Carrick: We must stay humble

Michael, you took over a team that had had a run of disappointing results at home. What do you think these two wins say about where your team are?

“I think it’s more about the feeling that this gives us, really, as a group. And the players and as a club, and certainly the supporters. That’s my concern – how that can bring us together and lift us, in a real positive manner. I’m not getting all carried away, we’ve got some bigger games coming up, because the next game is always the bigger game. So we’re not getting carried away. We’ve got really important things coming up and we need to keep improving. Two massive games, there’s a lot of emotion, a lot of energy and a lot of confidence that you can take but we’ve got to be humble and understand how we’ve got these results. That’s really important moving forward.”

What’s your challenge now? Is it top four? Is it to keep the momentum going? The fans were chanting ‘we’re going to win the league’…
“I know from our perspective, it’s just moving forward to the next game. It’s been less than two weeks we’ve been together. So it’s just keep getting good habits, really, and good routines and good habits. The boys have been fantastic with that. I don’t think we can look too far ahead. We certainly won’t be, anyway. It’s a big week leading up to Fulham and games coming up. We’ll finish where we finish by getting the results. I know that’s kind of obvious, but looking too far ahead can come back and bite you really. So we’ve taken this week by week, and game by game. We’ll certainly continue to do that. But we’ve got to ride it and use the emotion, you have got to use the energy and use the confidence. You’ve got to be humble enough to understand how we could just achieve these two big results. It doesn’t just come easy, so we need to continue that and bottle it and use it again.”

Is it a positive, being out of the cups now?

“It’s a clear focus, I said that starting last week, and everything’s in front of us now, nothing’s going to change, but it’s a good start. You’ve just got to keep building.”