A lot of people here seem to think it's Carrick selling our best players, and using the money to buy players who will be good in 6 months to 3 years time, and also assumes they're all going to work. He's 100% not doing that, and that was 100% evident on day 1 when he got called "the coach".
What is happening is we sell his best players, or lose them in other ways and then he gets given a replacement (sometimes). We obviously didn't replace those 3-5 key loan players we had when he first came either. Remember Archer, Ramsay, Steffen, Muniz, Giles (when he was on form)? This year we've had 1, Doak. I'm not counting the new ones who haven't been here 5 minutes yet.
It's extremely difficult to deal with this turnover, whilst also bringing all these players on so that the model works. The model is working though, along with the coach, we've got better and made a transfer profit over a mangers(coaches) time, and I can't recall us doing that, ever. I can recall plenty of times we've stayed the same or got worse after major investment, and a few times we climbed higher by breaking the bank more than our competition.
We're also seemingly trying to buy players for our set system, or buying players who the coach can hopefully adapt into that. This is 100% fine and expected, but the problems this creates is you sort of only end up with one way of playing. That way for us is the quick short passing and gain rapid yards up the pitch style. Changing a formation to one which the older and newer players are not used to is not going to be easy, not at the micro level of detail which this level of football needs. It's not like changing from a 4-2-3-1 to a 3-5-2 on sandy flats, the players there don't even know 4-2-3-1, so when they change to 3-5-2 there's no real loss, you just get "different, but still bad".
We've not really had many of our best players available all season either. I can only think of Azaz who's not been injured, but he wouldn't have been listed as one of our best players at the beginning of the season. Similar to LL, he's had his injuries and also had his agent in his ear all year, and Carrick's had to pick him, knowing he'll be out the door soon. I'm 100% sure he didn't want to have to start Forss up top on his own on Monday, he hadn't started a game up top for a year.
I'm not sure what we can do about the mistakes, I don't think there is really a way to train these out of players. Better players will make less mistakes of course, but he's not buying the players, or asking us to sell our better players. Due to the way we play with possession and passing, and trying more risky/ quick passes I suppose it does open up the door for us giving away the ball cheaply when we're committed (and not prepared to be defending).
Anyone asking for Carrick to get the chop wants to maybe have a think of how good our previous managers have been, when we've been backing them in the transfer market, buying their own players and we've been making a massive loss and not getting any better.