Mikel Arteta revealed a personal admiration for Michael Carrick ahead of Arsenal’s meeting with Manchester United, saying the former United midfielder was \u201cone of my favourite No. 6s\u201d. The comment came as Arteta reflected on a series of Premier League encounters between the two men from their playing days.<\/p>\n
The pair met on the pitch 10 times across Arteta\u2019s spells at Everton and Arsenal. Arteta registered a single victory; Carrick won seven of those matches, with two draws apiece. On their teams\u2019 scoring, Arteta\u2019s sides managed eight goals while Carrick\u2019s teams scored 16, conceding eight fewer. Stats via Transfermarkt .<\/p>\n
Arteta added detail on Carrick\u2019s style in conversation with Sky Sports: \u201cVery intelligent,\u201d he added, \u201clooked like he could never break sweat, he was so in control of the games.\u201d The two carried contrasting natural skillsets. Arteta was more of an attacking midfielder during his Everton years, arriving in the box and scoring regularly. Carrick operated deeper, dictating play from the base of midfield.<\/p>\n
Across his 12 seasons at Manchester United, Carrick contributed 16 Premier League goals. Arteta scored 16 goals for Everton between 2006 and 2009 before moving into a more withdrawn role in north London.<\/p>\n
When the two met from the dugouts, Carrick prevailed. During his first emergency stint at Old Trafford in 2021 he masterminded a 3\u20132 victory over Arteta\u2019s side, a match in which Cristiano Ronaldo scored twice in a VAR-riddled fixture that Carrick hailed as a \u201cperfect night.\u201d Carrick remained measured about its relevance to the current encounter. \u201cThere\u2019s not much to take from that moving into this one,\u201d the obdurately level-headed coach shrugged. \u201cIt\u2019s a whole new challenge, a whole new game, a whole new group of players. More feeding off what we\u2019ve done this week, going into the game and looking forward to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carrick will take confidence from an impressive showing against Manchester City last weekend, and Arteta is clearly wary of the swiftness of United\u2019s frontline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arteta calls Carrick ‘one of my favourite No. 6s’ and recalls their 10 Premier League meetings. next<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6219,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,1083,969],"tags":[1162,1087],"class_list":["post-6220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-man-utd","category-premier-league","tag-analytics","tag-coaching-change"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}