Michael Carrick's Decision on Luke Shaw for Manchester City Derby

Michael Carrick will leave it late before deciding whether Luke Shaw is fit enough to face Manchester City, as Manchester United brace for a derby with weight far beyond the league table.

Shaw, 31, missed Thursday night’s 4-0 Champions League win over Sabah FK after being taken off in the 2-2 draw with Everton. United cruised without him in Europe, but Carrick made it clear that omission was about protection, not punishment.

“We’ll have to see,” he told reporters when pressed on Shaw’s chances for Sunday. “We just kind of looked after him a little bit. He wasn’t quite ready for [Sabah] 100%, so we didn’t risk it. We’ll see how he is over the next couple of days or so.”

United will hope those “couple of days” are kind. Shaw’s experience and balance down the left remain central to how Carrick wants his side to build attacks and defend space. Against City, those margins usually decide everything.

A derby that changed everything

For Carrick, this fixture is not just another date on the calendar. It drags him straight back to January, to his first game in the dugout after replacing Ruben Amorim on an interim basis.

That day felt like a crossroads. United were drifting, winless in four, the mood flat. Then City arrived – and United cut them open.

Goals from Bryan Mbeumo and Patrick Dorgu sealed a sharp, clinical victory over Pep Guardiola’s side and snapped the slide in one punch. It was the afternoon that turned Carrick from stop-gap to serious contender.

He has no interest in letting that story be replayed as some kind of script for Sunday.

“It’ll definitely be different, just because no games are ever the same,” he said. “I think there’s no way we’re assuming we won last year, we’ll do the same things and everything will be the same.

“I think the confidence that we’ve built over a period of time and feel like we’re getting better all the time, I think that helps us. We know it’s a big game, we know it’s an important game. There’s a lot riding on it, it’s pretty obvious to say, but we’re looking forward to it.

“We’ve got a short space of time to recover and prepare for it, but we’ll make the most of it.”

Short turnaround, high stakes, familiar opponent. Carrick sounds like a man who has made peace with the chaos that comes with managing United.

From interim to architect

When he stepped in back in January, few expected him to still be steering the club’s long-term direction by the end of the year. Twelve wins in his first 17 matches changed that conversation quickly.

Those numbers forced the issue. The interim tag stopped making sense. The club moved to make his position permanent at Old Trafford, even as the INEOS-led hierarchy were heavily linked with high-profile candidates from outside.

Carrick insists he never saw himself as a temporary solution.

“I think I said it pretty early on, I was always planning to be [manager beyond the summer],” he admitted. “All the decisions we were making were if we were going to be here for a period of time. I never knew how long that was going to be, I still don’t!

“But you’re always planning for the future, what we want it to look like and the direction we want to go, and that was from day one.

“The performance the lads gave was incredible with all that, but there was definitely always – has been, always will be for me – from the start was planning to try and get this club to where we want to get it in the long term.”

That’s the frame around this derby now. It’s not just about getting one over Guardiola again, or about the noise around Shaw’s fitness. It’s about whether Carrick’s United, built with the long term in mind, can keep proving that January wasn’t a one-off jolt but the start of something that can stand up to City, and stay there.