Pardew says Carrick 'cut his nose to spite his face' by dropping Fernandes in United's loss to Bournemouth

Alan Pardew has criticised Michael Carrick’s decision to drop Bruno Fernandes for Manchester United’s defeat to Bournemouth, arguing the interim manager undermined himself by leaving his captain on the bench rather than using the situation to his advantage.

Fernandes had publicly attacked Carrick’s tactics following United’s 4-1 Champions League defeat to Como, and was an unused substitute as the Cherries beat United in their next fixture. Pardew, speaking on talkSPORT, said he would have taken a different approach.

“I’m thinking I would have played him, personally,” Pardew said. “There is this other side of the football coin where you go, you don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. You could still be strong by playing him. You say, ‘well, yes, I heard what he said. In my opinion, he’s wrong and I’m still not finished.’ There might be some discipline coming his way on the back of a win, if you know what I mean. So you could turn it around a little bit and still win as the manager.”

Pardew acknowledged he was not aware of what may have happened behind the scenes between Fernandes and Carrick in training, noting that any further incidents on the training ground or in the dressing room could have changed the calculus. “Unless I was privy to that, I can’t make that decision,” he said.

To illustrate his point, Pardew drew on his own experience managing Joey Barton at Newcastle United. “My first day, he said to me, ‘you’re not good enough to be manager here,’ but I played him in the game that came up next against Liverpool and we won,” Pardew recalled. “We went on from there and we were fine. He didn’t need to apologise. I watched Joey that week in training — he was on it, he was up for it. I could see that his playing side of it was going to give us something.”

With United having lost the match without Fernandes, Pardew believes Carrick’s position has only become more difficult. “The whole Fernandes one now — leaving him out and losing the game — becomes even more of an issue,” he said.