fit

He didn’t change as a manager. Always polite and friendly but not generating headlines for the sake of it.

His exuberant celebration after a 3-1 win at Sheffield United in February 2023, triggered by some pre-match needle between the sides, is remembered because it was so out of keeping with Carrick’s normal behaviour.

One pre-match dressing room chat was recalled in gathering background on Carrick for this article. With players on the pitch completing their warm-up, many managers want to be left alone in silence. Others obsess with their tactics board. On this particular day, Carrick engaged in a chat about the old TV remotes.

“Never too up, never too down,” says the source. “That is Michael.

“He doesn’t waste 10 words when one will do. At Middlesbrough, everyone loved him.”

Everyone apart from the fans in the end.

When Carrick arrived on Teesside in October 2022, he resurrected a club flirting with relegation and did so by delivering exciting, winning, possession-based football.

After losing his first game against Preston, Boro won 16 out of their next 22 league matches. Carrick deployed a number of different formations, including three at the back at times, and scored three goals or more on 11 occasions.

When they beat Preston in the return game at the Riverside on 18 March, they were three points off automatic promotion. Striker Chuba Akpom was on his way to 29 goals for the season and a return to the Premier League after a six-year absence was on the cards.

But Boro’s form deserted them at the wrong moment. They won two out of their last eight games, missed out on automatic promotion by 16 points and were beaten by Coventry in an attritional play-off semi-final that produced one goal in two games.

It never got better than that for Carrick at Boro, even though he lasted two more seasons.

The first of those never recovered from a rotten start, when they collected two points from their opening seven games. The second lacked consistency and five straight defeats from January into February ensured there was no late run to the play-offs.

On the plus side, there was a run to the EFL Cup semi-final in 23-24, where Boro were eventually beaten by Chelsea.

Carrick could also point to the sale of Akpom to Ajax in the summer of 2023, five key loan players not returning and Morgan Rogers’ £15m exit to Aston Villa in February 2024 as mitigation for not hitting the same heights, as Boro profited from the work he had done developing players.

Supporters didn’t see the situation in quite the same terms.

In the end, they felt he was too wedded to a 4-2-3-1 formation they did not believe was working. ‘No Plan B’ was a familiar criticism.

Carrick’s response of ‘I’m not going to change the style of play, it is what I know and what I believe in. We wouldn’t be good coaches if we suddenly went down a totally different route’ has echoes of Ruben Amorim.

Yet it is clear Carrick can see the benefit of tactical switches.

On Match of the Day 2 in October, summing up United’s win over Brighton, Carrick explained how his old club had achieved their success by forward players dropping and Luke Shaw pushing forward, condensing the space midfield pair Casemiro and Bruno Fernandes were being asked to cover.

“In the end, it’s a numbers game and a space game,” Carrick explained.

“You can see there is something building with the connections.”

Motherwell right-back and Scotland cap Stephen O’Donnell recently said it was incumbent on all Scottish players to give national manager Steve Clarke “a headache” in the run-up to the World Cup.

Findlay and Halkett are two such players but Findlay has the advantage of having worked with Clarke at Kilmarnock.

He is also one cap better off than his club-mate, having made his sole international appearance in a 6-0 win over San Marino in 2019 under Clarke.

The national team head coach is fiercely loyal to players who have served him well and Grant Hanley, Jack Hendry, Scott McKenna, Souttar and Kieran Tierney would all appear to be ahead of Findlay in the queue.

“There’s a few lads maybe on the outside of that just looking in at the minute,” McInnes added. “Going into big tournaments, there’s always maybe one or two casualties for injury and you just never know.

“If you’re playing for a team at the top of the league then there’s always significant players within that. But likes are Stuart and Craig Halkett, Stephen Kingsley, Harry Milne, these boys, you just never know.”

And Findlay added: “Every professional football player, until the day they retire, wants to play for their country. It’s the highest honour you can get in a game.

“I know the manager well and there’s no surprise to me how well he’s done. As a Scotland supporter, I trust him implicitly to pick the squad that he thinks is the best.

“For me, the biggest thing for me this season was doing well at Hearts. Of course, it’d be a massive bonus and it’d be great to be involved in.”

STROLLING the empty grounds of the “UK’s most beautiful castle”, I imagine myself as former resident Catherine of Aragon – minus the impractical clothing and messy divorce.

It was an autumnal Sunday morning after I had booked my family into one of the new Knights’ Retreat Lodges at Leeds Castle, near Maidstone in Kent, for the night.

The wooden lodges, named after mythical creatures such as Basilisk, Gryphon and Hippogriff, are built at the far end of the grounds, next to the children’s playground and falconry — an important detail for families when the grounds span 500 acres.

Our lodge slept five people, with a double bed in one room and three single beds decorated with cute shield pillows (available in the gift shop for a reasonable £14), plus a lounge area with a kitchenette and a bathroom. The lodges are a masterclass in small space management.

This allowed the adults to spend an enjoyable couple of hours chatting over a bottle of wine in the lounge, while the two boys battled it out in the bedroom with their shields.

Huge sandpit

But we weren’t there for chilling. Because a stay in the lodges gets you two-day access to Leeds Castle and its grounds, so we had to use our daylight hours wisely.

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First stop, the Knights’ Stronghold Playground, an enormous medieval-themed play area that is potentially the best “climbing frame” in the country. The four-storey castle has enough bridges, turrets, walkways, ziplines and slides to keep your child entertained for hours.

But we gave ourselves a strict two-hour time limit so we didn’t miss out on the rest of the action.

In the kids’ corner of the grounds, there is a huge sandpit almost as big as a small beach, an obstacle course and the birds-of-prey centre, which holds falconry shows featuring the resident hawks, falcons and owls.

The impressive show saw the handlers weaving through the crowd so that the birds were encouraged to whizz among us. They were so close that I had to duck on more than one occasion.

But the attraction that has been discussed most since our return to the commoner life is the maze, which was built in 1988 from 2,400 yew trees.

We were so bad in there that we had to ask for help to reach the middle. At that point, we were rewarded (for our cheating) with entrance to the magical underground grotto.

Thanks to back-to-back activities we’d worked up quite the appetite, so we took the woodland path over to the Castle View Restaurant for dinner.

We dined on classic dishes including ham hock terrine, rib-eye steak, chargrilled cauliflower and glazed pork chops, with a fantastic view of the castle all lit up at night.

Another brilliant thing about a stay in the Knights’ Retreat Lodges is you get access to the castle grounds before they open to the public. We took advantage of that with a magical hour’s stroll.

For the price of a night’s stay in a lodge that works out from £69 per person, it was quite something to have such a famous location to ourselves.

On the whole walk, we bumped into just two members of staff and got plenty of fantastic crowd-free pictures of ourselves outside the castle.

It also meant we were among the first inside the castle itself, so the four and six-year-olds in our company were able to exclaim loudly at obscure details in the lavish property, last decorated by Lady Baillie in the early 20th century.

As a rule, heritage properties don’t hold much interest for young boys, but Leeds Castle allows you to walk in among the items in many of the rooms instead of being roped off. You’re even encouraged to play a game of chess in the games room.

And at Christmas, they decorate the entire place, making it the perfect time to visit.

If you’re looking for some extra festive magic, they also have a Christmas Lights Trail, which runs until December 31, and features a small food market and fairground.

Even the great Catherine of Aragon would have been impressed.