The Spurs midfielder will play from the start for England in the second round of their World Cup campaign, after sitting on the bench for the entire group stages.
England took seven points from their three games but performances were generally of a poor standard, with Frank Lampard particularly guilty of wasting goalscoring opportunities against lesser sides.
Rather than making room for Carrick by dropping the out of form Chelsea player it has taken the injury to Michael Owen for Sven Goran Eriksson to make changes in every other department of the field, even though he had supposedly a direct swap for Owen in the untried Theo Walcott.
Eriksson made the situation clear on Tuesday night against Sweden when he replaced the injured Owen in the first minute with Peter Crouch, after leaving the Liverpool player out the side to accommodate Wayne Rooney. Owen had criticised the rest of the side of distributing aerial balls to Crouch in the games before his injury, as part of the reason for him failing to get off the mark in two hours of World Cup action. Meanwhile, 17-year-old Walcott who hasn't played in the Premiership has so far been used in one pre-tournament friendly as a substitute.
Crouch will be disappointed if he doesn't start another game in Germany. He said: "Against Sweden, we only played a couple of long balls, a lot were to feet. We worked well in the first half. The second half was difficult because we did not play well as a team and Wayne and I did not see much of the ball." (The Sun)
Eriksson's quandary comes about from this apparent need to have someone in midfield performing the playmaker role, but without disrupting the four established players in the middle of the park. And that means playing one less striker, meaning Rooney to play up front on his own, for the first time.
Joe Lovejoy in The Sunday Times: ‘The mad professor is at it again, experimenting with another new line-up and needlessly jeopardising England's World Cup prospects. The appropriate setting for trial and error is in friendlies, not in the biggest tournament of them all.'
‘It is a strange, ill-considered decision on two levels. The first is that Rooney excels at nearly all aspects of forward play, the one exception being the role of target man. He is at his best running at the opposition, not holding the ball up with his back to goal. Crouch, who is expected to replace Rooney around the hour mark, could be England's trump card. The second reason his intended deployment makes no sense is that a lone striker has to do the work of two men, running virtually non-stop to compensate for the lack of a partner while Rooney is still to regain optimum fitness after his metatarsal injury. Not for the first time, Eriksson appears to have taken the easy option in choosing his team — unwilling, as ever, to leave out any of his established "stars".'
If Jamie Carragher wasn't a good enough right back then why did it take so long to realise this? With Ecuador's apparent pace down the left wing, Eriksson felt that he could not consider David Beckham in the the full back position from the start, an experiment in the second half of the Trinidad game that worked nicely when Aaron Lennon replaced the captain on the right wing. Why move Owen Hargreaves out of his favoured position after coming into the team on Tuesday and doing well enough to deserve another go?
After the 2-2 draw with Sweden, Eriksson said: "Hargreaves was brilliant out there. I don't know how many balls he won in the 90 minutes. You can see that he played in that position for Bayern Munich week after week." (The Times)
So will a similar fate lurk around the corner for Michael Carrick – does it really matter how well he performs against Ecuador today in terms of gaining future opportunities in this World Cup?
Matt Dickinson in The Times, wrote: ‘It is another unexpected twist by the head coach and the sign of a man still casting around for his best side. The country clings to the hope that the head coach has come across his most effective line-up, and he may well have done, but it cannot be stated with great confidence given that Eriksson himself appears plagued with uncertainties. Of course, a manager must be ready to adapt to different circumstances, some beyond his control, but at a time when the players crave bold leadership, Eriksson has resembled a man scratching his head over a complicated jigsaw puzzle.'
After two clean sheets against Paraguay and Trinidad, neither of the two goals England conceded against the Swedes, were from open play. Usually it would be simple to eradicate the problem before the next match, but as Rob Hughes in the Sunday Times, asks: ‘How does anyone work at set piece vulnerability when the side is constantly changed, and when all those friendly matches were used to rotate 15 or more players instead of building consummate team understanding?'
England need to show a massive improvement today, or they'll be made mince meat out of by either Holland or Portugal in the quarter finals, the same phase Eriksson's England went out the tournament four years ago. We're all sick of his gambles because this isn't the same coach in practice that was supposedly building steadily a team to challenge for the big prize since Brazil knocked us out in Korea.