Mark Drury, BBC Radio Tees Middlesbrough commentator
Middlesbrough’s decision to sack Carrick may surprise some outside Teesside but one thing it can’t be described as is a knee-jerk reaction.
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.
There will be a sense of sadness on Teesside that Carrick was unable to follow up on the promise of his 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.
