Michael Carrick used Manchester United's draw with Paris Saint Germain to make a simple point. He wants the players to work their way through problems on the pitch, and he said the performance had more encouraging detail than the result suggested. United fell behind inside two minutes against PSG in Sweden, but Carrick still framed the evening as a useful test against back-to-back Champions League winners.

Carrick's message after the PSG game

"It's good sometimes that the boys have to problem solve and find their way a little bit," Michael Carrick told mirror.co.uk. "We don't want to always give them the answers, when we don't have to. It prepares them a little bit for the season as well."

That is a fair stance, and it fits the way United have been playing. They have won four of their last five recorded matches and scored 9 goals in that run, so the point was never that they were stumbling through a slump. Carrick's view is that those games still leave room for sharper in-game decisions, especially when a match flips early.

PSG also came into the game in solid shape, with only one defeat in their last five matches. That made the draw a proper reference point rather than a dead-rubber friendly, even if the scoreline is not the main story here.

Mount's brief outing

The other thread was Mason Mount. He played only 18 minutes before being replaced by Tyler Fletcher, and Carrick said the change was precautionary after Mount was kicked.

"He got kicked. We just wanted to be careful and look after him," Carrick told independent.co.uk. "We've been lucky with injuries so far, so we wanted to be careful."

Mount's recent minutes already show a stop-start pattern, with 74, 17, 95, 16 and 9 minutes across his last five appearances. This was not treated as a major scare, and the careful withdrawal fits the wider mood around him. United will take the caution, and Carrick will take the signs he said were there, with the bigger lessons set to carry into the rest of pre-season.

Written by Jack Mercer with AI-assisted research, cross-checked against 2 outlets. How we work →