England star opens up on depression
Michael Carrick had it all with Manchester United and England but depression soured it.
Carrick has wondered for a long time if he might have something in common with England cricketers Marcus Trescothick and Jonathan Trott, both of whom decided the stress and anxiety they felt on tour was too high a price to pay.
Carrick’s revelations this week about the depression and anxiety he felt for a period of his career, most acutely after Manchester United lost the 2009 Champions League final to Barcelona, may prove a gamechanger for elite English football.
Newly-released autobiography Between The Lines details what he describes as his stress and depression with the kind of clarity a player of his stature has never yet felt emboldened to make public.
Carrick looked back on the worst season of his life, culminating with him desperate to leave the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa, and said the stories of the two English cricketers struck a chord.
“I was thinking about Trescothick and Trott,” he says. “They came out and spoke about it and theirs [stress and anxiety] was being away with England and travelling, and that kind of struck me about the 2010 World Cup. It was just like, ‘get me out of here’, and as much as I was fighting it and thinking, ‘what’s wrong with you? You’ve got nothing to worry about,’ I just struggled.
“I couldn’t deal with it. I don’t know why. I still don’t know why. It just happens and you deal with it. I didn’t speak to anyone about it, and my mum and dad didn’t know until the book came out. We’re really close. I think they’re a bit disappointed they didn’t realise or I didn’t tell them.”
Carrick’s international career carried on until he was 34 in the stopstart fashion it had always progressed, although he never went to another tournament, having declined to go on standby for Euro 2012.
Both Trott and Trescothick have written about their struggles, and this is Carrick’s contribution — one to which he was committed. There was, he says, “no chance” he would leave the issue out of the book.
What is notable about Carrick is just how hard he takes the bad times.
“I was playing awful,” he says of his 2009-10 annus horribilis, a season in which he played 49 games for club and country, although those numbers do nothing to convince him otherwise. He goes back to the second leg of the 2010 Champions League quarter-final against Bayern Munich, when he recalls in pin-sharp detail being “shrugged off the ball” by Ivica Olic for the Germans’ first goal.
“The Bayern game sums it up. We are 3-0 up, cruising, and then I made a mistake, they score, then they score again and it’s 3-2 and we’re out of the Champions League [on away goals]. It’s like it hit me again, as if everything is a disaster. It’s my fault, again. You start questioning yourself.”
His anxiety manifested itself in many different ways, especially in South Africa in 2010, but one of the most striking is Carrick recalling how he perceived others.
“I was looking at the lads in the England squad and thinking, ‘he looks like he’s flying. He’s not got a care in the world. He looks happy.’
“It’s a bizarre feeling that all those things that never mattered before are such a big deal.”
As a coach now, Carrick says the mind had a big influence in top-level sport.
“It’s tiny margins. Sometimes you feel fine, other times, you get the ball, you see six things, and you pick the wrong one.”