Five minutes. Five uninterrupted minutes. Michael Carrick stood at the media briefing and spoke about what Manchester United means to him, and the room went quiet the way a cathedral goes quiet when someone starts singing in Latin. Nobody checked their phone. Nobody dared. This was not a press conference. This was a soliloquy, and the stage was a lectern in Carrington.
Then came the question, the one every journalist in England had been holding like a loaded gun. Would Bruno Fernandes be dropped? And Carrick, who once made a career out of standing calmly in front of danger, looked into the middle distance and did not rule it out. To drop or not to drop. That is the question. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the captain’s bad mood or to take arms against a sea of playmaking troubles and, by opposing, end them.
It is, to be fair, a magnificent piece of theatre. Hamlet had a skull. Carrick had a lectern and a hard stare at a ceiling tile. Somewhere a dramaturg is already drafting the Netflix miniseries. Act One: the grief of the Old Trafford stands. Act Two: the Portuguese-born conscience of a midfield. Act Three: a single word, ‘perhaps’, delivered like a death sentence to a man currently in the best form of his life.
We are, apparently, living through a tragedy. Let us hope the fifth act is shorter than the first.