Luke Shaw's Fitness for Manchester City Derby in Doubt

Michael Carrick will leave it as late as he dares before deciding whether Luke Shaw is fit enough to face Manchester City.

The 31-year-old left-back sat out Thursday night’s emphatic 4-0 Champions League win over Sabah FK, having been forced off in the 2-2 draw with Everton. Shaw’s absence in Europe was precautionary, but his involvement in the derby remains on a knife edge.

“We'll have to see,” Carrick told reporters when pressed on Shaw’s chances for Sunday. “We just kind of looked after him a little bit. He wasn't quite ready for [Sabah] 100%, so we didn't risk it. We'll see how he is over the next couple of days or so.”

United didn’t miss him against Sabah. They cruised. The tempo was high, the goals flowed, and the night felt routine. City, though, is another world entirely. Carrick knows it.

A Different Derby, Same High Stakes

This fixture is stitched into Carrick’s story as a manager. It was City who stood opposite him in his very first game in the dugout back in January, when he stepped in after Ruben Amorim’s departure on an interim basis.

That day, United snapped a four-game winless run with a sharp, disciplined display, taking down Pep Guardiola’s side thanks to goals from Bryan Mbeumo and Patrick Dorgu. It felt like a reset, maybe even a statement.

Carrick, though, refuses to lean on nostalgia.

“It'll definitely be different, just because no games are ever the same,” he said. “I think there's no way we're assuming we won last year, we'll do the same things and everything will be the same.

“I think the confidence that we've built over a period of time and feel like we're getting better all the time, I think that helps us. We know it's a big game, we know it's an important game. There's a lot riding on it, it's pretty obvious to say, but we're looking forward to it. We've got a short space of time to recover and prepare for it, but we'll make the most of it.”

The message is clear: last season’s derby win is a reference point, not a blueprint.

From Stopgap to Standard-Bearer

When Carrick first took the reins, the job came with a temporary tag. He was the bridge, not the destination. Then the results started to stack up.

Twelve wins from his first 17 matches changed the conversation. The interim label slipped away, replaced by a permanent appointment at the Theatre of Dreams and a sense that United had found their man from within.

Outside Old Trafford, speculation swirled. With INEOS stepping into the club’s hierarchy, plenty expected a marquee name to be parachuted in over the summer. Carrick kept his head down and his gaze fixed on the long road.

“I think I said it pretty early on, I was always planning to be [manager beyond the summer],” he admitted. “All the decisions we were making were if we were going to be here for a period of time. I never knew how long that was going to be, I still don't!

“But you're always planning for the future, what we want it to look like and the direction we want to go, and that was from day one. The performance the lads gave was incredible with all that, but there was definitely always – has been, always will be for me – from the start was planning to try and get this club to where we want to get it in the long term.”

That long-term vision now collides with the short-term reality of a derby that can tilt a season. Shaw’s fitness, the energy left in tired legs after Europe, the weight of expectation at home – they all feed into a single question.

Is this the night Carrick’s United show they’re ready to live with City, not just upset them?