Hello and welcome to the Football Reporters.

This week we will be looking back at Arsenal against Manchester United.

He had a famous win for interim boss Michael Carrick, what that does to the title race. And we'll be looking ahead to the final round of match day eight of the Champions League

group stage with all the possible permutations.

Gentlemen, nice to see you both in person, in live, not with the staccato kind of Zoom version.

How are we both?

You well, Rob? Lovely. Great to be back. I've got to pick you up on that. He's not the interim head coach. He's the boss, Michael Carrick. It's his job to lose. Well, let's get into the game first, shall we? To be fair, Rob, I might give you the first dibs at this, but only because I put you on the spot in the last pod about whether Carrick would be good enough.

Very loaded questions suggesting that we shouldn't get into this trap of, you know, Solshar 2.0 and all that.

How surprised were you by how well they played at Arsenal?

Yeah, I mean, really surprised. And that was even on the back of what they did against Man City,

because I think there was still a kind of question about the Derby, whether it were united really,

really good, which I think they were, or was it that City were really bad, which I think they were.

So going to Arsenal, I think people, fans thought that maybe the established

order would be kind of back again and Arsenal would win relatively comfortably, particularly

when they go ahead. I just think that Michael Carrick deserves an immense amount of credit for

what he did because I don't think he's made that many massive changes. Obviously, the formation

is different than the one we saw under Ram Rim. But I don't think there's been this kind of huge change that he's made that people have gone, oh my God, like, I can't believe he's done that. He's just, he's playing players in the right positions. He seems to have instilled a level of confidence in him. I thought the biggest thing, you know, aside from the performance at Arsenal and the result, that time and time again under Amoryn, we saw that when things started to go badly, they went really badly. They would concede two goals in five minutes or three goals in ten minutes. Something that predated Amorym, actually, it happened to turn hard quite a lot. So when they go a goal down at Arsenal, you start thinking this could be 3-0 in 20 minutes. And rather than that, you know, rather than kind of just settling themselves, they actually come back to win the game from that point and then suffer another setback right at the end and then go on to win it. Yeah. I think mentality-wise, that says an awful lot about what Michael Carrick has been able to do in, what is it, 10 days and that, aside from all the tactical stuff, and I'm sure we'll get onto all that stuff, but aside from that, that is the biggest thing that he's done, and he deserves a lot of credit for that. Okay, was that the most impressive thing for you? At 2-2, you suddenly think, okay, the Arsenal are going to sort of rouse themselves out of this slumber and get themselves over the line and yeah three minutes later or less than that I think couldn't you score as the winner I mean was that that response to that moment was that something that just wouldn't have happened under Ruben Amoryamara? I think so and I think also the fact that Patrick Dogger was injured prior to that and he made an attacking

substitution he replaced Dogger with Cunia rather than put a defender on to see it out.

So I think that again was a change from Ambrim who as we know was very kind of cautious,

overcautious.

So that was the impressive thing that Carrick has brought that sense of freedom back and ambition

and I think Amaran didn't trust his players did did he? I mean, I think that's fairly obviously. He didn't trust them. I think at times he almost didn't like them. There's some players that he didn't like in terms of he just exasperated by what he felt was their lack of quality. And I think that was kind of, you can see that in the players' performances that they knew the manager didn't trust them or have faith in them. Whereas Carrick, he clearly trust the players. And the players are responding out there. They've got a sense of freedom. I think Patrick Darga was the obvious example. The Darga was really poor under Amarin. Terrible. And Amarin made a couple of comments that suggested that he wasn't a fan at all. So I think we'd all written Dargo off as an expense one, not expensive, but still, $20 million flop from Lechay. But Carrick has just given him confidence, giving him some recent life into him. And he's got an amazing goal at the Emirates. It's got a winning goal against City in the Derby. So, you know, Patrick Dargo is kind of embodied what Michael Michael Carrick's done. It's given the player's confidence, a bit of freedom, and that was there in the performance yesterday. There was one thing that I thought was really, really interesting, that when the goal goes into it to make it 2-2, usually we would have seen, if that would have been Amram, the entire team would have sat back and and taken what they

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