season. Although Boro still looked good on the eye, efficiency evaded us most notably at the start, as we failed to win any of our opening seven league games. In retrospect, maybe it showed what we should have got from Carrick at the start of his tenure - a rookie head coach learning on the job.

We did end the season by losing only one of our final 12 matches, so hope was plentiful going into his third season at Boro. That, though, is where everything went south.

Boro had never been anywhere near watertight defensively under Carrick, but 2024-25 took the biscuit. We conceded comedic goals that the Benny Hill theme music would be a perfect match to. That was only one problem. Injuries struck again and, from January, Boro became a chore to watch. Ineffective, boring and one-dimensional. Carrick did not have the answers.

He took us from fourth to eighth to 10th. He took us from the best football I had seen to arguably the most infuriating. I wanted him to turn it around, but he could not.

Find more from Dana Malt at The Boro Breakdown