MANCHESTER, England -- Michael Carrick briefly looked exasperated in his weekly news conference Friday afternoon. "When Manchester United lose a game," he said, "everything is wrong. I think it's so easy to say, 'This is wrong, that is wrong.'"
It's been a rough week for Carrick. The defeat at Hull City on the opening weekend of the season was probably his lowest moment as United head coach. Ahead of Ipswich Town's visit to Old Trafford on Sunday, he would have known that the noise would crank up a notch had it not gone well.
He was perhaps fearing the worst when Ipswich took the lead Sunday. But after a Bruno Fernandes hat trick, a deflected effort from Harry Maguire and a late Bryan Mbeumo goal earned an emphatic 5-2 win, Carrick's calm in a difficult moment has been vindicated. Maybe not everything is wrong after all.
He was able to smile afterward.
"It's a week in football, isn't it, I think? The ups and downs," he said. "The most pleasing thing for me was -- we spoke about actually in the week -- about dealing with setbacks. If you want to be a good team and a successful team, every team gets beat and you've got to deal with setbacks in certain ways.
"For the way they bounced back and put in a performance like we did, that's probably the biggest thing to take. There's a lot of highlights, and there's a lot of really good football today."