WHEN Middlesbrough failed to win any of their opening seven league games of the season, Michael Carrick could have been forgiven for a sense of panic.

A rookie head coach, still in his first year of management, facing the first serious test of his Riverside tenure, Carrick could easily have started making kneejerk decisions in an attempt to turn things around.

Sometimes, though, the right answer is to stay calm and do nothing. Watching his players at first hand in training every day, Carrick was always confident his side’s fortunes would turn. Others might have panicked; Carrick doubled down on the methods and processes that had proved so successful last season. Two months on, and with Boro having won their last seven games in a row in all competitions, it is safe to say that his faith in his approach has proved justified.

“To be honest, I don’t really know why I manage in a certain way,” said Carrick, when asked to explain his thinking in those dark days of August and September. “I think a lot of the time, you are who you are and you feel what you feel.

“I was totally fine back then, 100 per cent. I feel exactly the same now as I did back then. That’s genuine. Why is that? Maybe it’s a bit of me and just who I am. Maybe it’s a bit of experience and having seen how other people have handled certain things. I think whoever you are, you’re probably always going to draw on your experiences a bit.

“But then you’re also just the person that you are. Ultimately, a lot of it also has to come from the group. It’s not about me – it’s about the group that I’ve got around me and the boys. That was in place at the start of the season, it’s there now and it’ll be there moving forward. So, it’s a little bit of all sorts I’d say.”

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While Carrick’s position at the head of his coaching team means he was the one having to justify his stance in public when results were initially refusing to turn, he readily acknowledges that he is part of a collective coaching unit that has a shared input into what happens at Rockliffe Park.

His first-team coaches, Jonathan Woodgate and Aaron Danks, were influential figures when things were proving difficult at the start of the campaign, and crucially, they were fully supportive of Carrick’s refusal to seek solutions to problems he was convinced did not really exist.

“We’re a team,” said the Boro boss. “I’m the one that sits here and has to speak and answer the questions, but we’re certainly a team. They were the same as me, right the way through.

“It was calm. There was no drama, really. Credit to them as well for that. It just felt normal. We just went about it, and carried on doing what we believed in.

“You get a sense of things when you’re in something, living it every day, and looking at players and each other. You get a sense of how things are going to go, and that sense is what I’ve been talking about all along. It’s fantastic for me to have good people around me.”

Having consistently predicted that things would turn, Carrick has been proved right thanks to a superb run that has lifted Boro to ninth place in the Championship table, level on points with sixth-placed West Brom, ahead of tomorrow’s home game with Stoke.

“It’s always nice to get some sort of success,” he said. “At the end of the day, we’re here to try to be successful and win football matches. Everything we do, everything we put in place and everything we try to build towards is ultimately to try to win enough over the course of the season to have that element of success.

“As I’ve said before, when it’s not going so well and maybe you’re not getting the results, there’s different ways of that going. Sometimes, it’s tough to see the next result or the next performance – other times, there’s a lot there and certainly enough there to give you belief.

“We certainly had that. It’s about building on it now and feeding off the run we’ve had, the confidence that the boys are feeling and the quality that we can show.”